much more experienced politician, is in a stronger position. There is a chance he may survive the onslaught that has already begun. But will there be much of a Labour Party left to lead? It’s too early to say. Some of its senior members are likely to join Sharon’s party: Shimon Peres already has. Either way we shouldn’t lose sight of the main picture. Between the unlikely, best-case scenario – a left-wing government ready to implement the Geneva Accord – and a likely worst-case scenario, another Sharon government, there is not much difference from the Palestinians’ point of view. Or, indeed, from the point of view of anyone committed to peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. I also doubt whether the people of Sderot have much ground for hope. Unemployment is rising, the factories have moved to

Egypt and Jordan, the educational system is failing, and there is no protection from the Qassam missiles that Hamas in its wrath rains down on them. At best, Peretz will pepper his social and economic policies with welfare initiatives, or at least with a lot of politically correct jargon, while allowing the extreme free market economy to keep Sderot – along with many other Israelis, Palestinians and North African Jews – at the bottom of the local economy. Israel needs a greater revolution than the election of Amir Peretz. The peace initiatives – or at any rate their short-term goals – have not changed since Israel occupied the territories in 1967. What is new is the growing realisation among grass-roots organisations worldwide, led by the hundreds of NGOs which now constitute Palestinian

civil society, that previous methods to bring peace have failed. Diplomatic efforts have led nowhere and have inadvertently allowed the Israelis to widen the occupation and introduce even more oppressive and cruel mechanisms of control, intimidation and dispossession. Palestinian armed struggle has also failed to produce any tangible results and its victims are not only Israelis but large sections of Palestinian society. Only one option remains: strong international pressure, of the kind that was directed against apartheid South Africa in the form of sanctions, boycotts and disinvestments. It is in illusionary moments like this – with Peretz portrayed as the bright new star – that committed people suddenly stop thinking, pinning their hopes once more on diplomacy and on the ability of Israeli

10 london review of books 15 december 2005

Jewish society to provide the kind of change from within that might end the occupation. The illusion won’t last: all those Israelis who, at great risk to their lives, protest against the apartheid wall, who monitor the roadblocks, who refuse to serve in the army of occupation but instead do everything they can to help the Palestinians living under the yoke of occupation, need a change more significant than any Amir Peretz will bring. And so do the Palestinians, who have not only endured one of the longest and harshest occupations of modern times but have suffered false promises of liberation whenever a leader supposedly committed to peace has emerged in Israel only to show himself committed to Zionism in such a way as to preclude any meaningful chance of solving the conflict. It is heartwarming to see a Moroccan Jew reach the higher echelons of power and commit himself to a ‘train ticket’ out of the territories. But Peretz’s mention of Menachem Begin is not accidental. The aim is not justice or peace, but to rid Israel of the Occupied Territories. If this is the goal there is no need for peace. In order to sustain a Jewish majority and Jewish supremacy, there is no need for a continuing military occupation of most of the territories – as even Ariel Sharon recognises – since these areas will be cordoned off behind Israeli fences and walls. To talk about replacing direct occupation with a form of life imprisonment is not, after all, to talk about peace, even if the person doing the talking is a genuine representative of the underprivileged class of Arab Jews. Still, there may be something positive to come out of Peretz’s election. He is the unlikely product of an education system that failed to provide school leavers with a chance of holding their own in the Israeli economy while implanting in their minds the need to de-Arabise: to forget – indeed, to wrench themselves from – their Arab roots. They learned that the way to integrate yourself into Israeli Jewish society was to adopt strong anti-Arab and, more particularly, anti-Palestinian positions. This is why towns like Sderot were built near the unstable and quite often violent borders of Israel. It is easier to feel hatred or animosity when you live in constant danger of being shelled or attacked. Amir Peretz has shown that you can make it from Sderot to the top by adopting leftist Zionist views. His prospective policies are not enough to change anything, but perhaps the next generation of Moroccan Jews will produce a leader capable of going one step further in liberating himself or herself from anti-Arab Orientalist ideologies of superiority – and, in so doing, influence the thinking of Israeli society as a whole. It ought to be possible for outlooks to change. After all, 99 per cent of the inhabitants of Sderot and places like it are not candidates for the premiership; nor are they likely to find jobs, proper housing or education, or peace of mind. They are victims of Zionism as much as the Palestinians are. Let us hope that a sense of shared victimhood will one day provide a joint leadershipand a genuine road map or train ticketout of our misery here in Israel and in Palestine. 2 December
The exiledTrotsky began his biography of Stalin with the observationthat the old revolutionist Leonid Krassin ‘was the first, if I am not mistaken, to call Stalin an “Asiatic”’. He proceeded to write about ‘Asiatic’ leaders as cunning and brutal, presiding over static societies with a huge peasant base. Another Bolshevik who ran foul of Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, called him ‘a Genghis Khan’, while Isaac Deutscher described Stalin as ‘primitive, Oriental, but unfailingly shrewd’. ‘Cunning’ and ‘shrewd’ are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians; ‘brutal’ is another, at least since Genghis Khan, with Pol Pot and Mao reinforcing the image in our time. The broad distinction between the static or indolent East and the dynamic, progressive West goes all the way back to Herodotus and Aristotle. Trotsky, however, made specific reference to Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, which appraised Asia by reference to what it lacked when set against the European model of development: feudalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, capitalism. A brutal satrap presided over a semi-arid environment, running armies of bureaucrats and soldiers, regulatingthe paths of great rivers, and employingvast amounts of slave labour in gigantic public works projects (the Great Wall). The despot above and the cringing mass below prevented the emergence of anything resembling a modern middle class. Karl Wittfogel, the leading ideologue of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s, was the leading proponent of this theory. He went to the United States, and taught at Columbia and the University of Washington. Oriental Despotismwas published in 1957. Marx never really investigated East Asia, but learned enough to know that even if China might fit his theory, Japan with its feudalism (and ‘petite culture’) clearly did not. Wittfogel, however, applied his notions of Oriental despotism to every dynasty with a river running through it – China, tsarist Russia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Incas, even the Hopi Indians of Arizona. He soon performed a complete tenko(Japanese for a political flip-flop), and re-emerged as an organic reactionary. He wrote for many right-wing publications and played a critical role in the purges of China scholars and Foreign Service officers during the McCarthy period. This episode tore apart the field of East Asian studies in America; people wouldn’t speak to each other for years. But China was now ‘Red China’, and the government needed experts. In the late 1950s the Ford Foundation provided funds for a committee to promote scholarship on the country. A few years later, the CIA provided a subvention for the publication of the China Quarterly, still the pre-eminent journal in the field. Its inaugural issue featured a debate about Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism. Wittfogel was back in the fold; out in the cold were the many scholars who had had their careers ruined and/or their characters assassinated. In 1975, Perry Anderson published Lineages of the Absolutist State, at the end of which is an 87-page ‘Note’ on the theory of the Asiatic mode. Anderson shows that Marx’s views on Asia differed little from those of Hegel, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and a host of others; they were all peering

We look at it and see ourselves Bruce Cumings

Eastern Europe. And it would still show bias not to point out that the United States engaged the services as the first president of South Korea of Syngman Rhee, an exiled politician who had spent the previous 35 years in America, and that the Office of Strategic Services deposited Rhee in Seoul after flying him there in General MacArthur’s personal plane, in an intelligence operation designed not only to get him there before anyone else, but to side-step State Department objections. Rhee had angered everyone at Foggy Bottom by pretending to represent a ‘Korean Provisional Government’ that had never governed any Koreans, and had in any case gone belly up in 1925. The writers who love to feature Kim in his Soviet uniform never mention such things. Balance and proportion are vexed questions because of the North Korean regime’s own habit of lying, and its grotesque exaggeration of its achievements and the merits of its leaders. Anyone wanting to find out about the country begins with a farrago of outlandish claims and heroic myths, goes on to what the ‘Dear Leader’ says, what DPRK scribes are told to write, what the outside experts claim, what the reporters report, what some other government offers up. Then there are the occasional visitors: what did they see and experience? For decades Pyongyang funded foreigners to set up groups for the study of Kim’s ‘Great Juche Idea’, otherwise known as self-reliance; I remember once seeing in a Pyongyang magazine a Bedouin sitting on a camel, one sneaker on and one off, perusing the pages of Kim Il Sung’s latest work. With all that, just over the horizon is South

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley Martin. Dunne, 868 pp., $29.95, October 2004, 0 312 32221 6

Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper Becker. Oxford, 300 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 0 19 517044 x

through the wrong end of a telescope, or in a mirror, weighing a smattering of knowledge of Asia against their understanding of how the West developed. And Marx never took the ‘Asiatic mode’ very seriously; he was only ever really interested in one thing – capitalism. Anderson recommended giving this theory an unceremonious burial, concluding that ‘in the night of our ignorance . . . all alien shapes take on the same hue.’ I eagerly recommended his book to my colleagues. A friend said: ‘He doesn’t know any Chinese.’ Another responded: ‘Isn’t he a Marxist?’ (Anderson had called Wittfogel a ‘vulgar charivari’.) The theory never was buried: it just reappears in less conspicuous forms. It isn’t politically correct to say ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’ anymore, but journalists use the term ‘Stalinist’ time and again to describe North Korea, without any hint of qualifying or questioning their position. The idea that the DPRK is a pure form of ‘Stalinism in the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other Communist regime in the 1950s. Chinese Communism had greater influence, but the DPRK isn’t often called Maoist. In the 1960s, Kim Il Sung instituted big changes, redirecting the state ideology towards nationalism and self-reliance and provoking sharp clashes with Moscow – enough to make Alexei Kosygin and Yuri Andropov come running to Pyongyang, where Kim essentially told them to go to hell. Whatever North Korea has been since then, it hasn’t been Stalinist. Stalin’s speeches went on about the newest gains in pig-iron and machine tools; in their focus on ideas, the two Kims’ ideology is closer to their Neo-Confucian forebears. The defector Hwang Jang-yop told Bradley Martin that the two Kims ‘turned Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian notions’. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a picture emerged of Kim Il Sung in a Soviet uniform with a medal on his lapel. Like Ho Chi Minh, he had a ‘dark period’. Between 1941 and 1945 his whereabouts were unknown; finally, some evidence turned up of a clear connection to Moscow. This information is never balanced with facts we learned long before: that Stalin ordered every Korean agent in the Comintern shot

in the late 1930s and began his many mass relocations of subject populations by moving 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (tens of thousands died on this forced exodus), in both cases on the racist grounds that they might be Japanese spies, subject to Japanese ideas, or generally unreliable. In recent years scholars have excavated Kim’s history as an anti-Japanese guerrilla from 1931 to 1945 and his relationship with the Soviets, which turns out to have been quite modest and uneasy. None of this scholarship is mentioned by Martin or by Jasper Becker. The Soviets of course controlled Korea north of the 38th parallel, and Kim could not have come to power over their objections. But even if Stalin had handpicked Kim and installed him in Pyongyang as his faithful servant, it wouldn’t have been too surprising, since he did that throughout

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11 london review of books 15 december 2005