Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]
You know, I really enjoy building my DoubleQuotes. They can be entirely frivolous, as is this one, for instance:
with its touch of gothic — a taste I share with my friend Bryan Alexander.
Or they can work like a Necker cube, offering opposite framings with which to view a single topic — in this case, video games.
In 1930, Robert Robinson–a black toolmaker working for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit–accepted a one-year assignment to apply his skills in the Soviet Union. He didn’t get out until 1974. His first renewals of his Soviet residency were voluntary; his later residency there, not so much.
Robinson gives a detailed account of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union and of the attitudes he encountered toward blacks and Americans; he also comments on the postwar rise of anti-Semitism. His book gives a good feel for what it must be like to live in an environment where everything you can do is entirely dependent on the government. He describes, for example, the joy of the peasants when Malenkov briefly replaced Stalin and it was announced that “all peasants are free to sell to sell their personally grown agricultural products in the free market.”
Remember the 10 Russian spies that were recently returned to The Motherland? The people who had their lifestyles at least partially funded by the government that sent them over here to gather secrets?
Putin just said that they lived “tough lives”.
I think I’m tough enough to sign up for such duty. Just throwing it out there in case the US government has plans to send me off to a foreign land where I can shop, live in a nice house, go to cocktail parties, and fail to dig up any information that can’t be easily found with a 10 second Google search.
Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, a lot of successful espionage projects run by the Soviets hinged on a certain type of snobbery.
You can see it most clearly when reading about the Cambridge Five, a spy ring consisting of several British high-bred good-old-boys. Recruited while attending a snooty college, they betrayed their country with elan and enthusiasm. The reason why they managed to get access to sensitive material was because they came from good families, and could use the connections formed during their school days to get jobs in government. Jobs that dealt with intelligence and secret information.
They had sources of sensitive info other than the documents they read while at the office. Other people in the spy game would let their guard down during casual conversation, and let slip some secrets. After all, this was their buddy from their university days! If you can’t trust someone who wears the same school tie, then the world makes no sense at all!
Voices from many quarters are saying dire things about the American-led campaign in Afghanistan. The prospect of defeat, whatever that may mean in practice, is real. But we are so close to the events, it is hard to know what is and is not critical. And the facts which trickle out allow people who are not insiders to only have a sketchy, pointillist impression of the state of play. There is a lot of noise around a weak signal.
ChicagoBoyz will be convening a group of contributors to look back on the American campaign in Afghanistan from a forty year distance, from 2050.
40 years is the period from Fort Sumter to the Death of Victoria, from the Death of Victoria to Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It is a big chunk of history. It is enough time to gain perspective.
This exercise in informed and educated imagination is meant to help us gain intellectual distance from the drumbeat of day to day events, to understand the current situation in Afghanistan more clearly, to think-through the potential outcomes, and to consider the stakes which are in play in the longer run of history for America, for its military, for the region, and for the rest of the world.
The Roundtable contributors will publish their posts and responses during the third and fourth weeks of August, 2010.
The ChicagoBoyz blog is a place where we can think about the unthinkable.
Stand by for further details, including a list of our contributors.