December 31, 2020
THE APPARATCHIK:
The Secrets John Le Carré Revealed (Brian Phillips Dec 17, 2020, The Ringer)
The Cold War was a conflict staged between grand ideologies but fought by amoral operatives; it was freedom versus oppression in the newspapers and liars versus assassins in the streets. In a way, the gulf between the high principles that justify a movement and the low pragmatism with which it pursues its aims is common to every political conflict: the French Revolution wrote fraternité on the banners it hung above the guillotines. But the Cold War exaggerated the tension to an extreme degree. This was partly because of the world-historic immensity of the opposing systems and partly because of the relative absence of overt conflict between them. The Cold War had no storming of the Bastille, no Gettysburg, no Omaha Beach. The grand struggle to control the future of humanity was fought by bureaucrats, spies, and proxies, in secret, deniably, off-screen. [...]Quick, what's the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? What happens in The Night Manager? Maybe you watched The Little Drummer Girl, Park Chan-wook's version of Le Carré's 1983 bestseller, when it came out on AMC two years ago; why does the protagonist go undercover again? The appeal, in stories like these, isn't the A-B-C of the plot; it's the sense of being lost in an unfamiliar alphabet. It's the atmosphere of fragile deceptions, shifting loyalties, provisional realities overlaid on one another until the "real" reality--like good and evil, our side and their side--becomes impossible to distinguish.
Robert D. Kaplan offered the best take on Realists like Le Carre in an aside about Henry Kissinger:
(In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite -- notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.)
No wonder he got so hysterical as he aged.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 31, 2020 8:12 AM