WITHERING LOWS: OPERATIVES OF THE STATE
[the case of Fiona Hill, PhD (Harvard)]
A Guardian article on Fiona Hill notes her concerns about people left behind due to de-industrialisation, in the UK, Russia and the USA:
And in all three countries, the ties of family obligations and social networks kept people rooted in place without prospects, and educational opportunities to change your destiny have withered away.
These same people then vote for populist like Johnson, Putin and Trump because
“Populism provides a narrative for people who have lost their identities that were tied to meaningful work,” she said. “When people lose that then they’re looking for something. There’s a feeling they’ve been robbed and deprived of a golden age, and they want that back and populist politics feeds upon that, and provides scapegoats for losing it.”
So, because ‘liberal democracies’ did not deliver the goods for working people, they turned to populists who screw them even more.
This is a sad narrative trotted out over and over again by high ranking academics who deplore the current affairs of state while being intimately associated with them. Fiona Hill, as a former adviser to Trump, and now back at the Brookings Institution, the foremost conservative think-tank (sic) of the U.S., is a case in point. Coming from a northern England working class background in County Durham, she ‘escaped’ a withering town called Bishop Auckland1, to ultimately end up in Washington DC as a highly acclaimed operative of the state. The Guardian attributes her rise to fame and glory to ‘karma and luck’, which is yet another favoured narrative for those who have prospered against all the odds. The other heart-warming story of pulling yourself out of the mire by the bootstraps, is less favoured these days (unless you are another celebrity operator called Dominic Cummings, BTW also from Durham) because it is fake, i.e. billions of people work extremely hard but never get anywhere, withering away instead, as of no fault of their own. Being an adviser to Trump must be one of the laziest jobs known to mankind, and yet with pay checks and perks that make the eyes water of well-to-do faculty of ivy-league universities in the U.S.
No doubt, Fiona Hill’s relatives and acquaintances left behind in withering Bishop Auckland are extremely proud of her achievements and rise in social and economic status. She is still one of us, they may say. But is she really? By her own admission she was accused of a betrayal of sorts:
Given everything that Hill knew and understood about the threats to democracy from populism and Putin’s Russia, some of her friends and colleagues were astonished when she went to work for Trump in the early months of the administration, with one accusing her of “aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise”.
Her feeble excuse, it seems was that
… she felt obliged to do what she could to address the dangerous volatility of the relationship between two nuclear-armed state.
Sounds a bit like working for Hitler’s regime with the excuse to wanting to mitigate the danger of war and genocide, which was a ruse employed by many of the Mitläufer so as to escape prosecution.
Not that I am suggesting that Fiona Hill is in the same league but what is so serrating in her case, is the stupendous denial of having anything to do with the ‘withering’ masses of people and yet being able to analyse the causes of it, and doing so from a highly privileged position of academic super power. If the current protest movements in the US were to succeed, everyone working or having worked for Trump should be indicted on the grounds of having condemned millions of people living in the US (and quite likely elsewhere in the world) to poverty, racial degradation and all that is implied in the term ‘withering’.
If this wasn’t so serious, one might call it hilarious when Fiona Hill is mistaken as a note-taking secretary by Trump, as if to confirm her perceived lack of criminal association. Given the vast machinery of state, some of the flunkeys that hover around the bright light of Trump (and Putin, Johnson and the like) like moths, do get their wings burnt, and then they have to retreat to their respective think-tanks. As Hill notes herself, these Machiavellian machinations have nothing to do with policy advice (how to avoid a nuclear war with Russia, for example) but with advisers sticking knives into each other’s backsides so as to get closer to the people in the room who make policy decisions on a whim. So, let us briefly look at her implied assertion that she is a genuine policy expert on all things Russia, i.e. why people like Trump should really listen to her. Having studied Russian and politics at St. Andrews and later at Harvard (see ‘karma and luck’) she was seemingly destined to advance to the higher ranks of the Brookings Institute by virtue of her publications on Russia. The first notable title from 2003 The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold is so revealing that one does not have to read a single line of the treatise: bad communists! A sentiment surely sufficient to endear oneself to arch-capitalists on Capitol Hill. A second one from 2004 I read in more detail (as one can download it for free), i.e. Energy Empire: Oil, Gas and Russia's Revival. To me it reads like pure policy trash, citing endless World Bank statistics and the like, introducing her topic with the meaningless but ever so dramatic phrase of ‘Russia is back on the global strategic and economic map.’ I mean, was Russia ever NOT on the map? Does Fiona Hill decide who is and who is NOT on the map? Is the ‘map’ some sort of objective artefact that needs no context? Colourful academics with a flair of colourful writing styles get away with murder but are applauded by their peers (in higher positions) as having an ideological baseline that somehow validates all the details that follow. As a conclusion Hill offers us this pill of wisdom:
Fuelled by oil and gas, Russia may yet follow the same path after the end of the Cold War. It could become the dominant power in its immediate neighbourhood by virtue of its economic growth and new soft power resource potential – not by virtue of the old hard power that led it to invade, conquer, and colonize territory in the past. Russian dominance of Eurasia in this manner would be much more palatable, even for the traditional hawks in the U.S. and the West who eventually became comfortable with the economic dominance by Germany and Japan of their immediate neighbourhoods.
This type of geopolitical trash talk is utterly divorced from the concerns of the vast majority of the people on this earth, appealing only to a small class of neo-feudal princelings who like to be told of their divine powers to rule the earth for the benefit of ‘their’ people and mostly for themselves. I mean, who are the ‘traditional hawks in the U.S. and the West’ that Hill is writing about? Today, are they the neo-fascists who deem the so called ‘antifa’ as terrorists? Are they the ‘hawks’ who deem anarchists as ‘ugly’? People who tear down racist statues are told by Johnson that
To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”
When after the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘traditional hawks in the U.S. and the West’ encouraged the new states to tear down statues of Stalin, Lenin, etc. and rename places named after them, nobody of the Western liberal power elites blinked an eyelid. When a progressive intellectual like Noam Chomsky called for various U.S. presidents to be tried for war crimes, the ‘traditional hawks in the U.S. and the West’ (e.g. Nixon) put him on a list of ‘traitors’ to be eliminated. Sure, Nixon went too far but it looks as if Trump and his contemporaries (Johnson and Putin, in Hill’s estimation) are going further without impunity, what with Hill’s ambiguous statements during the impeachment trial having no impact whatsoever. I am not advocating that Fiona Hill work in the coalmines, like her father did, but I wish she would reconsider her status and at least join an autonomous zone in Seattle, writing pamphlets to call for the ‘defunding’ of all police and armed forces in the U.S., Russian and the U.K., if not the rest of the world. This would not only mitigate the dangers of all wars (civil and uncivil) but eliminate them. A project that might even appeal to the ‘traditional hawks in the U.S. and the West’ as they are always intent on ‘eliminating’ something and someone. In the absence of such action we will only experience more ‘withering’ - lately enhanced by a virus that decimates the working classes more than twice the rate of the upper classes, so why care?
1 As another BTW, writing this from Auckland, NZ, one may note that this city is named after a miserable British colonialist who waged various disastrous wars in India and Afghanistan. Time to revert to the Maori name of Tāmaki Makaurau.
Hill, Fiona; Gaddy, Clifford G. (2003). The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Hill, Fiona (September 2004). Energy Empire: Oil, Gas and Russia's Revival (PDF). London: Foreign Policy Centre.
