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This exchange will appear in the June 24 issue of The New York Review. Peter Beinart’s essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” appeared in the Review‘s June 10 issue. Abraham H. Foxman is National Director of the Anti Defamation League in New York City.

Benjamin Netanyahu; drawing by John Springs

Abraham H. Foxman:

Peter Beinart offers a conveniently impressionistic view of the American Jewish community to frame his critique of Israeli policy trends. He should know better than to fall into the trap of generalizing about the Jewish state without giving proper context for what is going on.

He sees an Israel that is clearly moving to the right, that has less regard for the “other,” no matter who that may be, and that is unwilling to take seriously efforts toward peace. Beinart seems to be suffering from the same problems we have seen in the Obama administration, ignoring what Israel has gone through over the last decade and thereby misreading what Israelis are thinking today.

Israelis, to a large extent, and this is shared by many in the American Jewish community (another of Beinart’s targets), feel frustrated that all their efforts toward changing the dynamic have been met with rejection and/or violence. Most Israelis understand that continuing to sit in the West Bank is not good for the country. So at Camp David in 2000 they tried a solution of ending the conflict, which included withdrawing from 90 percent of the territories and eliminating the majority of settlements. They got a big no and suicide bombs.

In 2005, they withdrew unilaterally from Gaza with the intent to do likewise in the West Bank because they saw no partner for peace. They got Hamas and rockets against their civilians. In 2008, with a different Palestinian interlocutor, they went back to a full and better offer for a Palestinian state and got nothing again. So after all that, is it surprising that the public in the last election said, nothing works, let’s hold on until there’s real change on the other side?

There’s no evidence, contrary to Beinart, that there’s a fundamental change in Israel away from peace and away from concessions. What there is is a justified cynicism about the willingness of the other side to end the conflict and a confusion about what real options Israel has regarding its dilemma of how to withdraw and still have security.

The lesson that Beinart and the administration should draw from all this is not what kinds of pressures should be put on Israel to change the situation. Israel has taken initiatives and will be ready to do so again when the time is ripe.

The issue is what can be done with a divided Palestinian leadership and with at best a passive if not destructive Arab world, to bring about that long-awaited change in which the Palestinians fully accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state. That should be the goal so that when Israel once again moves toward a new initiative, for the first time there will be a Palestinian side, supported by the Arab states, ready to say yes, a yes that will finally change the lives of Israelis and Palestinians for the better.

Peter Beinart:

Abraham Foxman’s letter illustrates the problem my essay tries to describe: an American Jewish leadership that publicly defends the Israeli government, any Israeli government, rather than defending Israeli democracy, even when the former menaces the latter.

Obviously, as Foxman suggests, the Palestinians are not blameless. Yasser Arafat deserves history’s scorn for not responding more courageously to the chances for peace at Camp David and the much better ones put forward by Clinton in December 2000. And the election of Hamas was a tragedy, for both Israel and the Palestinians. But to suggest that Palestinian and Arab behavior fully explains the growing authoritarian, even racist, tendencies in Israeli politics is to don a moral blindfold, a blindfold that most young American Jews, to their credit, will not wear.

Firstly, Palestinian rejectionism cannot explain Avigdor Lieberman’s crusade to humiliate, disenfranchise, and perhaps even eventually expel Arab Israelis, the vast majority of whom want nothing more than to be accepted as equal citizens in the country of their birth. Lieberman is not a marginal figure. He was Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff; he heads Israel’s third-largest party; he serves as foreign minister; and when Israel held mock elections in ten high schools last year, he won.

Nor are his views marginal. In 2008, in a poll cited by Yediot Ahronot, 40 percent of Jewish Israelis did not believe that Arab Israelis should be allowed to vote. Among Jewish Israeli high school students surveyed this March, the figure was 56 percent. We cannot wish this away, and we cannot blame it all on Israel’s foes. When do American Jewish organizations plan to start forcefully opposing Lieberman and the forces he represents? When he becomes prime minister?

Secondly, Palestinian rejectionism does not explain Netanyahu’s deep-seated hostility to a Palestinian state. Foxman praises Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert for their willingness to concede such a state in East Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank. (Olmert’s was never a formal offer, and came when he was already a lame duck, but he deserves credit for it nonetheless.) But if Foxman genuinely supports those offers, why does he not criticize Netanyahu’s opposition to them? Netanyahu, after all, spent the Barak and Olmert years opposing a Palestinian state. And even last year, when under intense American pressure he verbally endorsed the concept, he simultaneously added two conditions that make a peace deal virtually impossible: that Jerusalem remain united under Israeli sovereignty and that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

In the real Israel, as opposed to the imaginary one that American Jewish leaders conjure, there is no consensus on a Palestinian state. There are Israelis who believe that such a state is a demographic and moral necessity. And there are Israelis—like Lieberman, Effi Eitam, and the leaders of Shas—who are doing their best to make a Palestinian state impossible, for instance by ringing East Jerusalem with settlements. American Jewish leaders cannot profess solidarity with the first group while serving as intellectual bodyguards for the second.

There is a strange lack of Israeli agency in Foxman’s story. It is true that Palestinian leaders in the West Bank are weak, and that this makes a peace settlement harder. But their weakness flows in part from their inability to stop settlement growth. (Even this year, despite Netanyahu’s “freeze,” his own transportation minister boasts that “the construction momentum in Judea and Samaria is the same as when it was at its peak.”) It is true that the Palestinians are divided. But when the Saudis brokered a national unity government in February 2007, Israel and the US did everything they could to torpedo it, including reportedly urging elements in Fatah to try (unsuccessfully) to seize power militarily in Gaza, thus overturning the election that Hamas won.

The ADL was founded “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” What I have always admired about that statement is its suggestion that to truly defend Jewish dignity, one must also defend the dignity of other vulnerable groups. At home, the ADL still honors that mission, working valiantly, for instance, against racial profiling in Arizona. But how can an organization that is so vigilant in opposing bigotry in the US be so complacent about a government shaped by men like Lieberman, Effi Eitam, and Ovadia Yosef? How can it not take its rightful place in the struggle on behalf of Palestinians evicted from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah?

When it comes to Israel, the ADL too often ignores the interconnectedness of Jewish and non-Jewish dignity. After all, the same sort of settler fanatics who burn Palestinian olive groves also assassinated an Israeli prime minister. The same ultra-Orthodox hooligans who burn Christian holy books also attack Jewish women trying to pray at the Western Wall. And the same Israeli government that demonizes Israeli Arabs also demonizes Israeli human rights groups. To be for ourselves, we must also be for others. I hope the ADL will live that ethic again.

yuga.ru

Chechen President Ramzan A. Kadyrov, with a portrait of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, February, 2009

In the summer of 2004, two years and four months before she was gunned down in the entrance to her Moscow apartment, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya made a bold visit to Chechnya to interview 27-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, who had recently become (with the Kremlin’s blessing) the republic’s de-facto leader. It proved to be a harrowing experience. When they met face to face, Kadyrov could not contain his rage at Politkovskaya for reporting on his brutal rise to power, even threatening to have her shot. Politkovskaya concluded later that “a little dragon has been raised by the Kremlin. Now they need to feed it. Otherwise it will spit fire.”

Politkovskaya was all too right. Since becoming president of Chechnya in 2007, Kadyrov has made the republic into his own fiefdom, which he rules by violence and terror. He has also, apparently, had his gunmen carry out a series of brazen killings of his perceived enemies in Moscow, Dubai, Istanbul and the North Caucasus.

Until recently, the Kremlin, which has provided military and economic support to Kadyrov’s regime, consistently brushed off the murder allegations against him. Since April, prosecutors in two separate cases—a murder in Vienna and a murder attempt in Moscow—have for the first time implicated Kadyrov directly. And in the weeks since those revelations, the Kremlin leadership appears to be showing misgivings about its unconditional support for Kadyrov. How these cases play out could have profound effects on the future of Moscow’s Chechen policy.

It has long been known that Moscow has allowed Kadyrov to run the Chechen Republic with ruthless force, facilitating his extensive cult of personality and funding his lavish lifestyle while ignoring the alarmingly frequent kidnappings, disappearances, and torture of those suspected of opposing his rule. But Kadyrov’s bloody vendettas have not been limited to rival Chechen clans. Indeed, it now appears that he has been going after anyone who draws attention to the shocking human rights abuses in Chechnya committed under his auspices—and that Politkovskaya herself may have been one of his first targets.

The list of likely victims is chilling: In January 2009, there was the Moscow shooting of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov (together with a journalist friend) who had pursued legal cases against Kadyrov. That same month Umar Israilov, a former member of Kadyrov’s security team who was granted asylum in Austria and subsequently made shocking allegations of human rights abuses against Kadyrov, was killed by Chechen gunmen in Vienna. And in July 2009 came the murder of Politkovskaya’s close colleague, Natalia Estemirova, who had been documenting the widespread abductions and extra-judicial executions by Kadyrov’s counter-insurgency forces for Novaya gazeta, Human Rights Watch, and Memorial. Estemirova was kidnapped by four men in broad daylight as she left her Grozny apartment. Hours later, her body, riddled with bullets, was found in a ditch in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia.

After the Politkovskaya killing, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin went out of his way to point out that the murder hurt Kadyrov “much more than any newspaper article [i.e. those written by Politkovskaya] could do.” Last summer, when Estemirova’s family, friends, and colleagues gathered in Grozny to mourn her on the 40th day of her death (a Russian orthodox tradition), Putin flew to the Chechen capitol to attend a state ceremony with Kadyrov by his side. Significantly, Kadyrov was allowed to take personal control of the investigation into Estemirova’s murder and there have been no arrests.

Moscow has also rejected demands by the Dubai government for the extradition of Kadyrov’s cousin Adam Delimkhanov, a member of the Russian parliament and Putin’s United Russia Party, who they accuse of having organized the March 2009 murder of yet another Kadyrov opponent, Sulim Yamadayev, who was a member of a rival Chechen clan. (On April 12, a Dubai court sentenced two men of Central Asian origin to life imprisonment for the killing.)

But how long can Moscow ignore the mounting evidence against its Chechen puppet? In April the counter-terrorism department of the Vienna police handed over a confidential 214-page report to Austrian prosecutors in which they named Kadyrov and his top aide, Shaa Turlayev, as the “principal offenders” in the January 2009 murder of Israilov, the former member of Kadyrov’s security guard. According to Israilov’s widow, Turlayev appeared in Vienna shortly before the murder and tried unsuccessfully to meet with her husband. In addition, the man charged with organizing the killing locally, a Chechen refugee who now calls himself Otto Kaltenbrunner, placed a call to Turlayev immediately after the murder. Moreover, a copy of Turlayev’s passport was found in the getaway car, along with an electronic airline ticket that he used to travel to Austria. As a representative of Human Rights Watch puts it: “the conclusions reached by the Austrian Prosecutor’s Office about Ramzan Kadyrov…should prompt the Russian government to finally take the necessary steps to restore the rule of law in Chechnya.”

Meanwhile, Kadyrov’s Kremlin backers have also been facing pressure from a Moscow investigation into an attempted murder in June 2009. The victim of the failed attempt was Isa Yamadayev, the brother of Salim Yamadayev, the murder victim in Dubai, and of Ruslan Yamadayev, a State Duma Deputy who was killed in Moscow in 2008. In April of this year the Moscow District Court began holding secret hearings about the case. Incredibly, a transcript and video of the interrogation of the accused would-be killer ended up in the hands of the intended victim, Yamadayev, who leaked it to a major Russian paper, Moskovskii Komsomolets. During his questioning, the accused, Khavash Yusupov, confessed to the crime and claimed that he was hired by none other than Shaa Turlayev. Yusupov said that Turlayev took him for a meeting with Kadyrov, who ordered the killing.

It remains to be seen whether Austria will indict Kadyrov when it issues formal charges in the Vienna murder in a few weeks, and what the Moscow Court will decide to do about Kadyrov. But the fact that, in the Moscow case, highly damaging testimony about the Chechen president and his top advisor was allowed to appear in the Russian media suggests that some members of the Kremlin elite may have decided that Kadyrov needs to be reined in. Could Russian President Dmitry Medvedev be among them? In contrast to Putin, Medvedev has expressed strong concerns about the unsolved murders and the problem of human rights abuses in the Caucasus. Responding to the Estemirova case last summer, Medvedev said it was “obvious” that she was killed because of her human rights work and expressed his personal condolences to her family and friends.

In January, Medvedev appointed a presidential envoy, Alexander Khloponin, to a newly formed North Caucasus Federal District, which some observers interpreted as an effort to exert Moscow’s control over the region, especially Chechnya. More recently, on May 19, Medvedev invited human rights activists to a two and a half –hour meeting in Moscow, in which Estemirova’s murder was discussed. It was not the first time the Kremlin has met with human rights advocates. But it was a departure for Medvedev because the meeting was devoted entirely to the situation in the troubled North Caucasus. With Khloponin at his side, Medvedev listened to grim details of the abuses attributed to Kadyrov’s counter-insurgency forces in Chechnya and to the concerns that surround unsolved murders like Estemirova’s.

“If you think I don’t know some of the facts,” Medvedev told the participants in the meeting, “well, that’s not the case. I know more than anyone else here because it is my job to know. Have no doubt. I know some very sad things.” In what seemed to be a reference to Kadyrov, who routinely ridicules the efforts of human rights workers, Medvedev also said that political leaders in the Caucasus who do not engage in a dialogue with non-governmental organizations in the region “must ultimately leave.”

However sincere Medvedev might be (and there are many skeptics), at the moment he is not in a position to topple Kadyrov without the concurrence of Putin and members of his powerful Federal Security Service, who installed Kadyrov as the leader of Chechnya. And it appears that the Putin has been unwilling to rein in Kadyrov in part because he fears that doing so would create even more instability in the North Caucasus region (and possibly more terrorist bombings in places like Moscow).

As Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, observed: “The impunity and omnipotence of Ramzan Kadyrov depends on the support of…Putin. As long as Putin supports him nobody will touch a hair on Kadyrov’s head, even if he kills us all.” Perhaps the recent revelations about Kadyrov will finally convince Putin and his colleagues that it is time for Kadyrov to go.

Sergei Supinsky/Getty

People attending the unveiling of a new Joseph Stalin monument, Zaporizhia, Ukraine, May 5, 2010

Three and a half months after a Ukrainian court convicted Stalin of genocide against the Ukrainian nation during the famine of 1932–1933, a new monument in honor of the Soviet dictator has been erected in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia. Separating the two events was this year’s Ukrainian presidential election, in which Viktor Yushchenko, who had pursued a radically anti-Stalinist memory policy, was defeated and replaced by Viktor Yanukovych, who promised to avoid extremes and unite the nation. Though Yanukovych would prefer to steer clear of such ostentatious nostalgia for Stalin, he is responsible for a remarkable change in mood.

In his final months in office, Yuschchenko favored an ill-considered “trial” against Stalin and other long-dead defendants as a way to define the history of Ukraine’s past within the Soviet Union; Yanukovych, by contrast, has overseen the formation of a new coalition government that includes the Communist Party of Ukraine. Rather than simply letting his predecessor’s strident anti-communism fade into the past, the new president has pronounced on Ukrainian history in a contrary spirit. Thus, Yanokovych told the Council of Europe in late April that the deliberate starvation of the three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine by the Stalinist regime was not genocide, but rather a “common tragedy for all people who lived in the former Soviet Union.” His bland formulation blurs important truths.

While it is true that Stalin’s policy of collectivization—the state seizure of farmland and the coercive employment of peasants—brought enormous suffering throughout the USSR in the early 1930s, it is also true that Stalin made deliberate decisions about grain requisitions and livestock seizures that brought death to three million people in Ukraine who did not have to die. Some of the very worst of the killing took place in southeastern Ukraine, where Stalin is now being celebrated and where Yanukovych has his political base. The famine destroyed that region’s rural society by killing many, cowing more, and permitting the immigration of people from beyond Ukraine—chiefly Russians, some of whom inherited the homes of the starved. The cult of Stalin is thus no empty symbol in Ukraine; it is a mark of active identification with a person who owed his mastery of Ukraine to a campaign of death.

Against this background, the new Stalin monument in Zaporizhia has disturbing implications. Yanukovych himself would have preferred the city to have held a local referendum before erecting the monument, as has been the custom with public monuments in other Ukrainian cities. But the district committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine in Zaporizhia proudly declared on its Web site that the action was entirely legal. However that may be, the monument stands.

Communism is remembered for its killing, but communists ruled and repressed by subtler methods most of the time. In Yanukovych’s Ukraine, other signs of the Stalinist past, less prominent but perhaps more frightening, are beginning to resurface. As students organize protests of Yanukovych’s policies in western and central Ukraine, the Ukrainian secret service has returned to the discredited approaches of its institutional predecessor, the Ukrainian branch of the old Soviet KGB. Its officers now approach the rectors of universities and ask them sign statements that amount to promises of loyalty.

The premise is subtle but effective: the rectors take cognizance of the fact that students might be arrested and imprisoned. Then, when students are arrested and imprisoned, the secret service shows the students the letter, thus breaking their trust in the university system. The secret service keeps the letter, which also serves as an instrument of blackmail for university officials who later might think of refusing their cooperation. What seems at first like an anodyne acceptance of police authority quickly becomes a tool to force cooperation. These statements were the institutional basis for the effective collaboration of millions of people with the old communist regime. They had disappeared from independent Ukraine; now they return.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian secret services seem to have accepted a rather surprising concession: their colleagues in Russia’s FSB now have the open right, confirmed be an agreement between the two agencies on May 19, to act on Ukrainian sovereign territory. Late last year Ukraine was expelling Russian secret service officers; now it is inviting them back. In the Russian and the Ukrainian press, analysts speculate that the Russian officers will recruit from retired staffers and sailors of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The change coincides with debates in the Russian parliament about the “strategic” use of ethnic Russians beyond Russia’s borders. The Crimean Peninsula, where the Russian fleet docks, is the only part of Ukraine with an ethnic Russian majority.

According to the treaty signed in April between Ukraine and the Russia, the Russian naval force will have the right to base at the Ukrainian port at Sevastopol until 2047. This makes NATO and EU membership very unlikely for Ukraine for the foreseeable future. Thus Yanukovych takes a political argument away from his political opponents, who say that they are the ones who can lead Ukraine into western institutions. If Russian military forces are to be stationed in Ukraine for the political lifetime of anyone now active in politics, which is what the thirty-year extension amounts to (Russian already had basing rights until 2017), it is hard to see how the conversation about joining NATO and the EU will even be possible in Kiev.

All of this represents a step backward for Ukraine, but the biggest loser—ironically—is probably Russia. Moscow will pay for basing rights in Crimea by subsidizing natural gas in Ukraine, a gain for the Ukrainian but a loss for the Russian budget. Moscow gets little of significance in return but the certainty of decades of headaches. The Black Sea Fleet is an important political presence in southern Ukraine, and that is precisely the problem for Russia. The very last thing Russia needs is to be drawn into imperial competition for Ukraine. Russian statebuilding (whether democratic or not) depends precisely on the ability of Russian politicians to attend to the obvious problems within their own country, rather than creating permanent distractions for themselves and their successors abroad.

Russian civil society is also threatened by endorsement of Stalin from beyond Russia’s borders. The plane crash that killed Poland’s president and ninety-five other Poles in April provoked a Russian conversation not only about the shootings of Poles at Katyn, which Polish dignitaries were coming to commemorate, but about Stalinist killing in general. Both Putin and Medvedev have encouraged not only political commemoration of the tragedy of Katyn, but also these broader discussions. At just such a moment, it is to be rued that viewers of Russian television watch a monument to Stalin erected in Ukraine, a land that suffered under Stalin even more than Russia itself.

Jason DeCrow/AP Photo

The Dalai Lama at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York, May 23, 2010

Following is an English translation of an Internet dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens that took place on May 21. The exchange was organized by Wang Lixiong, a Chinese intellectual known for his writing on Tibet and for theorizing about how China might generate its own kind of democracy in the Internet age.

The idea of promoting “free dialogue” on the Web between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens is an extremely bold notion. To China’s rulers, nearly every word in the phrase “free dialogue with the Dalai Lama” is anathema. The Dalai Lama, in their language, is a traitor, a “splittist,” an “enemy of the people,” a “monster,” a “wolf in monk’s robes.” The word “dialogue” has not fared well in Chinese Communist history, either. It is what student protesters were asking for in spring 1989 just before tanks and machine guns settled the question by massacre.

So how did Wang Lixiong do it? First he asked representatives of the Dalai Lama, who is on a tour of the U.S., for an hour of time in which the Tibetan religious leader might answer questions from Chinese citizens. The Dalai Lama agreed to use the hour of 8 to 9 a.m. (EST) on May 21 for this purpose. Wang then arranged to open a Twitter page beginning on May 17 at 10:30 a.m. (Beijing time), onto which Chinese Web users could pose questions. In order to promote democracy in the questioning process, Wang decided to prioritize the questions using the program Google Moderator, which posts all questions on a Google Moderator page inside China. According to the program, any Web visitor can vote on which questions he or she prefers and only one vote from any one remote Web user is accepted (to prevent a cyber version of ballot-box stuffing); during the voting period, a running tally is published on which questions have received the most votes.

This process went well until 4:07 p.m. (Beijing time) on May 18. At that moment access to the Google Moderator page inside China was blocked. Apparently the authorities had discovered the project. Many questions and votes had already been collected, however, and questions continued to pour in even after the blocking because many Web users in China know how to use proxy servers to “jump the great firewall” electronically. By 10 p.m. on May 20 (EST), which was the deadline Wang set for submitting questions and voting on preferences, 282 questions had been submitted and 12,045 votes for questions had been cast. Wang said that he was “very pleased” with this response and that the questions that rose to the top of the pile were indeed, in his view, a good representation of the actual concerns on the minds of Chinese citizens.

The questions that had the most votes at the end were presented to the Dalai Lama Friday at 8:00 a.m. (EST). My English translations of the questions and answers, which follow below, are based on a Chinese-language transcript that has been approved by the Dalai Lama’s staff. More detail is available at Wang Lixiong’s Twitter account (twitter.com/wlixiong). The numbers attached to the questions refer to their rank order in number of votes received.

Question 1: Your Holiness Dalai Lama, how are you? I want to ask you about the religious leadership of Tibet in the future. Please forgive my audacity, but what is your view on the possibility of “two successors” for you, as happened in the case of the 11th Panchen Lama [when Tibetan Buddhists chose one successor and the Chinese government arrested him and named another]? And what, by the way, is your view of the Panchen Lama that the Chinese government has appointed?

Dalai Lama: In 1969 I issued a formal declaration that the question of whether the Dalai Lama system should continue is a question for the Tibetan people to decide. In 1992 I issued another declaration, making clear that as soon as Tibet might gain formal autonomy, I would hold no official position in a Tibetan government and that all Tibetan affairs would be continue to be handled by officials serving in their posts inside Tibet. Then, in 2001 the Tibetan government in exile adopted a system to elect leaders to five-year terms of office by popular vote of the Tibetan community in exile. In view of these developments, I have come to feel that the Dalai Lama system is no longer very important. I am going to continue to do my best in my role as long as my health holds up, but as for the Dalai Lama system, I have to say that the Chinese government cares more about this than I do (laughs). A problem like that of “the two Panchen Lamas” might indeed appear. But if such a thing happens, it will only cause confusion and not do any good.

[On the government-appointed Panchen Lama], I understand that he is very bright and works hard at Buddhist cultivation. Believers remain skeptical about him, waiting to see whether he can cultivate himself to a high level. In my view this will be very important, and will depend upon his own efforts.

Question 2: I would like to ask Your Holiness about the meetings between the Tibetan government in exile and the Chinese Communists. Why are these meetings always fruitless? What exactly are the questions that have been so intractable over the decades?

Dalai Lama: The main problem is that the Chinese government continually insists that there is no Tibet problem, only a Dalai Lama problem. I have made no demands of my own, but am primarily concerned with six million Tibetans and their culture, especially their religion and their natural environment. If a day comes when Chinese leaders acknowledge a “Tibet question” in the same sense in which they recognize a “Xinjiang question,” and if they are ready to face the Tibet question and work for its solution, I will lend my full support, because our goals—to build, develop and unify Tibet—will then be the same. At present the Communists are relying on forcible methods. They repeatedly stress “stability” in Tibet. My belief is that true stability comes from inner confidence and trust.

Question 3: Hello, Your Holiness. Regardless of what political path China takes in the future, the gap between ordinary Tibetans and ordinary Han Chinese is getting bigger all the time. Many Tibetan people are too simplistic when they say the problem is just that Hans rule Tibet. In fact we Han people are also victims of the same dictatorial rule. How do you view this problem? Do you have any way of maintaining good relations between Hans and Tibetans?

Dalai Lama: Relations between the Han and Tibetan people did not begin in 1949 or 1950; they arose more than a thousand years ago. There have been times of harmony and times of conflict. We are now in a time of conflict, but the cause of the conflict has been the government, not the people. This why our people-to-people relations are so important. It is why we have set up “Tibetan-Han Friendship Associations” in many of the free countries of the world. These associations have seen some success.

In my view the main difficulty [on the Chinese government’s side] has been the failure to carry out Deng Xiaoping’s “seek truth from facts.” Hu Yaobang also had the right idea when he stressed “understanding actual conditions.” Recently Wen Jiabao has praised the spirit of Hu Yaobang’s approach of relying not just on official documents but doing on-the-scene investigation.

In China generally [not just Tibet], the pattern of ignoring actual conditions and living in non-transparent social structures causes many major problems. If there could be transparency and attention to actual conditions, much progress could be made, for example, in handling and reducing corruption and graft.

As for how to maintain good relations between Hans and Tibetans, my experience, wherever I go, has been that I get a lot of respect and sympathy from people if I just approach them as one human being to another. If Hans and Tibetans approach one another in this way, on a basis of equality, many problems might be solved. When I meet people from mainland China, I always find them extremely sincere and find no barriers to communicating with them.

The problems of doubt and suspicion between people are hardly limited to Tibetans and Hans. These problems exist everywhere in the world. This is why we need contact. We need it in order to get rid of suspicion and doubt. Whenever I meet someone, no matter where in the world it is, I emphasize harmony in person-to-person relations. There are two levels in any such meeting. The first is that we are all human beings. Only when that point is clear do I address differences of religion, culture, or language.

When I was in Beijing in 1954 and 1955, I learned that Marxist theory emphasizes “internationalism,” which is a doctrine that people everywhere are the same. I entirely agree with this.

Question 4: I would like to ask your Holiness about your “Memorandum on Achieving True Autonomy for All Tibetans,” in which you do not mention how to protect the rights of Han people living in Tibet. Would you, after autonomy, recognize the right of Han people who currently reside in Tibetan areas to continue living there? Can you publish a Memorandum describing how you would guarantee equal rights of life and livelihood to Han people in Tibetan areas? Many Han people believe that your “autonomy” is another word for independence and that an autonomous government would discriminate against Hans and drive them out.

Dalai Lama: Han people were living in Tibet before [the CCP takeover in] 1950. There were Hans and Muslims living near the place where I was born. In the future, too, Hans will no doubt live in Tibet. The crucial question is whether Tibet will become like Inner Mongolia, where Mongols have now become a minority. When this happens the significance of self-rule is lost. In some Tibetan districts, where the Han population has grown large, the language and culture of Tibet are in great peril.

Question 5: I would like to ask the Great Teacher why your description of earlier Tibet—as a harmonious Buddhist society—differs so radically from the Chinese government’s description of an evil slave society. There are many drawings and other visual materials that document a cruel and dark slave society. Can you explain why this discrepancy is so big?

Dalai Lama: Tibet before 1950 was a “backward society” and its institutions were imperfect. We acknowledge this. No one ever said Tibet before 1950 was a paradise. I don’t think any Tibetan, inside Tibet or outside, even in their dreams, would want to restore the old system intact.

On the other hand, the Chinese government’s widespread claims that old Tibet was a kind of hell are also very wide of the mark. For example the film called “People Denied the Right of Birth,” which was sponsored by the Chinese government, is pure propaganda and utterly unacceptable to most Tibetans because it departs so far from the truth. This is like the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, with all its claims about “great victories”—which, once the true situation could no longer be covered up, melted into nothing. It is also reminds us of the Tiananmen events of June Fourth [1989], which the whole world knows about, but the Communists’ propaganda pretends not to have happened.

The most important point is that every one of you [Han Chinese friends] should make fair, objective, and scientific investigation of questions. I often say the same to Tibetans. I tell them not to take what I say as automatically true and accept it uncritically; I say make your own observations and reach your own conclusions. As a Buddhist, I approach even the words of the Buddha in this spirit of analyzing thoroughly and reaching one’s own understanding.

Question 6: If the regime were to allow you to return to Tibet, and were to grant self-rule to Tibet, what kind of political system would you like to see in Tibet?

Dalai Lama: This question will be for Tibetans inside Tibet, especially intellectuals, in a spirit of “seeking truth from facts,” to decide for themselves. Our Tibetan society in exile, for the past 50 years, has already achieved democratization in its social system.

Question 7: I would like to ask the Dalai Lama a sharp question. The fiercest criticism that Chinese government officials level against you is that you demand there be no troops in Tibet. This, they say, is evidence that you are asking for independence in disguise. Do you stick with your demand of “no troops in Tibet”? The right to station troops is a fundamental part of national sovereignty, and I am afraid that most Han people will not be able to agree to a “no troops” condition. Is there any possibility you will drop this condition?

Dalai Lama: We do ask for “autonomy,” but we have repeatedly been very clear that foreign relations and military affairs would remain the responsibility of the central government. Many years ago I expressed an idea that when relations of friendship and mutual trust had grown among India, Nepal, and Tibet, we might form a sort of “peaceful region,” but this was little more than a distant ideal. The whole world, actually, holds this kind of ideal. So there truly is nothing to worry about.

Question 8: In view of how things stand at present, the chances of a peaceful resolution of the problem of Tibet seem almost zero. May I ask how Your Holiness views the current prospects for Tibet?

Dalai Lama: During 60 years of Chinese Communist rule, the eras of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao have all been different. In fact there have been some very major changes. I feel confident that changes in [China’s] nationalities policy will come, and in particular that the Tibet problem can be solved on the basis of mutual interest. Some retired officials and Party members who used to work on Tibetan affairs—as well as some Chinese intellectuals—have begun to point out irrationalities in minority policy and the need for a re-thinking of nationalities policy. This is why I feel there will be changes in the not-so-distant future, and that problems can be solved.

Wikimedia Commons

The gallery surrounding the Alhambra’s Court of Lions, February 2006

Every so often, writers outside the architectural profession publish works on the building art that capture the public imagination and make the best-seller lists, most lamentably Tom Wolfe’s wildly misinformed fantasia on early Modernism, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981). Far more benign was Tracy Kidder’s House (1985), a numbingly detailed report on the creation of an architect-designed dwelling for a Massachusetts family. More recently, the architect and educator Witold Rybczynski has mastered the art of explaining the commonplaces and arcana of the architectural process and its products in several books commendable for their lucidity and even-handedness. Now they are joined by Edward Hollis, a British architect and preservationist whose new book, The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories, offers an advanced seminar for graduates of Rybczynski’s introductory courses. Hollis, who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art, stands apart from other popular writers on the building art in his acknowledgement that architecture is anything but the immutable medium most people suppose it to be. As he writes:

These masterpieces, so called, are too capricious to answer to any one master. They are ruined, stolen, or appropriated. They flit away and reproduce themselves, evolve and are translated into foreign languages. They are simulated, prophesied, and restored, transformed into sacred relics, empty spectacles, and casus belli. It is the contention of this book that their beauty has not been made by any one artist but has been generated by their long and unpredictable lives. [p. 10]

Hollis’ wide-ranging meditations encompass touristic staples (the Parthenon and Notre Dame de Paris); religious shrines (the Santa Casa of Loreto in Italy and Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall); and cult classics (Leon Battista Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s follies at Sanssouci palace in Potsdam). But no matter how familiar these works may be, he turns the story of each structure and its subsequent transformations into an informative parable about the inevitable metamorphoses of the built environment.

Leon Batista Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini

Epitomizing such adaptations, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia has successively served as a church, a mosque, and now a museum. St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice incorporates many elements looted from Constantinople, some from Hagia Sophia itself: a Byzantine porphyry sculpture of the Emperor Diocletian; a host of golden icons; and the four larger-than-life-size bronze horses of ancient origin—expropriated by Napoleon for the Louvre but returned after his downfall—that prance above its main portal (as replicas, however: the originals are now kept inside the Basilica).

A more recent Venetian is the casino hotel of that name in Las Vegas, which features a fake St. Mark’s campanile, Doge’s Palace, Grand Canal, and Rialto Bridge. Hollis observes that this exercise in architectural escapism is not terribly different from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli or Schinkel’s Roman Baths at Sanssouci.

The Venetian has been so profitable that in 2007 the Chinese government was persuaded by the hotel’s majority shareholder, Sheldon G. Adelson, to build a replica of the replica in Macao, the former Portuguese island colony and the Vegas of the Far East. In a Power Point pitch, the American promoters to Vice Premier Qian Qichen in Beijing projected a motto summing up the Möbius-like contortions at play: “Authenticity is the basis for fantasy.”

Wikimedia Commons

A replica of a replica: the Venetian Macao resort, December 2007

However, Hollis’s thesis of architectural mutability is a somewhat mutable thing in itself, in that great buildings convey their greatness in a host of different ways. His argument holds up better in some chapters than in others, most notably where the absence of known master builders supports his welcome insistence that the Great Man Theory is particularly inappropriate to an art form that is essentially collaborative, both in a structure’s initial creation and in the many hands that leave their marks on it over time.

Hollis’s prose sometimes soars, as in this scintillating evocation of the Alhambra’s most celebrated inner sanctum:

The Court of the Lions was so cunningly wrought that it appeared to reverse the very laws of gravity. The marble columns that supported the arches seemed to hang down from them like tassels, and the walls were like screens of petrified lace, through which light could be seen. The rooms that opened off the court were vaulted with domes composed of thousands of tiny stalactites that scattered the sun in constellations of light; they seemed to drip down from the heavens, rather than rest upon the walls.

Less convincing is Hollis’s chapter on the Hulme Crescents, a high-rise English housing estate in Manchester, which opened in 1971 and was demolished in 1993. An even more short-lived American public welfare development, George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project of 1954–1955 in St. Louis, fell to the wrecker’s ball in 1972, just in time to become Exhibit A in the ascendant Postmodernists’ case against the Modern movement.

Oscar Newman, Defensible Space

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project being torn down

Although both these slum-clearance schemes were initially praised, they soon fell into disrepair and in due course were seen as breeding grounds for crime and anomie. That indictment was pressed by neoconservative writers who argued that the architectural conceptions themselves caused delinquent behavior.

To his credit, Hollis points out that the withdrawal of government subsidies in Britain under Margaret Thatcher (and in the US after the Great Society) had a more direct effect than any design flaws in turning a workers’ paradise into a Clockwork Orange dystopia. But he has little evident sympathy for idealistic social visions gone awry, and writes that however well-intentioned, “every future is followed by another—blueprints for everlasting utopia would, like all plans, be cast aside in pursuit of others.” [p. 229]

If the author’s chapters on the Hulme Crescents, the Berlin Wall, and the continuing struggle over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem lack the enchantment of his evocations of historical monuments, he can be blamed for nothing more than deciphering the latest handwriting on the wall with unremitting clarity. Here he provides the ground for a reinvigorated public discourse on the role of architecture in contemporary society, which makes even his more debatable assertions worthy of wide consideration.

Edward Hollis, The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (Metropolitan Books, 2009)

Theo Cote

Lydia Davis, Rensselaer County, New York, May 2009

Dan Chiasson reads from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which he reviewed in the April 29, 2010 issue of The New York Review, and talks to Gabriel Winslow-Yost about accidental greatness, lonely translators, and reading at stoplights.

Sergio Larrain/Magnum

Baker Street underground station, London, 1959

Everyone who walks the busy streets of a city takes imaginary snapshots. For all I know, my face glimpsed in a crowd years ago may live on in someone’s memory the same way that the face of some stranger lives on in mine. Of course, out of the hundreds of people we may happen to see in a day, we become fully aware of only a select few, and often not even that many if we have too much on our minds. Then it happens.

All the poets who loved colorful street life, starting with Whitman and Baudelaire, knew that the unforeseen was one of the inherent qualities of the beautiful. We come face to face with someone, or we catch a peek at them from the corner of our eye and the camera in our heads clicks, suspending the image. Here is a tall, well-dressed young woman with a look of utter despair in her eyes and an incongruous smile on her lips. In the next instant, she’s gone and we forget her as we busy ourselves with other things, except she may reappear later that day to haunt us, or in a month, or even years after, like some snapshot we found in the shoebox in the attic that we can’t stop looking at because we no longer remember who that person in it was or when or where it was taken.

Why do we remember some faces and not the others? One meets all sorts of interesting-looking people in the city: confident, bursting with health, sickly, preoccupied, seemingly lost or thoroughly defeated, so how come so few stick in our memory? No doubt it’s because something about them cheers or troubles our spirit. At times, compassion and fear make us identify with them. We find ourselves in their shoes for a moment, living a life we have read in their faces. I recall seeing, for example, a pale, middle-aged man in an inconspicuous gray suit, sitting on the subway with his gray hat, gray moustache, collapsing cheeks and empty watery eyes as the uptown local rattled along.

For some reason, the memory of his face is more vivid to me than many far more momentous encounters and occasions in my life that I ought to remember with greater clarity. I keep his face in my secret photo album, the one I would not show to anyone, even if I could, because the pictures in it would most likely mean nothing to them. And yet for me, and I’m sure for others, this sort of collection of random images is a kind of unintended autobiography. When I hear people say that “every human being carries around a secret,” this is what I think they are talking about.

Fifty years ago sitting in Washington Square park one warm spring day, I overheard a story on this very subject. Two old men were chatting about different kinds of women they knew in their life, and the various way in which they drove both of them crazy, when one said that his father told him before he died that the most beautiful woman he ever saw in his life was getting off the Staten Island Ferry just as he was getting on. Their eyes met and that was it. His father even remembered the exact date and the time of day, which as I recall was in the month of May in 1910. Of course, after he fell silent, I turned around to sneak a better look at the man who was telling the story, but today, no matter how hard I try, I can only bring back his words and nothing else. Evidently, to remember a face, it helps if one’s mind is blank and not busy thinking about some story one has just heard.

AP

Pope John Paul II blesses Father Marcial Maciel, November 2004

Of all the terrible sexual scandals the hierarchs in the Vatican find themselves tangled in, none is likely to do as much institutional damage as the astounding and still unfolding story of the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel. The crimes committed against children by other priests and bishops may provoke rage, but they also make one want to look away. With Father Maciel, on the other hand, one can hardly tear oneself from the ghastly drama as it unfolds, page by page, revelation by revelation, in the Mexican press.

Father Maciel, who was born in Mexico and died in 2008 at the age of eighty-seven, was known around the Catholic world. Against ordinarily insurmountable obstacles, he founded what was to become one of the most dynamic, profitable, and conservative religious orders of the 20th century, which today has 800 priests, and approximately seventy thousand religious worldwide. The Legion of Christ, nearly 70 years old as an order, is comparatively small, but it is influential: it operates fifteen universities, and some 140,000 students are enrolled in its schools (In New York, its members teach in eleven parish schools); and its leadership has long enjoyed remarkable access to the Vatican hierarchy.

A great achiever and close associate of John Paul II, Maciel was also a bigamist, pederast, dope fiend, and plagiarist. Maciel came from the fervently religious state of Michoacán in the southwest of Mexico, and grew up during the years of the Cristero war (1926–1929), a savage conflict that pitched traditional Catholics (Cristeros) in provincial Mexico against the anti-clerical government in the capital. One of his uncles was the commanding general of the Cristeros. Another four uncles were bishops. One of them, Rafael Guízar y Valencia, brought him into a clandestine seminary in Mexico City, where as a 21 year old who had not even taken his vows, Maciel created a new religious order that was intended to be both cosmopolitan and strict.

Given its founder’s age and general lack of education, it is not surprising that its aims were poorly defined, although in a fascinating study of Maciel by the historian and psychoanalyst Fernando M. González we learn that one of the order’s statutes specified that priests should be decenti sint conspectu, attractione corripiant, or graceful and attractive. At the age of 27 the young Father Maciel had an audience with Pope Pius XII, who, according to the Legionaries’ official history, urged him to use the order “to form and to win for Christ the leaders of Latin America and the world.” This has been the order’s unwavering mission for six decades, and with remarkable speed it emerged as a conservative force to rival even Opus Dei.

Maciel was evidently a man of some magnetism; dozens of wealthy women contributed generous amounts for the Legionaries’ good works, and the Mexican magazine Quién, normally known for its society pages and not for its investigative reporting, recently had a story about one of Mexico’s wealthiest widows, Flora Barragán de Garza, who donated upwards of fifty million dollars during the years of Maciel’s glory. “She gave him practically all our father’s fortune,” Barragán’s daughter told the Quién interviewer, adding that the family finally had to intervene so that the by then elderly woman would not be left destitute. Her generosity allowed Maciel to travel first-class throughout his peripatetic life, but it also provided the wherewithal for the network of private schools to which wealthy Mexican conservatives dispatched their children.

In 1997, a Mexican woman who was living in Cuernavaca looked at the cover of the magazine Contenido—a Reader’s Digest-y sort of publication—and saw on it the face of her common-law husband. She had been his partner for 21 years and borne him two children, and she knew him as a private detective or “CIA agent” who, for understandable work-related reasons, put in only occasional appearances at home. Now she learned that he was a priest and and that his real name was Marcial Maciel. He was, the magazine said, the head of an order whose strictness and extreme conservatism appeared to hide some vile secrets: the article, picking up information first brought to light in an article by Jason Berry in the Hartford Courant, revealed that nine men, one a founder of the Legionaries, another still an active member, and the rest all former members of the order, had informed their superiors in Rome that Maciel had abused them sexually when they were pubescent seminarians under his care.

The accusations were not new, nor would they be the last. In 1938 Maciel was expelled from his uncle Guízar’s seminary, and shortly afterward from a seminary in the United States. According to witnesses, Maciel and his uncle had a gigantic row behind closed doors, and one witness, a Legionary who had known Maciel since childhood, told the psychoanalyst González that the bishop’s rage had to do with the fact that Maciel was locking himself up in the boarding house where he was staying with some of the younger boys at his uncle’s seminary. Bishop Guízar died of a massive heart attack the following day.

Later, it would become known that Maciel had his students and seminarians procure Dolantin (morphine) for him. This led to Maciel’s suspension as head of the order in 1956. Inexplicably, he was reinstated after two years. Much later still, someone realized that his book, The Psalter of My Days, which was more or less required reading in Legionary institutions, and was a sort of Book of Hours, or prayer guide, was lifted virtually in its entirety from The Psalter of My Hours, an account written by a Spaniard who was sentenced to life in prison after the Spanish Civil War.

“The Families of Maciel,” on the cover of the Mexican magazine Quién, March 19, 2010

Uneducated and mendacious, Maciel nevertheless had a genius for politics, and for personal relations. According to a former Jesuit with good knowledge of the story, one of the very first sizable donations that the Polish Solidarity movement received came from Maciel, who raised the money among the conservative Mexican elite he had so steadfastly cultivated. No doubt the Polish Karol Woyjtiwa heard about this act of generosity and appreciated Maciel’s ideological stance. The priest was at John Paul’s side throughout the first three of the Pope’s five visits to Mexico: Legionary money, its priests, and its very active laypersons’ movement, the Regnum Christi, strengthened the Polish Pope’s campaign to remove socially radical or liberal priests from positions of power and give ascendancy to his conservative Catholicism.

It is hard not to think that these are the reasons the Vatican ignored the detailed and heartwrenching letter sent in 1998 by Maciel’s eight accusers (the ninth member of the group having died.) Even as the public first became aware of the accusations through the Hartford Courant and the Mexican press, which picked up the story immediately, the Vatican refused to act. Instead, Pope John Paul II put forward the beatification of Maciel’s mother and of his uncle, Bishop Guízar. (The bishop is now Saint Guízar. Maciel’s mother is still going through the beatification process.) It was only in 2006, after John Paul’s death, that a Vatican communique announced that Maciel had been “invited to lead a reserved life of prayer and penitence.” He lived out his final years quietly and died in the United States. The Legionaries, however, have continued to grow in numbers and in wealth.

It’s risky for a nonbeliever to try to evaluate how the Maciel narrative will affect the Church’s standing as a whole, because an outsider can understand so little of how a faith is lived among its rank and file. No doubt many Latin American believers know a parish priest who had a “housekeeper” and perhaps a “niece” living with him, because these things have never been uncommon here—or elsewhere, probably, although the effort to hide them may be greater. But Paraguayans have not abandoned their cheerful president, former priest Fernando Lugo, despite the fact that he is known to have fathered at least three children (he seems to think there may be more) while he was still a bishop.

Homosexuality has also been tolerated and to some degree almost expected of skirt-wearing priests in this macho part of the world. It is possible, perhaps, that for many Catholics baptism, confession, and weekly mass are almost bureaucratic procedures, like voting or getting a driver’s licence, and that true faith is something that happens at home-made altars and through the magical pathways of ritual, leaving priests to live their own lives as long as they do a creditable job with the sermons and the burials. The sexual abuse of children and its cover-up are a different matter entirely, one suspects.

As it turns out, Maciel’s common-law marriage to Blanca Estela Lara Gutiérrez was not exclusive. Some ten years after he met her, he began a long-lasting relationship with a 19-year old waitress from Acapulco, to whom he introduced himself as an “oil broker.” He had a daughter with her, and, according to a recent article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, several more children with other partners.

After she found out that her husband was not a CIA agent but a child-molesting priest, Blanca Estela Lara did not come forth with the news that she was married to him. Perhaps she was terrified unawares of the man she believed “was her God,” as she would say a decade later. Perhaps she was simply ashamed. At any rate, she kept silent while some of Maciel’s victims and a few journalists—notably the late Gerald Renner and Jason Berry, now of the National Catholic Reporter—kept producing more evidence. And then, last March, two years after Maciel’s death, Lara appeared with her three sons on one of Mexico’s most well-regarded talk shows and listened quietly while her children testified that their biological father, Marcial Maciel, had made them masturbate him, and had first attempted to rape them, the older one said, when he was a boy seven years old. (This testimony has been tarnished somewhat by the revelation that the sons had earlier demanded millions of dollars from the Legionaries of Christ in exchange for their silence. The order has not attempted to deny the accusation, however.)

Quite apart from the damage to Maciel’s victims, there is the pressing question of why the Catholic Church, as an institution, did not condemn him when he was ordained as a priest, or when he founded the Legionaries, or when the story of his pederasty made the cover of magazines, or when enough evidence was found to conclude that Maciel should live out the rest of his life in seclusion, or even when the rumors grew strong enough to warrant a Vatican investigation of the order as a whole. The answer surprises no one: at a time in which churches are emptying, the Legionaries have been a rich source of conscripts, money and influence; in Mexico everyone from Carlos Slim to Marta Sahagún, the wife of former president Vicente Fox, gave money to or asked favors from Maciel.

Pius XII greets the first group of Legionaries arriving in Rome, September 1946

It was not until last year that Karol Woyjtiwa’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, at last authorized a visitation—churchspeak for investigation—of the entire order of the Legionaries of Christ. As usual, the press and some disaffected religious have been way ahead of the Vatican. Now we learn from the press that the order kept some 900 women under non-binding vows as consagradas, or quasi-nuns, in conditions of emotional privation and subjugation that violated even canonical law.

In the end, the scandal of Marcial Maciel, gruesome and ribald as it is, will turn out to be of much greater significance to the Catholic Church than the isolated terrors inflicted on their victims by one or another European or U.S. bishop or priest. There is the distressing question of the Church’s last Pope, the popular John Paul II, and his relations with the demonic priest. There is the not unimportant fact that the Legionaries—along with Benedict XVI and indeed John Paul—represent the most morally conservative part of the Church, and that they now appear enmeshed in the most squalid moral scandal it is possible to imagine. There is, above all, the fact that an entire, large, wealthy, international institution is now under suspicion (what did Maciel’s fellow Legionaries know, when did they know it, and who was complicit?) and that the greatest institution of all, the Roman Catholic Church, appears to have engaged in a cover-up for decades on its behalf. Catholics who always assumed that a priest and Bing Crosby were more or less identical will need some time to adjust to this knowledge.

But there is the also the question of the future of the Church and of its priests and nuns as sexual beings. It is not necessarily cheap psychology to speculate that extreme sexual repression of the sort imposed by the Church on its members leads to perversion, an issue that has surfaced importunately for the last millenium. Many religious, it would seem, opt to “obey” rules but not comply with them, as the Spanish formulation has it (“obedezco, pero no cumplo”). I offer this simply as anecdotal evidence, but in my casual, friendly, and often admiring acquaintance with members of the Catholic orders—all from the social activist branch of the church, for whatever it’s worth—a remarkable number have been involved in some sort of couple relationship.

I once attended a major church festivity in a small town at which several of the priests and nuns who arrived to concelebrate Mass were openly, and even defiantly, there with their partners, either homosexual or hetero. In 1979, at the time of John Paul’s first visit to Mexico, I had a conversation with a progressive Spanish priest who lived with his partner, a middle-aged woman, about the split life he lived. Why, I asked, didn’t he leave the Church if so many of its norms violated his own convictions and desire for honesty? I remember his saying, in effect, that the possibility of doing good within an institution as enormous and influential as the Church was greater that the chances for doing good outside of it. Perhaps that equation is changing.

Nuclear weapons protestors dancing during the first London-Aldermaston March, London, April, 1958. Aldermaston became a nuclear base in 1950 and is now the headquarters of Britain’s Trident missile program.

In the recent foreign policy debate among the three candidates in next week’s general election in Great Britain—the incumbent Gordon Brown (Labour) against David Cameron (Conservative) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat)—it is generally conceded that Clegg won. But I have seen no commentary on the interesting exchange about nuclear deterrence that took place somewhere in the middle of the debate. Britain has at present four Vanguard class submarines that—according to a Cold War agreement between the US and Britain—are designed to carry Trident nuclear missiles leased from the United States. The submarines are becoming obsolete. Clegg noted that it would cost about a hundred billion pounds to replace them with a new generation of submarines, money that might be spent elsewhere. He raised this point at least twice and was ignored by the other two candidates. Finally, the moderator insisted they answer. Gordon Brown said that it was important for Britain to have an independent deterrence—separate from the US’s umbrella—citing the threat posed by countries like Iran. Cameron agreed. Unfortunately Clegg did not ask the obvious question: Why? What earthly function do these submarines serve? Who can they possibly deter, especially since only one of them at a time is ever at sea?

It has become ever clearer that nuclear arms are no longer useful weapons of war. Iran, to take Gordon Brown’s example, has been put on a list of countries that the US is targeting with nuclear weapons—hundreds of them. This strategy has not deterred anything. It has only made the Iranians more belligerent. Russia has at present the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons of any country. Yet in late March, two women were able to board subways in Moscow and blow up suicide vests using conventional explosives. In the “war” against terrorism, nuclear deterrence has little meaning.

It should be noted that when nuclear weapons first began to be constructed in the early 1940s, no one thought of deterrence. The bomb was not designed to “deter” Hitler. It was to defeat him and his Axis allies. In the spring of 1943 the Columbia physicist Robert Serber gave a series of lectures to new recruits at Los Alamos. The opening lines of the printed version read: “The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction in one of more of the materials known to show nuclear fission.”

As far as I can tell, the first suggestion that these weapons could be used for deterrence came from General Leslie Groves, who headed the Manhattan project. Some time after the defeat of Germany, but well before the first successful test of the bomb in July of 1945, he came to Los Alamos. At a small dinner he expressed the view that the Russians would have to be deterred by the bomb. He was sure that they had expansionist plans that included the domination of all of Europe and that nuclear weapons would be necessary to stop them. In fact, Soviet spies had already furnished Stalin with extensive knowledge of the US program well before it became public after Hiroshima; Stalin’s reaction was not to be deterred, but to start a crash program to build nuclear weapons of his own while at the same time occupying the countries of Eastern Europe.

Indeed, if you think about it, deterrence is an odd concept. It implies explicit or implicit negotiations between the deterrer and the deterree. How is one to know when deterrence has been successful? It is easier to know that it has not been when one is attacked. David tried to deter Goliath by invoking the God of the Israelites. Goliath had no interest. If David had shown Goliath his skills with a slingshot instead of attempting to deter him it would probably have provoked a better defense against sling shots. What does one expect a deterree to do, sign a document admitting that he/she is deterred? Would anyone trust such a document? Without such a document how much deterrence is enough? Is one atomic bomb enough? How about fifty or five hundred? Who is to decide? For many decades, the US and Russia were engaged in a policy of “mutually assured destruction”—MAD. How did we know that destruction of the other side was “assured?”

A Trident submarine leaving its base, with the village of Strone visible in the background, Clyde, England, December 29, 2007 (Flickr/JohnED76)

Consider the recent British debate over the Trident missiles: the first thing one must know is that the British have racked up very large debts during the recent recession. Like ours, they are unsustainable. Like ours, the only solution is a combination of reduced services and expenses, along with higher taxes. The second thing one must know is that, although they cost a huge amount of taxpayer money to maintain, only one of Britain’s four Vanguard class submarines capable of carrying Trident missiles is at sea at any given moment. The other three are involved in either training exercises or undergoing maintenance. The crew of the one at sea does not know where it is. Its rules of engagement are contained in a letter from the Prime Minister that is stored in a safe onboard. If the submarine is ever cut off from its base then the letter authorizes the commander to fire the missiles or not depending on his view of the situation.

The purpose of this arrangement was, originally, to get around the Cold War problem of first strike: by arming a British submarine whose whereabouts were unknown with missiles capable of destroying Russian cities, the US would be able to retaliate against even a devastating nuclear attack by the Soviets—thus deterring Moscow from launching such a strike. But in an era in which the major threat no longer comes from a single nuclear-armed opponent but from terrorists and insurgents, what purpose does this one submarine serve?

The French also have four nuclear-weapon-armed submarines as well as airplanes. The Cold War reasoning behind this force de frappe was stated by General de Gaulle in:

Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians. I truly believe that one does not light-heartedly attack people who are able to kill 80 million Russians, even if one can kill 800 million French, that is if there were 800 million French.

Given the present situation, this statement seems totally absurd. Yet French President Nicolas Sarkozy insists that these submarine and air missiles are needed to retaliate against terrorist states. The French have had terrorist incidents. Against whom can they retaliate with nuclear weapons?

From what I have written so far one might draw the conclusion that a total abolition of nuclear weapons is desirable. On this point I am not so sure. I think about conflicts that might have happened but didn’t. For example, given the numerous recent terrorist acts in India such as the Mumbai bombings that have been traced to Pakistani groups, I think it is quite plausible that without the restraint of nuclear weapons on both sides there would have been war. Here deterrence worked. The lesson from this is that the existing bombs on both sides were both necessary and sufficient in this instance. Instead both countries are engaged in efforts to increase their stockpiles of nuclear arms. To what end? One cannot help but be struck by how ludicrous this is.

The path of a MIRV rocket

Likewise I think that the mainland Chinese might have tried to reclaim Taiwan if it was not for the nuclear umbrella the US provided. I also suspect that some combination of Arab states might have attempted to destroy Israel if it was not for the generally accepted fact that the Israelis have something like two hundred nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. These cases seem to me to be an argument that the presence of some nuclear weapons has helped to preserve the peace. But how many do you need? I wonder if in our recent agreement with the Russians there have been frank discussions of what mutually assured destruction really requires. It does not look that way. The signed treaty allows for many more warheads than anyone really needs. It also does not eliminate “MIRVing”—having multiple re-entry vehicles on a single rocket, which defeats attempts to deflect the rockets. I think that when the history of this period is eventually written, two of its worst inventions will be the hydrogen bomb and MIRVing. Both were acts of folly.

This leaves us with the dilemma that I think characterizes our age. We seem to have a choice between preserving some nuclear weapons in the hope that they will deter some conventional wars or accepting the fact that conventional wars will continue to occur if we eliminate all nuclear weapons. As a species we are very good at developing technology—nuclear weapons are a big triumph in that department. But when it comes to deciding what to do with it, we seem bewildered.

“The art of photography is deliciously impure: its aesthetic triumphs and traditions are inescapably enmeshed in the messy world of work.” So writes Peter Galassi, curator of “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” the Museum of Modern Art’s ambitious new exhibition devoted to the work of one of the most brilliant photographers of the twentieth century. On view through June 28, 2010, the exhibition presents Cartier-Bresson’s work in a daring way—his most iconic masterpieces share wall space with lesser-known photographs from throughout his career. In this audio slide show, the photographer Dominique Nabokov—whose own work appears regularly in The New York Review—talks about the exhibition and the ways in which Cartier-Bresson’s daily works reveal his genius. An additional photograph from the exhibition appears in the May 13 issue of The New York Review.

—Dominique Nabokov interviewed by Eve Bowen;
slide show produced by Eve Bowen and Sean Hagerty

William Blake: Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, c. 1785

It never crossed my mind that I would become the poet laureate of the United States. The day I received the call from the Library of Congress, I was carrying a bag of groceries from the car to the house when the phone rang. They didn’t beat around the bush, but told me straight out that this was an honor and not a job they were offering to me. Of course, I was stunned, and without letting the groceries out of my hand, told them that I needed to think about it for a while and that I would call them back tomorrow. My first thought was, who needs this?

I’d heard about the endless reading tours of previous laureates, the elaborate projects they had devised and administered to make poetry more popular in United States, and none of it appealed to me very much. There’s a good reason why I have lived in a small village in New Hampshire for the last thirty-seven years. I like to hear roosters crow in the morning and dogs bark at night. “No way,” I told my wife. I was going to call them back and politely decline. But to my surprise, speaking to my children, I changed my mind. My son and daughter told me, separately, that if I refused this great honor I would come to regret my decision some day. I knew right away that they were right. I thought some more about it, but I kept going back to what they said. So, I accepted.

The appointment was announced on August 2, 2007. For the next few weeks my phone didn’t stop ringing. I gave countless interviews over the phone or in person, appeared on TV and radio shows, had film crews and photographers at my house, and received hundreds of emails, letters, and packages with poetry manuscripts whose authors wanted instant critique or endorsement. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I enjoyed the attention. It was very strange to be talking to so many different people about poetry every day: the big television networks whose reporters were astonished to hear that anyone in America reads or cares for poetry, and the better newspapers and radio stations where one encountered well-informed people who asked probing questions.

Still, the amount of attention was not only overwhelming but also full of surprises. I was asked, for instance, to read a poem to an annual convention of Kansas businessmen in Topeka, to be photographed in New York’s most popular ice cream parlor eating one of their huge concoctions, to have my picture taken in a butcher shop chopping meat with a cleaver, to read a poem at the unveiling of the new vintage of a famous California vineyard, and so on. Since I had an office at the Library of Congress and spent a few days there every month, I got a few invitations from official Washington, which I mostly turned down, including one from Laura Bush to the White House.

William Blake: Milton a Poem/in12 Books,1804/1811, “The Author & Printer W. Blake, 1804, To Justify the Ways of God to Men” (The British Museum)

I don’t know if you are aware of this, but our poet laureates are not called upon to write occasional poems. The position is privately endowed—originally from a fund set up by industrialist scion Arthur M. Huntington in 1936—since it is unimaginable that the Congress of the United States would ever agree to part with a penny for the purpose of promoting poetry. The Republicans, especially, are always worried that someone in the arts is undermining the religious and family values of our country. They suspect poets of being subversives, free-thinkers, sex-fiends, and drug addicts. Their fears are not entirely without foundation. There have not been many American poets, living or dead, you’d want to bring home to meet your grandmother or have speak to your Bible study group.

I figured all the hoopla would end after a couple of months, but it continued during the entire year I served. The position of the laureate has become very well known to the press and the public thanks to my fourteen predecessors, so sooner or later every small town newspaper, regional magazine, and radio station across the country would get around to asking me for an interview. I almost never said no.

Over the years, I had read too many essays by literary critics and even poets, which proclaimed confidently that poetry is universally despised and read by practically no one in United States. I recall my literature students rolling their eyes when I asked them if they liked poetry, or my old high school friends becoming genuinely alarmed upon learning that I still did. Patriotic, sentimental and greeting card verse has always been tolerated, but the kind of stuff modern poets write allegedly offends every one of those “real Americans” Sarah Palin kept praising in the last election.

During the time I served as the poet laureate, however, I found this not to be true. In a country in which schools seem to teach less literature every year, where fewer people read books and ignorance reigns supreme regarding most issues, poetry is read and written more than ever. Anyone who doesn’t believe me ought to take a peek at what’s available on the web. Who are these people who seem determined to copy almost every poem ever written in the language? Where do they find the time to do it? No wonder we have such a large divorce rate in this country. I won’t even describe the thousands of blogs, the on-line poetry magazines, both serious ones and the ones where anyone can post a poem their eight-year daughter wrote about the death of her goldfish. People who kept after me with their constant emails and letters were part of that world. They wanted me to announce what I propose to do to make poetry even more popular in United States. Unlike my predecessors who had a lot of clever ideas, like having a poetry anthology next to the Gideon Bible in every motel room in America (Joseph Brodsky), or urging daily newspapers to print poems (Robert Pinsky), I felt things were just fine. As far as I could see, there was more poetry being read and written than at any time in our history.

The obvious next question is how much of it is any good? More than one would ever imagine. America may be going to hell in every other way, but fine poems continue to be written now and then. Still, if poetry is being written and being read now more than ever, it must be because it fulfills a profound need. Where else but in poems would these Americans, who unlike their neighbors seem unwilling to seek salvation in church, convey their human predicament? Where else would they find a community of likeminded souls who care about something Emily Dickinson or Billy Collins has written? If I were asked to sum up my experience as the poet laureate, I would say, there’s nothing more interesting or more hopeful about America than its poetry.

Raoul Wallenberg; drawing by David Levine

The fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic young Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews before he was arrested by the Soviets in Budapest in early 1945, is one of the great unresolved mysteries of World War II. For decades, the official story from Moscow has been that Wallenberg died in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison on July 17, 1947—two and a half years after he was captured. But many questions have surrounded that story, and now the Russians themselves have come up with startling new information suggesting that Wallenberg did not die on that date.

The new information appears in an 8-page letter from FSB (Federal Security Service) archivists to a pair of U.S.-based researchers, Susanne Berger and Vadim Birstein, who have been working on the case for years. In the letter, the FSB reveals that Wallenberg was “in all likelihood” the “prisoner number 7” who was interrogated in Lubyanka for sixteen hours on July 23, 1947, along with his driver in Budapest, Vilmos Langfelder, and Langfelder’s cellmate, Sandor Katona (both Hungarians). If the FSB is right, this is, first of all, a chilling admission that Wallenberg was subject to far more abuse than previously thought: it was known that he had been interrogated by the Soviets, but not in this extreme way; we can only imagine what he must have suffered at the hands of his brutal NKGB interrogators—and they were notoriously brutal—during that sixteen-hour session. More importantly, it also means that Wallenberg was still alive six days after July 17.

Why does this matter? Above all, as Susanne Berger told me, it re-opens the Wallenberg case by raising new possibilities about his fate. Wallenberg could have been killed immediately after (or during) his July 23 interrogation or he could have been kept in severe isolation in Lubyanka for several months and then executed. Another possibility is that he was sentenced and transferred to a distant prison, such as Vladimir, 250 kilometers east of Moscow, where quite a few witnesses said they met or heard of Raoul Wallenberg after 1947. Also, the new FSB evidence strongly suggests that—contrary to what the Russians have long maintained—documents related to Wallenberg still exist in the Russian archives. It may well be possible to determine, once and for all, the truth about his fate.

Several years ago I wrote a piece about Wallenberg for the New York Review, in which I discussed the findings of the Swedish-Russian Working Group on Raoul Wallenberg after the Russian archives first became accessible in the 1990s. Back in 1957 Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had handed over to Swedish authorities a report signed by a Lubyanka prison doctor, stating that Wallenberg had suffered a fatal heart attack on July 17, 1947. But documents released from the Russian archives in the 1990s suggested that the heart attack never occurred and the doctor’s report was a cover-up. If Wallenberg had indeed died on July 17—the Russians insisted on this date, while the Swedes and independent experts for the working group remained unconvinced—it was probably by murder.

Until recently Russian archival officials claimed there were no more relevant documents on Wallenberg to be found, and the Swedish government stopped pressing the Russians for answers. But Wallenberg’s half-brother, Guy von Dardel (who died last year) and several other researchers who took part in the working group, including Berger and Birstein, insisted that the Russians were holding back key evidence. In 2001—inspired in part by von Dardel’s unflagging efforts to find out what happened to his brother—Berger and Birstein began corresponding with the officials who run the FSB archives about some of the unresolved questions.

Over much of the past decade, little progress was made. But in January 2009, a top FSB archival official, Vasily Khristoforov, suddenly admitted—in a long article in the Russian daily Vremia Novostei—that important questions about Wallenberg remained unanswered: Why did the Soviet special services need Wallenberg? What were the circumstances of his imprisonment? And, finally, how and when did he die? In stressing that the case was by no means closed, Khristoforov seemed to suggest that more information was forthcoming. That information came in late 2009, when the FSB sent the 8-page letter to Berger and Birstein. (Although the letter was delivered to the researchers via the Swedish Embassy in Moscow last November, they kept it under wraps until late March of this year; before going public they wanted to study its contents and ask for further clarifications from the FSB archivists, as yet unanswered.) Why did the FSB reverse its position and raise the curtain, if only slightly, on a murky episode of the Stalin era?

Igor Gavrilov/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

An interrogation room inside Lubyanka prison, which was housed inside the old KGB headquarters, Moscow, November 1, 1991

The FSB would not take such a significant step in the Wallenberg case without the approval of the Russian leadership. It is probably no coincidence that the FSB’s revelation about Wallenberg has been followed by the Kremlin’s recent recognition of the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 members of the Polish armed forces. In addition to allowing a Polish documentary about this terrible Soviet atrocity to be shown on Russian state television, the Russian government has for the first time acknowledged the historical significance of Katyn, in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s comments at the 70th anniversary commemoration of the massacre in early April. (A subsequent event, that was to have involved the Polish and Russian presidents, was horrifically overshadowed by the crash of the Polish delegation’s plane, though there is some hope that the tragedy will result in stronger Polish-Russian relations.)

Given the Kremlin’s blatant disregard for historical truth about the Soviet era, especially since Putin became president in 2000, this openness comes as a surprise. As recently as September 2007, at Putin’s behest, then FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev handed over purported archival documents on Wallenberg to the Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berel Lazar, for inclusion in a proposed Museum of Tolerance. Among the documents was the fake report saying Wallenberg had died of a heart attack.

The motivations behind the Kremlin’s recent shift remain unclear: perhaps it wants to obtain economic concessions from Europe, or perhaps there is a broader recognition by Russian leaders that coming clean about the Stalin period will bring them respect from the West and make it easier to advance Russian foreign policy aims. But surely the documentation about Prisoner No. 7 in the interrogation register did not appear out of the blue; there should be a larger file. And if Wallenberg was ultimately sent to a prison away from Moscow, there might be documentation in the archives of the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs). It’s time for the Swedish government (and perhaps the Americans and other Western leaders) to press the Kremlin leadership directly for answers.

After the second televised prime ministerial debate
, Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats continue to run neck-and-neck in opinion polls with David Cameron’s Conservatives, with Gordon Brown and Labour in third place.

This interesting, but not entirely unexpected, turn of events has little to do with Clegg’s personal charisma or a sudden rush of popular enthusiasm for Lib Dem policies, like their strong support for Britain’s membership of the EU, their redistributionist tax schemes (among other measures, they’d raise the basic tax threshold to £10,000 per annum and slap a “mansion tax” on houses worth more than £2m), and their championing of civil liberties against New Labour’s increased use of extended detention without trial and mass surveillance. Polling suggests that most Britons are either lukewarm about the Lib Dem proposals or don’t know what they are. Their enthusiasm for Clegg, and their seeming readiness to vote Lib Dem on May 6, has another likely explanation.

Most commentators have pointed to the great parliamentary expenses scandal of last spring as the “cause” of the present mood of distrust and contempt for politicians in general. But it was not the cause so much as the convenient catalyst for a breaking wave of fury that had been building in strength from around the midpoint of Tony Blair’s second term in office (2001-2005). The huge unpopularity of the 2003 Iraq invasion (supported by the Conservatives, but opposed by the Lib Dems), followed by the bursting of the property bubble and the steep rise of unemployment and home foreclosures that came with deepening recession, had turned British voters against their political class long before the Telegraph got hold of its bootleg disk of MPs’ claims on their allowances.

When the scandal broke in April, it seemed to ratify everyone’s worst opinion of parliamentarians—that they were all in it for themselves, all had their snouts in the same trough, and none were to be trusted with running the country. Timing was everything. The story happened to come out when Britain was enduring the worst of the recession, when people were baying for a scapegoat to blame for their shuttered businesses and underwater mortgages, and MPs as a class became that useful animal, and more easily targeted than the hated bankers. On May 14, 2009, in Question Time with David Dimbleby, broadcast from Grimsby, the audience treated the politicians on stage as if they were miscreants on exhibition in the village stocks. Interestingly, the then leader of the Lib Dems, Sir Menzies Campbell, was treated with as much disrespect as his fellows.

The expenses scandal was clearly a cathartic moment for the electorate, the perfect opportunity to put MPs in their place, take them down a peg, and tell them what’s what in no uncertain terms. The May 6 election seems to present just such another opportunity. When Brown and Cameron agreed to allow Nick Clegg to make a threesome in their debates, they can’t have foreseen what now look like the inevitable consequences. For as soon as Clegg appeared at his own lectern, on an equal footing with Brown and Cameron, British voters appeared to scent a fresh catharsis in the immediate offing.

Clegg’s great attraction in the first debate was that he managed to look and sound like a disgruntled voter when he said, “Don’t let them tell you that the only choice is between two old parties that have been playing pass the parcel with your government for 65 years now, making the same old promises, breaking the same old promises,” and, of Brown and Cameron, “The more they attack each other, the more they sound exactly the same.” In the second debate, he maintained his edge by playing the part of the man of practical common sense, sandwiched (literally, for this time he stood at the center lectern) between two tiresome, warring ideologues. It’s a role at which he is surprisingly good. Though, like Cameron, he comes from a rich family and was privately educated, Clegg’s accent is mongrel-London and his pleasant face looks more fils du peuple than to-the-manor-born. His great strength is that he comes off as entirely inoffensive; decent, knowledgeable, articulate without being dangerously eloquent or witty, bright but not brilliant, telegenic but not a natural star. Eight days of national fame have led to a rash of silly comparisons with Obama, which, I think, miss the whole point of Nick Clegg, one of whose chief merits, to the skeptical British eye, is that he is no Obama.

Clegg and the Lib Dems give the electorate the chance to teach the British parliament a lesson that it won’t forget. It’s no wonder that support seems to be draining from the odious British National Party and the eccentric, noisy United Kingdom Independence Party, for protest has found a more effective way of registering its dissent—by hanging parliament, as if by the neck. On the BBC election website, there’s an interactive toy, the Election Seat Calculator, with which one can (crudely) translate votes into seats. On April 23, the day after the second debate, the “poll of polls” gave the Lib Dems 30 per cent, Conservatives 33 per cent, Labour 27 per cent, and Others (including the Scottish and Welsh nationalists) 10 per cent. According to Britain’s first past the post system—which essentially negates Lib Dem votes in Labour and Conservative strongholds, provided the incumbent party still wins those constituencies—this would work out as 261 seats for Labour, 258 for the Conservatives, 102 for the Lib Dems, and 10 for Others—a result manifestly unfair (the party with the fewest votes takes the most seats), but also pretty satisfying if you are, as Britain is now, in a plague-on-all-their-houses mood. It will give politicians of the three biggest parties a blinding headache, and by doing so it will assure an angry and cynical electorate that this time it has managed to pull off something really big at the ballot box.

PS: Over the weekend of April 24-25, half a dozen polls showed a slight decrease in support for Clegg and the Lib Dems, and a corresponding rise in support for Cameron and the Conservatives. Impossible to tell yet whether this is a blip or a serious augury. Some commentators are saying that Clegg’s moment of glory has likely peaked, others that his souffle-like rise is showing the first signs of collapse. The reliable go-to site on new polls and their interpretation is Anthony Wells’s UK Polling Report.

In reporting on the two million people who have fled Iraq since 2003, Alisa Roth and I have been struck by the extent to which their experiences have eluded visualization. Unlike during other refugee crises, we have seen no columns of people on foot pushing their belongings in carts and wheelbarrows; no large camps with blue UN tents; no legions of starving, half-naked children gathered in dusty rural terrain. Instead, hundreds of thousands of ordinary, middle-class men and women—educated city-dwellers like ourselves—have fled from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities to similarly anonymous urban areas outside the country.

Perhaps because of this disconcerting ordinariness, the plight of Iraqi refugees has been a seemingly intractable subject for photojournalists; and the crisis has been all too easily overlooked by the press—despite the fact that the departure of Iraq’s secular urban elite may be one of the most devastating and lasting consequences of the war. Yet a few, including the Czech-American photographer Gabriela Bulisova and the Swiss-based Afghan photographer Zalmaï, both of whose images appear in our Review article, have been able to overcome this challenge. Some of Bulisova’s imaginative photo documentations of Iraqis who have been resettled in the United States—many of them struggling to get by—are now on view at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts.

Zalmaï, whose recent, aptly titled collection, Silent Exodus, depicts Iraqi exiles who are stuck in the Middle East, offers powerful insight into these people’s uprooted lives—and their often remarkable efforts to cope with a situation that has no obvious end. The photographs in Silent Exodus were taken in 2007, during a series of trips Zalmaï made to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, the three leading destinations for fleeing Iraqis. Pairing a series of portraits of families and individuals with brief first-person accounts of the events that caused each to leave, Zalmaï’s book, though slender, gets close to a number of the social and psychological effects of exile and the traumas that lead to it. “The basis of society in Iraq has been destroyed: there are no more teachers and judges,” a former schoolteacher tells Zalmaï. Taking the picture from above, Zalmaï shows the man’s reduced existence: he is sitting in a small, barren room in Damascus, his well-tailored shirt—a habit of an earlier life—clashing with the ratty towel behind him apparently standing in for a curtain and his head-in-hands despair.

Three generations of Iraqi women now living in the United States; photograph by Gabriela Bulisova from the exhibition The Option of Last Resort

In one image, a woman, evidently engrossed in the experiences she is relating, stares large-eyed at the wall—seeming to relive her shock—as she recalls the violence that forced her to abandon her country. Another portrait, among the most horrific in the series, shows a small, unclothed boy lacerated with burns suffered when his house was bombed; his father, who is holding him, has taken him to Amman in hopes of getting him medical treatment. But as with many of the Iraqis we met who survive in Jordan’s underground economy, they are afraid they will be sent back to Iraq. “I don’t dare go outside for fear of deportation,” the father says.

Yet the cumulative tragedy of these portraits is balanced by an equally forceful current of resilience that runs through many of them. An Iraqi woman, hanging laundry in a dingy airshaft in Syria, looks up almost joyfully at the shafts of light that have managed to penetrate this dark corner; a young boy watches with rapt fascination as a man works with a hammer and water sprayer—industriousness somehow persevering despite unemployment and (as we often found among the Iraqis we met in Jordan) lack of access to school; a girl in a dark Damascus apartment leaps into the air with such glowing force that the somber Iraqis watching her and the peeling room they are in seem almost to dissolve around her.

Indeed, we encountered numerous Iraqis in Jordan and elsewhere who had, notwithstanding the squalor of their surroundings, kept their clothes perfectly pressed and retained small things—a bouquet of plastic flowers, a cracked mirror, a framed photograph—as a way of holding on to some semblance of the life they had known. Conveying this with particular poignance, perhaps, is Zalmaï’s arresting portrait of an elegant middle-aged couple, both winsome and finely groomed, sitting together on a small couch: a composition infused with dignity and careful decorum. Yet on closer inspection, the man is missing his right arm, and their anxious faces are filled with resignation to a life of uncertainty, completely cut off from the world they knew.

Zalmaï’s collection of photographs, Silent Exodus: Portraits of Iraqi Refugees in Exile, is published by Aperture, with an introduction by Khaled Hosseini. Gabriela Bulisova’s photographs can be seen in the exhibition The Option of Last Resort: Iraqi Refugees in the United States, at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts through May 30, 2010.

Toni Bentley, age 16, in Paquita

“Doctor, I want my hip bone.”

Doctor Padgett did a double take.

“I want my bone, you know, what you’ll be taking out.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, “you’ll have to talk to pathology about that.”

Down the hall, the pathologist said sure. A couple of weeks after surgery you can have it. (First they would have to conduct the routine tests on any newly removed body part.)

They both asked me the same question: “Why?” I wasn’t sure, I just knew I wanted it. Perhaps I didn’t want to part with the part of me that had caused me the most pain without having a final word.

So I got the OK. That and the promise of a small—well, smallish—incision, and I agreed after more than two decades of delay to go under the knife with the hope of trading more pain for less. Though being a ballet dancer, it really wasn’t to lessen the physical pain that I finally decided to have my hip replaced. It was because of the increasing loss of mobility. Life was getting smaller, and my hip was starting to rule.

At the age of twenty-three when I was dancing for Balanchine in the New York City Ballet, I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my right hip while on tour in Europe. It all began when I couldn’t swoop my right leg up to the side during the opening minutes of Serenade one night at Tivoli. After many exams and X-rays I got one of those “Honey, sit down, it’s all over, your career is finished” talks from the company orthopedist. Needless to say I did not obey, though I did have to go to bed for three months to allow the inflammation to subside. A year later, with the help of Indocin and daily physical therapy, I got back on stage and danced for another eighteen months. But then other injuries, the body’s compensation, started adding up and I knew the time had come.

I stopped dancing, but refused to give up my hip. It was my battle wound, proof of having attained victory over that great defiant physical act upon which all classical ballet is delicately perched: turn-out. (Contrary to common belief, true turn-out—the outward rotation of the legs so that the knees and are pointing in 180 degree opposition—is a pivoting in the hip socket, not in the knees or feet.) One of the many ironies is that I lost the ability to turn-in: I was trapped turned-out. Ha! I suppose I thought that in keeping the bone after it was removed I was losing less somehow.

Not a very appropriate fear for a ballerina, for whom dancing is, by definition, a conscious act of loss. A ballet dancer goes onstage on a given night, in a specific theater, in a specific ballet and executes, in a specific fraction of musical time a movement that is already past just as it appears. And it takes far more than 10,000 hours of practice and repetition to make this movement exquisite, worthy. A dancer’s entire career consists of these moments of non-existence; they are not even fleeting, they are, somehow, never there at all, a shadow in someone else’s mind at best.

I first realized this at age seventeen, having already focused thirteen years on the pursuit of this particular kind of beauty. I had just been chosen by Balanchine to join his company, and when finally dancing his ballets on his stage, the real task at hand became apparent. I feared not having the courage to endure this kind of transience—this was spiritual work of a very high order; the physical work paled beside it. Terror sent me into a kind of scribbling frenzy in an attempt to salvage myself from what felt like complete extinction. (Surely dancing is the saddest of the arts in its fragility—for architects, sculptures, painters, writers, composers, musicians, actors, their work resides legitimately outside themselves. Not so dancers. And don’t talk to me about the two-dimensional horrors of video and DVDs!)

So now, decades later, I envisioned a parched white Georgia O’Keefe bone, my eroded femur head, on a shelf in my house, a fossil, evidence of those millions of lost moments dancing, now solid, externalized. Proof. (Of what? God knows.)

Two weeks after surgery, as promised, Mrs. Wong, my doctor’s office manager, called to say my bone was back from pathology and ready for pick up. Well, the Georgia O’Keefe fantasy quickly vanished. Sitting on Mrs. Wong’s desk in an opaque quart-sized Tupperware container with a crooked orange hand-written label were pieces of something floating in formaldehyde. She handed it to me, and suggested that if I was taking it on the airplane to California I should put it in my checked luggage so as to not concern security with the “What is THAT?” question, not to mention the liquid it was in.

Once back from the hospital I gingerly opened the container: nothing in there looked remotely like anything from an anatomy book. Now, Mrs. Wong had also told me that if I wanted to preserve my “souvenir” on dry land I needed to have a taxidermist extract the fatty tissues from the bone so it wouldn’t go rancid. One hundred thousand dollars of medical bills and I still needed a taxidermist.

Back in Los Angeles I let the Tupperware sit in its cocoon of bubblewrap in the corner of my dining room bureau for several weeks. Finally I Googled “taxidermists Los Angeles” and came up with several places. Game Master Taxidermy was the one closest to me. It was already 10 p.m. but I thought I’d call and see what information the recording would give me about hours and parking.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said.

“Oh, er, ah, sorry, ah—is this the taxidermist? I thought you’d be closed…”

“Yeah, this is the taxidermist and yeah we’re closed.” Images of him in some dark workshop drying out the dead late into the night came to mind. I explained that I needed my recently removed hip bone “treated” in some fashion. He warmed up a little. It was illegal, he explained, for him to have human bones on his premises—at least the kind that are free-floating. “But I can tell you what to do. It’s very easy,” he said cheerfully.

Here’s the recipe he gave me:

1. Boil bones on the stove in plenty of water for one hour.
2. Drain and soak in cold water for 30 minutes.
3. Soak in a solution of 50 percent bleach, 50 percent water for twenty minutes.
4. Let dry outside in the sun

Well, I’d come this far and I wasn’t going to stop now. But, what if, as they came to a boil, there was a smell? By now I had realized that step one was the same as making chicken broth and I wondered if I should have added a carrot and celery stick, a bay leaf and some whole peppercorns like my mother did. Human broth. What if my cats started yowling like they do when they smell chicken broth? But, I reasoned, I am not a chicken—and I wasn’t going to avoid smelling it. It was a rare opportunity. I stuck my nose into the pot like Julia Child and inhaled deeply. The aroma was mild and, well, not so bad.

As directed, I drained the pot into a colander observing, I’m proud to report, very little fat on the surface of the liquid. Less than with a chicken. And no, I didn’t save the broth. I’m not crazy.

There on the bottom of my red plastic colander that had held so many strands of pasta was my hip. Sort of. This was the first time I had really seen the pieces not submerged in liquid. I had to look in brief flashes to get used to it. There was me, the inside on the outside, and it sure didn’t look pretty. I had hoped to see the arthritis that had caused the end of my dance career at an age young even for a dancer. I wanted to confront the enemy and see that it was real. Even now, all these years later, I still think I should have been able to cure my injury, alleviate the pain and increase my motion with enough sleep, steak, cod liver oil, time, acupuncture, physical therapy, and Pilates. Like a child, I thought my bad hip was my fault. I wanted to face it now, to confirm somehow that I could not, with all the will in the world, have overcome it and danced again.

So there it was, the femur head in two halves (pathology had cut it in half). But there were numerous other pieces, bits, God knows what. Yuck. Maybe the bleach would, at least, turn everything white, purify it. It didn’t. And neither did the sun.

I have since brought my bones inside. I’m no longer scared of them, just curious. They simply don’t make any sense. I can look at my X-ray and see what got taken out but there are many rough, asymmetrical, curved, chunky, twisted, strange pieces that don’t fit. When I showed them to Dr. Padgett during a check-up back in New York (yes, I packed them up and took them on the plane back East again) he wrinkled his nose and drew back—not exactly how you want your surgeon to react to your insides, especially the parts he removed himself. He shrugged and said he had no idea what they were. Jeez. Then he explained that the smooth, mottled, marble-colored side of the femur head, the only part of the bone that was beautiful to me, was the “arthritis,” meaning the place where the cartilage was gone entirely: arthritis is an absence—pure, smoothed-down bone surface. Inside the sliced bone it looked like honeycomb.

Maybe I’ll glue the femur head back together so at least it looks more like a femur head. For now an elastic band holds the two sides as one. But the truth is that all the pieces do not fit together and they never will. I guess they didn’t inside me either. That was the trouble. They sit now in a wooden box that belonged to Balanchine, that he painted himself, that I was given by Father Adrian who buried him. Next to the box, I keep the last pair of pointe shoes I ever wore on stage. The coffin of my career.

Archbishop Romero surrounded by nuns, shortly after being gunned down at Mass, El Salvador, March 24, 1980 (Eulalio Pérez)

I was in Managua, Nicaragua, thirty years ago, recovering from dengue fever, when my editor at The Guardian called from London to say that I should get on the next plane to San Salvador: the Archbishop of El Salvador had been gunned down while saying Mass. I remember laughing at the impossibility of this too literary story—Murder in the Cathedral; of course it wasn’t true!—and then feeling sick. Óscar Arnulfo Romero, a self-effacing, not particularly articulate, stubborn man, who insisted every day on decrying the violence and terror that ruled his country, was, after all, the hierarch of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He had all the weight of the Vatican behind him, and the natural respect of even the most right-wing zealot for such a holy office. And then there was the act itself: murder at the most sacred moment of the Catholic Mass. Who, in such a Catholic country, would dare to violate the transubstantiation of Christ’s body?

But of course the story was true. At around 6:30 PM on Monday, March 24, 1980, a red VW Passat drove up to the small, graceful chapel of the Divina Providencia Hospital, a center run by Carmelite nuns where Romero lived. It was, as it almost always is in San Salvador, a hot day, and the wing-shaped chapel’s doors were open. As Romero, standing at the altar, prepared to raise the host for consecration, a tall, thin bearded man in the passenger seat of the VW raised an assault rifle and fired a single .22 bullet into the archbishop’s heart. Then, in no particular hurry, the car drove away. A grainy black-and-white photograph from that day shows the victim on the floor. As Romero’s heart pumps out the last of its blood, the white-coiffed nuns gather around him like the points of a star, or like the figures at the feet of the Christ in Rennaissance murals, which were intended simultaneously as representations and as prayers.

Historical turning points are so often the result of stupidity. The Sandinista Revolution, which had triumphed in Nicaragua barely eight months before, had set the dream of revolution flaring across Central America. But Romero’s murder, and the mayhem and bloodshed set off by a sharpshooter at his funeral the following Saturday, were perhaps the immediate sparks for the bloody twelve-year civil war that started just months later, with the US providing financial and military backing to the government side. It is hard to overstate how fervently the campesinos of El Salvador believed in Romero. When he was gone, entire villages placed themselves at the disposal of the now united guerrilla factions.

Archbishop Romero made a long journey to arrive at his death. Hardworking and conscientious, he rose through the ranks and eventually became bishop of the rural province of San Miguel, maintaining all the while a strict distance from Liberation Theology and what he called the left’s “mysticism of violence.” By then, however, the insistent defense of human rights by the new generation of radicalized priests and nuns, and the murderous government’s determination to violate those rights, particularly in the case of the landless peasantry, had created a small army of conscripts for the guerrilla organizations, which promised an equal and just world order born of socialist revolution.

During the presidency of General Arturo Molina (1972–1977), the army and security forces were essentially transformed into death squads: Romero watched in horror as campesinos in his parish were displaced, threatened, terrorized, and, increasingly, shot, stabbed, or hacked to death by underfed, underage soldiers wielding machetes against their own kind. He began speaking out against these atrocities and received his first death threat (from General Molina himself, who wagged a finger at him and warned that cassocks were not bullet-proof). And then, in 1977, just weeks after Romero had been ordained archbishop, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, a close friend of Romero’s who had been organizing landless peasants, was shot down on a country road along with two of his parishoners.

Romero with seminarians, undated (Photography Center
of El Salvador)

All Romero’s contradictory feelings about Church and duty, repression and human dignity, his native distrust of radicalism and politics, his caution and, no doubt, his fear, appear to have resolved themselves at that moment. With the same methodical determination that seems to have characterized his rise to the archbishopry, he spent the next three years organizing human rights watchdog groups, asking President Jimmy Carter to suspend military aid to the murderous junta, and speaking out—plainly, but never unreasonably—against the government. “It is sad to read that in El Salvador the two main causes of death are: first diarrhea, and second murder,” he would say. “Therefore, right after the result of malnourishment; diarrhea, we have the result of crime; murder. These are the two epidemics that are killing off our people.”

Around this time, I made many trips to the countryside. But it was only two years later, after Romero’s funeral had dissolved into grim chaos, that I had my first real understanding of the feudal ignorance in which Salvadoran campesinos were kept. As red-robed cardinals from abroad milled around the vast unfinished cathedral together with humble worshipers who had lost their shoes, their false-teeth, their satchels or their eyeglasses in the stampede to escape from a sniper’s bullets, everyone trying to understand what had happened, and why, a tiny, trembling man approached my friend, the photographer Pedro Valtierra. “Please, my daughter’s lost.” he said, and then he repeated several times, until we understood: “Please use your loudspeaker to call out her name.” He was pointing to Valtierra’s camera.

Those were the days before the Internet or even faxes, and the lone opposition newspaper, El Independiente, was more or less gagged. The murders and disappearances carried out by death squads, army officers, and a notorious security force called, for inexplicable reasons, the Treasury Police were unreported, but Romero took to reading a detailed account of the week’s brutalities. The sermons were broadcast over the Catholic radio station, and campesinos all over the country gathered around a radio to listen to them. So did the military.

The once conservative archbishop, who had been trained and nurtured not in his homeland but in Rome, became the government’s most visible opponent. Later he would say that when he stood on the dirt road where Father Rutilio Grande had been murdered and contemplated his friend’s corpse, he thought, “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.”

Thanks to an extraordinary reportage posted last month on the Salvadoran online newspaper El Faro we know that the tall, skinny shooter who killed Romero was contracted by General Arturo Molina’s son, while the weapon and the getaway car were provided by the drinking buddies and death squad associates of a former Army major called Roberto D’Aubuisson. Not that anyone doubted from the moment it happened that the murder was D’Aubuisson’s work. He died of cancer of the esophagus at the age of forty-seven, in 1992, but while he lived, this slender, charismatic psychopath was king. Although he was briefly arrested, he was never tried for murder, and soon rose to become the head of the Constituent Assembly; he was defeated only narrowly when he ran for President in 1984. Until last year, the party he founded, which had its origins in the death squad he also put together, governed El Salvador.

Over a two-year period El Faro’s director, Carlos Dada, hunted down and twice interviewed one of the surviving participants in D’Aubuisson’s conspiracy against the Archbishop, a former Air Force pilot by the name of Álvaro Saravia. Four other alleged co-conspirators named by Saravia have been killed, another committed suicide. Some, like, Mario Molina, son of former President Arturo Molina, are enjoying the good life, but Saravia, pursued by his own demons, is living in abject poverty in another Latin American country not disclosed in the newspaper’s report. Perhaps out of sheer loneliness, he told his story to El Faro.

Saravia recounts the details about the hit man and Mario Molina’s role in hiring him. He also reveals that an announcement placed in La Prensa Grafica by Jorge Pinto, the owner of the independent newspaper El Independiente, inadvertently sealed Romero’s fate. Published on the morning of March 24, it informed readers that the archbishop would celebrate a Mass in memory of Pinto’s mother at 6 PM that afternoon, in the Divina Providencia chapel. Hung over after a party with other members of D’Aubuisson’s group, Saravia woke to the news that the boss had ordered Romero’s murder at this conveniently secluded location.

Karol Wojtyla had just been annointed pope at the time of Romero’s murder, and with the assistance of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger he was busy dismantling the progressive church of Latin America. Pope John Paul II’s response to the crime—he called it “a tragedy”—was hardly as emphatic as his attacks on the pro-Sandinista clergy when he visited Nicaragua four years later. A spontaneous movement in favor of Romero’s canonization has been stalled for years now in Rome.

But for the Church rank-and-file Romero has become an extraordinarily meaningful figure, as a quick Internet search of his name can attest. We can find evidence of this in yet another work intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his death: a documentary film, Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero, directed by Ana Carrigan and Juliet Weber, and produced by the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame, a Jesuit university. The film is, unintentionally perhaps, or at least effortlessly, a hagiography, a record of a saintly life. It is an astonishing compilation of footage from the last three years of Romero’s life, not only of the archbishop himself but of army patrols and mothers of the disappeared and guerrillas on the move—and above all of those unforgettable Masses in which the small, unprepossessing archbishop read out loud the record of the government’s atrocities while hundreds of ragged, persecuted campesinos listened in gratitude, their existence and suffering recognized at last.

I interviewed Romero two or three times before he died, and although I cannot locate any of my notebooks from those dreadful years, I have the distinct recollection that he did not say anything particularly scintillating or inspirational or visionary: he was deeply distrustful of rhetoric and purposefully self-effacing. Instead of words I have the memory of a peculiar ducking gesture he used to make with his head when, after Sunday Mass, he stood outside the Cathedral doors shaking hands with every single one of the knobby-jointed, malnourished campesinos who came from miles away to hear him, a few coins knotted into their handkerchiefs for the journey back. They would clasp his hand and stare into his face and try to say something about what he meant to them, and he would duck his head and look away: not me, not me.

Nuns leaving the cathedral after the funeral of Romero, El Salvador, March 30, 1980 (Harry Mattison)

The day before his murder, on Sunday March 23, after the long dreadful months in which four American churchwomen had been killed, and a cropduster had sprayed insecticide on a protest demonstration, and we reporters had gone nearly mad from the obligation to hunt every morning for the mutilated corpses that D’Aubuisson’s people had left at street corners the night before, and distraught mothers lined up every day outside the archbishopry’s legal aid office asking for help in finding their disappeared children, and the waking nightmare of El Salvador clamored to the very heavens for justice, Óscar Arnulfo Romero for the first time spoke in exclamation points during his Sunday homily.

I want to make a special request to the men in the armed forces: brothers, we are from the same country, yet you continually kill your peasant brothers. Before any order given by a man, the law of God must prevail: “You shall not kill!”… In the name of God I pray you, I beseech you, I order you! Let this repression cease!

The next day he was shot.

Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero, a film directed by Ana Carrigan and Juliet Weber.

Scott Rudd

Marina Abramović performing The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010

At ten o’clock on a recent weekday morning, when the crowds were let in the door and up the stairs to the big hall on the second floor of MoMA, Marina Abramović was already seated in the center of a space that had been cordoned off by lines on the floor, strong lights making it seem like a movie set. She was wearing an immensely dramatic flowing red dress. Her black hair was in a single plait which folded around her left shoulder. She had her back to the stairs. She would not move from her own chair, not once, not even to eat or go to the bathroom, while the museum stayed open. In front of her was a small simple table and an empty chair, a line forming to take the seat facing her.

I was second in the line. The woman in front of me seemed nervous as more people joined the line behind us. By ten thirty there were more than twenty people waiting to sit on that chair opposite Abramović. Many others stood around and watched.

Marina Abramović’s eyes were closed and her head was down. She was like a figure praying or in a state of concentrated reverie. The effect, the pose, was from a painting in its designed, self-conscious stillness rather than a moment in opera or the theatre. As the woman who was first in the line approached and sat down, Abramović did not move; she let a few seconds linger. And then she lifted her head and opened her eyes.

She seemed immensely weary. The gaze was of someone who has been gazing too much into too many faces. But it was not tired; it was fully alive, alert to itself and the light and the still drama of the occasion. She did not do much more than gaze, allowing very little variation in the intensity of the look. Sometimes she blinked. That was all. I watched from a distance and waited.

And then it was my turn. I had been told by one of the guards to let ten seconds or so pass before I approached. During this time, Abramović put her head down once more and closed her eyes. I had been seated for something like half a minute when she lifted her head and looked at me. The gaze now, from this closer perspective, was more sorrowful, but it was also oddly noble and grand. And it was concentrated. She was looking at me and at me only.

I knew not to speak or move or make any gesture. I tried to soften my own gaze, which had been too concentrated and sharp to begin with, and I was curious to know if she would notice this, or do anything with her own gaze in return, but she did not. The lights caught her left eye in two points, but later only in one point, which means she must have moved her head slightly, but I did not see her doing this. The other eye seemed dead, or deadened in comparison. Her nose was strong, her lips full.

It was important, I thought, to do the gazing as intelligently as possible. I knew that she would not smile, or descend into shyness. She would only look. And I had permission to look at her looking all day if I liked. Despite the line of people waiting, there was no time limit on how long I could stay in this chair.

It was like being brought into a room in Enniscorthy when I was a child on the day after a neighbour had died and being allowed to look at the corpse’s face. You studied Abramović’s face with the same mystified intensity, as though it would yield something—not come alive exactly, but in its very stillness offer something, an image maybe, that you should know and remember.

The gazing came in waves. Sometimes it was easy to relax and just look, and blink when you had to, and then look harder. She was always looking directly at your eyes. Her face was not like a mask. Just as the face of someone who has recently died can seem to flicker or move, so too her face seemed at times infinitely suggestive and vulnerable. But it was also sexual, sensuous, spiritual, and that made me both fascinated and uncomfortable. It made me feel that I could spend the day there opposite her, and maybe the next day too, and it also made me want to go, it made me consider at what point I would leave.

As soon as I began to think over my options, I forced myself to look at her more closely. I had no clear idea what she was thinking but she was doing a good imitation of someone gazing in the most serious way at someone else, like a painter might gaze in that second before applying the brush to the canvas, or like the sitter in turn might gaze at the painter. Or like we should look at paintings ourselves, or at things we believe in. Whatever she was doing, Abramović was causing a line of energy that made laughter, mockery, irony into matters that were beside the point.

This was serious, too serious maybe, too intimate, too searching. It was either, I felt, what I should do all the time, or what I should never do. I wondered if I should go. I tried to look at her harder, I tried to get more from my gaze and from hers. She did not change. Eventually, I bowed to her and turned away from her. She put her head down again and closed her eyes and awaited her next visitor. My stay had lasted twenty minutes.

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present is on view until May 31 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

Pope Benedict XVI celebrating Mass, Floriana, Malta, April 18, 2010

Charges and counter-charges are swirling around the Catholic church. Newspaper articles have raised questions about how much Pope Benedict XVI knew about particular cases and the ways in which he himself dealt with abusers. No one can predict what will happen as more cases come to light and more victims tell their stories. But it’s worth stepping back, for a moment, and remembering that Benedict is probably the greatest scholar to rule the church since Innocent III, the brilliant jurist who served from 1198 to 1216. He knows how to wield all the tools of historical research and theological and exegetical argument. No one has studied the development and meaning of the Catholic liturgy with more care and precision, or performs Mass more beautifully. His rich sense of the value of tradition—and the way it develops over time—will likely determine his response to the current crisis.

The Pope’s thinking about the Church and its relation to the faithful emerges clearly in his eloquent apostolic letter Summorum pontificum, issued in 2007, in which he specified the rules for celebrating the Tridentine (Latin) mass. There he explains that

the sacred liturgy, celebrated according to the Roman use, enriched not only the faith and piety but also the culture of many peoples. It is known, in fact, that the Latin liturgy of the Church in its various forms, in each century of the Christian era, has been a spur to the spiritual life of many saints, has reinforced many peoples in the virtue of religion and made their piety bear fruit.

The Church brings the means of devotion to its people—even to its saints.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope served as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Office). In this capacity he maintained a strict eye on the orthodoxy of Catholic theologians. He showed notable severity towards Leonardo Boff and other representatives of Latin American Liberation Theology. Among many other duties, he also oversaw the papacy’s dealings with priests accused of sexual abuse. As Prefect he cultivated a fierce clarity about what is, and what is not, Catholic doctrine, and what distinguishes Catholicism from other religions and other forms of Christianity.

The pope is capable of showing equal clarity when dealing with scandalous violations of the rules that govern priestly conduct. For years, accusations of abusing teenage boys swirled around Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legion of Christ and a special favorite of John Paul II. His privileged position, and wads of cash, kept him safe. In 2004, however, the then Cardinal Ratzinger reopened an investigation of Maciel and ordered a Vatican official to interview Legionaries and alleged victims of abuse worldwide. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “asked” Maciel “to retire to a private life of penance and prayer, giving up any form of public ministry.” (In late March, the Legionaries of Christ acknowledged in an unusual public statement that Father Maciel “had fathered a daughter in the context of a prolonged and stable relationship with a woman, and committed other grave acts.”)

Under pressure in recent weeks, the Pope has confessed in general that the church made grave errors, and should “do penance” to address its “sins.” He has also clarified the procedures for reporting accused sexual abusers to the police authorities. On April 17, he travelled to Malta to meet with alleged victims of abuse, and was reportedly tearful in this private encounter, experiencing “shame and sorrow” over what “the victims and their families suffered,” according to a Vatican statement.

Those who want more—who want emotional public scenes of reconciliation with former victims, and a clear, detailed accounting—are not likely to find satisfaction. The Pope seems to have seen priestly abuse of children, for a long time, as an American problem, rather than the general one it clearly is. He still seems to regard journalistic discussions of it as part of a broad, deliberate attack on the Church, a line that his surrogates and some outside defenders have made their own. He responds to accusations defensively, in the first instance, like many long-serving officers in powerful established institutions whose members wear uniforms and live, in some ways, outside the normal social world—think of the armed forces or the police. At bay, as he is now, he has not yet acknowledged, and may never accept, the wisdom that any competent PR consultant would offer: cover-ups are always worse than the crimes they are meant to conceal. Instead, for the most part, he has turned his spikes outward, as hedgehogs do.

That stiffly protective attitude towards the institution helps to explain some of the pope’s past conduct—such as the masterly inactivity with which he greeted pleas from the Oakland Diocese to unfrock a priest who “had been sentenced in 1978 to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco Bay area church rectory.” Ratzinger’s office met a long series of urgent requests from the States with every known bureaucratic delaying tactic, from a claim to have lost the dossier to a Latin letter in which the cardinal, after four years, explained the need for further study and the harm that might be done to the “Universal Church” by releasing so young a priest from his vows. One wonders what exactly was said to Bishop Cummins of Oakland when he visited the Congregation in September 1982.

But that is no reason for Catholics—or non-Catholic admirers of the Church, like the present writer—to despair. Over the centuries, the central institutions of the Church have often worked in counter-productive ways, emphasizing the powers and prerogatives of the institution over the spiritual life of the faithful. Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical church was not providing. Under Innocent III, the Curia crystallized as a superbly effective institution, intent on rights and revenues, rather than tending to the poor and sick who were crowding into Europe’s rapidly growing industrial and trading cities.

But when Francis of Assisi founded an order of men who were willing to give up all they had and minister to the urban poor, and Dominic founded a second one of men dedicated to preaching the truth and rooting out heresies, Innocent III immediately gave both of them vital encouragement. Three centuries later, between 1534 and 1549, a very different pope, the politician and aesthete Paul III, offered warm support when Ignatius Loyola arrived in Rome with a few tattered followers and a plan to preach to former Catholics in Protestant lands and to non-Christians overseas, and when St Angela Merici created a new form of religious life for women.

It seems unlikely that Benedict is the man to transform the Church, so that it freely and frankly confronts what many priests have done to the children in their charge, and what many of their superiors did to conceal their crimes. Still less does he seem likely to remake the church into an institution that not only worships in an orderly, beautiful and theologically clear way, but also ministers to the world as it is now. But he is a great scholar, with a mind as crisp and deep as Innocent’s. He knows that the church, whatever its resources, needs its saints, and has often found them far outside the Curia. History matters to the Pope, and that gives some reason to hope that he is not looking for another Dominic, since he himself has played that role so well, and that he too will recognize the Francis or the Angela Merici of our time when he or she appears before him.

Tony Judt; drawing by David Levine

I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.

I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious. A Protestant who does not believe in the Scriptures, a Catholic who abjures the authority of the Pope in Rome, or a Muslim for whom Muhammad is not the Prophet: these are incoherent categories. But a Jew who rejects the authority of the rabbis is still Jewish (even if only by the rabbis’ own matrilineal definition): who is to tell him otherwise?

I reject the authority of the rabbis—all of them (and for this I have rabbinical authority on my side). I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals. I don’t make a point of socializing with Jews in particular—and for the most part I haven’t married them. I am not a “lapsed” Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don’t “love Israel” (either in the modern sense or in the original generic meaning of loving the Jewish people), and I don’t care if the sentiment is reciprocated. But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise.

The ostensible paradox of this condition is clearer to me since coming to New York: the curiosities of Jewish identity are more salient here. Most American Jews of my acquaintance are not particularly well informed about Jewish culture or history; they are blithely ignorant of Yiddish or Hebrew and rarely attend religious ceremonies. When they do, they behave in ways that strike me as curious.

Shortly after arriving in New York, I was invited to a bar mitzvah. On my way to the synagogue, I realized I had forgotten my hat and returned home to recover it—only to observe that almost no one else covered his head during the brief, exiguous excuse for a religious ceremony. To be sure, this was a “Reform” synagogue and I should have known better: Reform Jews (known in England as “liberals”) have been optionally topless in synagogue for over half a century. All the same, the contrast between unctuous performance of ritual and selective departure from established traditions struck me then and strikes me now as a clue to the compensatory quality of American Jewish identity.

Some years ago I attended a gala benefit dinner in Manhattan for prominent celebrities in the arts and journalism. Halfway through the ceremonies, a middle-aged man leaned across the table and glared at me: “Are you Tony Judt? You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!” Primed for such interrogations, I asked him what was so terrible about what I had written. “I don’t know. You may be right—I’ve never been to Israel. But we Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day.” The return of eliminationist anti-Semitism was just a matter of time: New York might become unlivable.

I find it odd—and told him so—that American Jews should have taken out a territorial insurance policy in the Middle East lest we find ourselves back in Poland in 1942. But even more curious was the setting for this exchange: the overwhelming majority of the awardees that evening were Jewish. Jews in America are more successful, integrated, respected, and influential than at any place or time in the history of the community. Why then is contemporary Jewish identity in the US so obsessively attached to the recollection—and anticipation—of its own disappearance?

Had Hitler never happened, Judaism might indeed have fallen into deliquescence. With the breakdown of Jewish isolation in the course of the later nineteenth century throughout much of Europe, the religious, communitarian, and ritualistic boundaries of Judaism were eroding: centuries of ignorance and mutually enforced separation were coming to a close. Assimilation—by migration, marriage, and cultural dilution—was well underway.

In retrospect, the interim consequences can be confusing. In Germany, many Jews thought of themselves as Germans—and were resented for just that reason. In Central Europe, notably in the unrepresentative urban triangle of Prague-Budapest-Vienna, a secularized Jewish intelligentsia—influential in the liberal professions—established a distinctive basis for postcommunitarian Jewish life. But the world of Kafka, Kraus, and Zweig was brittle: dependent upon the unique circumstances of a disintegrating liberal empire, it was helpless in the face of the tempests of ethnonationalism. For those in search of cultural roots, it offers little beyond regret and nostalgia. The dominant trajectory for Jews in those years was assimilation.

I can see this in my own family. My grandparents came out of the shtetl and into unfriendly alien environments—an experience that temporarily reinforced a defensive Jewish self-awareness. But for their children, those same environments represented normal life. My parents’ generation of European Jews neglected their Yiddish, frustrated the expectations of their immigrant families, and spurned communitarian rituals and restrictions. As late as the 1930s, it was reasonable to suppose that their own children—my generation—would be left with little more than a handful of memories of “the old country”: something like the pasta-and-St.-Patrick’s-Day nostalgia of Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans, and with about as much meaning.

But things turned out differently. A generation of emancipated young Jews, many of whom had fondly imagined themselves fully integrated into a post-communitarian world, was forcibly re-introduced to Judaism as civic identity: one that they were no longer free to decline. Religion—once the foundation of Jewish experience—was pushed ever further to the margin. In Hitler’s wake, Zionism (hitherto a sectarian minority preference) became a realistic option. Jewishness became a secular attribute, externally attributed.

Ever since, Jewish identity in contemporary America has had a curious dybbuk-like quality: it lives on by virtue of a double, near-death experience. The result is a sensitivity to past suffering that can appear disproportionate even to fellow Jews. Shortly after publishing an essay on Israel’s future, I was invited to London for an interview with The Jewish Chronicle—the local Jewish paper of record. I went with trepidation, anticipating further aspersions upon my imperfect identification with the Chosen People. To my surprise, the editor turned off the microphone: “Before we start,” she began, “I’d like to ask you something. How can you stand to live among those awful American Jews?”

And yet, maybe those “awful American Jews” are onto something despite themselves. For what can it mean—following the decline of faith, the abatement of persecution, and the fragmentation of community—to insist upon one’s Jewishness? A “Jewish” state where one has no intention of living and whose intolerant clerisy excludes ever more Jews from official recognition? An “ethnic” membership criterion that one would be embarrassed to invoke for any other purpose?

There was a time when being Jewish was a lived condition. In the US today, religion no longer defines us: just 46 percent of Jews belong to a synagogue, only 27 percent attend at least once a month, and no more than 21 percent of the synagogue members (10 percent of the whole) are Orthodox. In short, the “old believers” are but a minority. Modern-day Jews live on preserved memory. Being Jewish largely consists of remembering what it once meant to be Jewish. Indeed, of all the rabbinical injunctions, the most enduring and distinctive is Zakhor!—Remember! But most Jews have internalized this injunction without any very secure sense of what it requires of them. We are the people who remember… something.

What, then, should we remember? Great-grandma’s latkes back in Pilvistock? I doubt it: shorn of setting and symbols, they are nothing but apple cakes. Childhood tales of Cossack terrors (I recall them well)? What possible resonance could these have to a generation who has never known a Cossack? Memory is a poor foundation for any collective enterprise. The authority of historical injunction, lacking contemporary iteration, grows obscure.

In this sense, American Jews are instinctively correct to indulge their Holocaust obsession: it provides reference, liturgy, example, and moral instruction—as well as historical proximity. And yet they are making a terrible mistake: they have confused a means of remembering with a reason to do so. Are we really Jews for no better reason than that Hitler sought to exterminate our grandparents? If we fail to rise above this consideration, our grandchildren will have little cause to identify with us.

In Israel today, the Holocaust is officially invoked as a reminder of how hateful non-Jews can be. Its commemoration in the diaspora is doubly exploited: to justify uncompromising Israelophilia and to service lachrymose self-regard. This seems to me a vicious abuse of memory. But what if the Holocaust served instead to bring us closer, so far as possible, to a truer understanding of the tradition we evoke?

Here, remembering becomes part of a broader social obligation by no means confined to Jews. We acknowledge readily enough our duties to our contemporaries; but what of our obligations to those who came before us? We talk glibly of what we owe the future—but what of our debt to the past? Except in crassly practical ways—preserving institutions or edifices—we can only service that debt to the full by remembering and conveying beyond ourselves the duty to remember.

Unlike my table companion, I don’t expect Hitler to return. And I refuse to remember his crimes as an occasion to close off conversation: to repackage Jewishness as a defensive indifference to doubt or self-criticism and a retreat into self-pity. I choose to invoke a Jewish past that is impervious to orthodoxy: that opens conversations rather than closes them. Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling: the dafka-like quality of awkwardness and dissent for which we were once known. It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other peoples’ conventions; we should also be the most unforgiving critics of our own. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Toni Avegael was transported to Auschwitz in 1942 and gassed to death there as a Jew. I am named after her.