review -- Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by J. Q. Whitman

In a memorable scene from the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg," the defence lawyer played by Maximilian Schell reads a legal opinion to the court: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange indeed, if it could not call upon those who already sapped the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offsprings for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent their propagation by medical means in the first place. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Snapping the book closed, Schell continues, “The opinion upholds the sterilization law in the State of Virginia, of the United States and was written and delivered by that great American jurist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes.” It is an unsettling moment in the film. Although the American precedent is not developed any further, it hints at a disturbing reality.

Could Oliver Wendell Holmes really have written such a thing? Could the words have been taken out of context? Could it be more than a rhetorical flourish? While racism was there for all to see in the American South with its segregationist Jim Crow laws, putting America side-by-side with Nazi Germany sounds almost obscene. And even if we must acknowledge that the Nazis regularly quoted U.S. eugenicists and U.S. race laws as precedents, we want to believe that such efforts were sheer propaganda, a shabby effort to put a veneer of respectability on their own odious regime.

Unfortunately, as J. Q. Whitman shows in Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the truth is much uglier than this. The truth is that the Nazis undertook a deep and sustained study of the laws of America as they were designing their infamous anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, because America was for them, as Hitler himself said in Mein Kampf, the one state that had made progress in developing a “healthy racial order.” To be sure, Britain was no slouch, along with its colonies and dominions, when it came to racist immigration preferences, treatment of non-whites, and so on. But America appealed to the Nazis more by being explicit in its laws—and harsher. Until at least 1936 Nazi Germany remained hopeful that it could “reach out the hand of friendship” to the U.S. on the basis of a shared commitment to white supremacy.

This may seem at first to be an extreme interpretation, but doubts quickly disappear as Whitman, Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, offers copious quotations from German texts of the 1930s. With chilling effectiveness, Hitler's American Model reveals how deeply a second current runs in the American system, counter to its high ideals of freedom, equality, and the rights of man, a current of white, even Aryan, racism.

While today Jim Crow laws probably come to mind most easily for us, they were not the focus of the Nazis who, after all, did not plan to create an apartheid regime. Their aim was—before the 1942 Wannsee Conference and its genocidal Final Solution—to drive non-Aryans out of the country and create a racially pure state. Their tools would be new laws on citizenship and sexual relations.

Citizenship law in America drew a clear race line as far back as 1790 when the Naturalization Act allowed citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.” In the following century denying citizenship to Asians became the focus. Indigenous peoples were marginalized by being deemed “nationals” but not citizens. And when the Spanish-American War brought new non-white peoples into the American system, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the creation of second-class citizenship for Puerto Rican and Filipino subjects, a disempowered status of “non-citizen nationals,” “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.”

African-Americans presented a special difficulty as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which gave them citizenship rights; however, the Nazis were careful to note that, especially at the state level, “all means are used to render the Negro’s right to vote illusory” through petty measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. Most states, too, had laws to restrict African-Americans in their freedom of movement and career possibilities. The few Asians and Mexicans who had made it into the country had their voting rights blocked with similar legislation. Legal ingenuity such as this was appreciated by the Nazis, and in the case of the Czechs they did use a second-class status similar to the American example. But within Germany they were determined to be direct in their purposes by instituting straightforward racist laws.

According to Whitman, from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s and 1930s the United States came to be regarded not just by the Nazis but throughout Europe as “the leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.” As the National Socialist Handbook put it, until the coming of Hitler, the United States had held “the leadership of the white peoples” in the “Aryan struggle for world domination”—although it had merely groped its way toward the historic mission to be undertaken by Germany.

The passing of the U.S. Immigration Act in 1924 delighted Hitler. He took as a given its Asian Exclusion Act (an extension of the 1922 Cable Act which revoked the citizenship of American women who married an Asian), but the National Origins Act struck him as especially revealing, for it favoured immigrants from the “Nordic” countries while limiting immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. For him it was a prime example of völkisch citizenship legislation—in fact, the only in modern times. Hitler spoke of it in combination with the earlier genocidal wars on indigenous peoples, believing that it showed clearly that the U.S. was “the model of a state organized on principles of Rasse and Raum,” that is, on the principles of race and the seizure of territory for a völk defined by race.  

But immigration and citizenship laws are not enough to create a racially pure nation. There had to be metrics to determine the degree of acceptable racial purity and laws to prevent racially mixed births ("mongrelization," in Germany, "miscegenation" in America). Here again America provided the precedents for Germany, and in particular for the Nuremberg Blood Law where, according to Whitman, the American model is seen at its most influential. In many societies mixed marriages have been discouraged through social constraints and sometimes they have been annulled as a matter of civil law, but historically bigamy has been the only form of marriage subject to criminalization and prosecution. In their review of American legislation, the Nazi researchers found that thirty states had passed criminal laws against miscegenation, some of them with penalties as severe as ten years imprisonment. (Virginia continued to enforce its miscegenation statute until 1967, when the Supreme Court, in the case of Richard and Mildred Loving, struck it down. See the 2016 Hollywood film, “Loving.”) The Nazis passed their own criminal laws against race mixing, but the Americans, they thought, had been too harsh, especially with the “one-drop” rule that some states used to define Negroes. As a result, the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 was milder, defining a Jew as a person having three Jewish grandparents; and it allowed as a mitigating factor the degree of a person’s assimilation into non-Jewish society. The Jim Crow laws, too, were seen by the Nazis as going too far; German laws prohibited German women from consorting “indecently” with black men in public, but they did not place sanctions on private behaviour, as in the U.S.

Nazi Germany showed racism in its ugliest, most murderous form. However, a clear-eyed look at the historical record, such as we get in Hitler's American Model, is a healthy reminder that the nations that banded together to destroy Nazi Germany were also infected by the same disease, the difference being simply in the degree of toxicity.

Review -- Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb

Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb

by Thomas Powers

A Founder of Modern Physics

By the late 1930s Werner Heisenberg’s fame as one of the founders of modern physics was firmly established. His paper on the “uncertainty principle,” published when he was 26, revealed an amazing, fundamental feature of the subatomic world. Our knowledge of the physical world, he announced, would never be complete, because in principle it is not possible to know both the position and momentum of a particle (or better, that the more precisely we know its position, the less precisely we can know its momentum, and vice versa). In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics." His work, combined with that of his mentor and friend, the towering figure of Niels Bohr, formed the background to a series of historic debates Bohr held with Einstein about how to make sense of the bizarre findings of modern quantum mechanics. While Einstein argued powerfully for the idea that fundamentally the physical universe is comprehensible, governed by causality and predictability, that “God does not play dice with the universe,” Bohr, to the satisfaction of most physicists, refuted him, arguing for the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, an idea he shared with Heisenberg, the view that the physical world is indeterminate, governed not by certainties and traditional causality but ultimately by probabilities.

On a tour of America in the summer of 1939 Heisenberg was repeatedly invited by various scientists he met there to emigrate, as many of them had done, and make a clean break from Hitler’s Germany. While despising Nazism, Heisenberg felt bound by a deep loyalty to his native country and replied rather optimistically that he was needed at home to offer a voice of reason, to “create islands of decency,” to protect young German scientists from conscription, and to keep German science on the right path in the face of appalling nonsense about “Jewish science.”

The Most Dangerous Man in Germany

A month after his return home hostilities broke out, and soon thereafter Heisenberg was made leader of atomic research in Germany. Although scientists outside Germany struggled to maintain contacts, friendships, and a semblance of internationalism, their efforts wobbled under the pressures of war. To some, Heisenberg, who they feared might put an atomic bomb in the hands of Hitler, became “the most dangerous man in Germany because of his brain power.” Ever since, suspicion has hung over his name. How morally compromised was he by working under the Nazis? How committed was he to developing a German atomic bomb? How far did the project get? And even—was the failure of Germany to produce an atom bomb the result of his scientific incompetence?

In Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb, a work of extraordinarily detailed research, Thomas Powers sorts through a vast range of sources to answer those key questions. The weighing of evidence is subtle and complex, but the conclusions Powers comes to are clear.

Hero or Traitor?

Powers provides evidence that Heisenberg did deliberately prevent Germany from working on an atomic bomb, although after the war he was not entirely forthcoming about his role. In the early years of fission research, soon after it was discovered in 1939 by Otto Hahn, all scientists acknowledged that, if a bomb were feasible, developing it would require a gargantuan, resource-draining effort. As the war began, German scientists agreed that such an effort would take too long to produce results before the war was over. In June 1942 Albert Speer called a crucial meeting between government officials and scientists to determine whether Germany should pursue an atomic bomb (about the same time, incidentally, that the Manhattan Project got underway). Heisenberg addressed the meeting, clearly spelling out all the difficulties. Soon afterward, all work on a German atomic bomb came to an end, with nuclear research restricted to small-scale work on an “energy machine” or reactor. Heisenberg had managed, in Powers’s words, “to guide German atomic research into a broom closet where scientists tinkered until the end of the war.” Germany’s stockpile of uranium was used to make armour-piercing shells.

Was Heisenberg simply being realistic in his assessment for Speer, or was he deliberately discouraging bomb development? After the war Heisenberg maintained that he had honestly believed a bomb to be impractical at the time, adding that German scientists were thus “spared the moral decision” of whether to work on a bomb. (On August 6, 1945 he and the other German scientists being held in detention in Britain were stunned by the news of the Hiroshima attack, shocked that American scientists had worked on the bomb and horrified that President Truman had used it to destroy a city.) Yet Powers points out that Heisenberg’s post-war account omitted important details. What he had told Speer may not have been untruthful, but it was carefully crafted to dampen interest. While outlining the extreme difficulties of separating the fissionable U-235 isotope from uranium, Heisenberg did not mention the relatively easier path to a bomb using plutonium. Asked whether a nuclear explosion might set the entire world on fire, he did not rule it out as a possibility. His talk emphasized all the difficulties and, most important of all, buried in technical language the most alarming possibility, the mere fact that there was an outside chance that someone—if not Germans, then Americans—might build a bomb for use in the war. Phrased differently, his presentation could have put Speer on high alert and ensured that Germany would set to work full bore on an atomic bomb. The crucial moral decision had, in fact, been made by Heisenberg and his colleagues, and they had chosen to block Hitler. His fudging of that fact after the war was probably an attempt to escape being branded a traitor by some of his countrymen.

During the war Heisenberg made a number of very risky efforts to let Allied scientists know that Germany was not working on a bomb. His intention—his “vague hope,” as his wife described it—was that he might inspire all scientists everywhere to refuse to work on a bomb, thus preventing the horror of a world armed with nuclear weapons. The hope, however, was as naive as it was vague. Americans, especially the émigré scientists who had fled Nazism, distrusted him for remaining behind, wondering whether his assurances were aimed at stopping Allied efforts, thus clearing the way for Germany to become the sole nuclear power. The mere mention of a bomb by Heisenberg prompted the Allies to undertake the most intense efforts to find information about a German bomb program—the American effort, under General Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, never relaxing an iota until Germany was occupied and its last laboratory was inspected.

Kill or Kidnap?

In its 500 pages Heisenberg’s War covers a great deal of material other than Heisenberg and the moral culpability question. The SS came close to arresting him twice. There is the adventure-movie story of the attacks on the heavy water production facility in Norway (“The Heavy Water War,” a Norwegian series on Netflix gives a too-dark portrayal of Heisenberg).  Heisenberg’s famous visit to Bohr in 1941 is given close scrutiny. The visit led to such a chill in their relations that it never fully rewarmed; it has been the subject of endless comment, including in the 1998 play “Copenhagan.” Powers’s conclusion is that the break occurred, first, because Bohr was shocked to hear his old friend speaking of atomic bombs and, second, because he was deeply angered by several pro-German remarks Heisenberg made about the necessity of occupying various European countries, including Denmark, and the great good Germany was doing for Europe by attacking Russia. With supreme insensitivity he once remarked how much better off Europe would be dominated by Germany than dominated by Russia.

One thread that runs through many chapters is the deep concern the Allies had over what to do about Heisenberg. A first step was to determine the exact nature of his research projects, leading to several fascinating cloak-and-dagger operations involving more than one outlandish character. By the summer of 1943 the British reached the conclusion that there was no German atomic bomb program, mainly on information coming from their contacts with scientists in neutral countries who were still in touch with sympathetic German scientists, but also because the code breakers at Bletchley Park had never deciphered a single message referring to atomic bombs or Heisenberg. Because the Brits shared their conclusion but not their sources, they failed to convince the Americans, who remained implacable. Robert Oppenheimer’s opinion was that Heisenberg should be killed. General Groves considered recommending a bombing raid on Heisenberg’s lab in Berlin with the object of killing the scientists. More elaborate and enduring were several plans to kidnap Heisenberg as he attended a conference in Switzerland. At one point, an agent with a pistol in his pocket sat in the front row of a lecture hall as Heisenberg talked, ready to shoot him if he dropped the slightest hint about a German atomic bomb.

After Germany was occupied, the Allies were stunned to realize the primitive stage of German nuclear research, and the story was born that Heisenberg and his team had made grave scientific blunders. On the night of Hiroshima, Otto Hahn, in detention with them, called them “second-raters.” (Hahn himself was on the verge of suicide over his discovery of fission.) Power spends about ten pages considering the evidence before finally concluding that Heisenberg’s apparent mistakes were really a ruse to prevent the development of a bomb. He knew the world’s most dangerous secret, and he kept it from even his closest colleagues.

Review -- Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff

Khrushchev’s desire to mark a new era in Soviet life had a drastic effect on an American musician, enmeshing concert pianist Van Cliburn so thoroughly in Cold War politics that to the end of his life he seldom broke free. In 1958, at the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, Khrushchev learned that the judges were in a quandary. The rules of the game had been rigged to ensure a Soviet performer would win, but the judges, including greats such as pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels and composers Dmitri Kabalevsky and Aram Khachaturian, agreed that the 23-year-old Texan clearly outshone all the others. His grand, expressive, Romantic style was more Russian than the Russians’. Khrushchev said simply that if Cliburn was the best, the gold medal should go to him. When the win was announced, it created a sensation in the midst of Cold War hostilities, with Cliburn gaining instant, world-wide fame, on a rock-star scale. In New York he was given a ticker-tape parade. In the Soviet Union where, even before the win, his warm, open-hearted personality had charmed the public, waves of adulation swept across the country, never really to subside.

Moscow Nights by Nigel Cliff tells the story of Van Cliburn’s Russian connections. The book begins, perhaps appropriately but very oddly, with a chapter on Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the internal Soviet politics that led up to the Tchaikovsky Competition. Although Cliburn had not traveled outside the U.S. before arriving in Moscow, Russian music was in his blood, inherited directly from his mother and teacher, a pianist whose great boast was that she once met Rachmaninoff at a minor concert in Louisiana. And at the Juilliard School in New York Cliburn was immersed even more deeply in Russian Romantic pianism by the great Russian teacher, Rosina Lhévinne. The Tchaikovsky competition was a natural for him.

As its title suggests, Moscow Nights presents Cliburn’s life with a strong Russian filter. Given the source of his fame, this is not so objectionable. It certainly makes for a pleasant and readable book, sure to be treasured by his die-hard fans. Anecdote piles upon anecdote, sometimes amounting to an hour-by-hour narrative of a concert and reception or a weekend in Washington or Moscow. At the same time the Russian filter is constraining. We learn little about his repertoire beyond Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff or his career outside the U.S.-U.S.S.R. nexus or his personal life. Of his homosexuality there is only the barest mention, even though it must have been difficult for him in his early years as a good, church-going boy, as well as later when he was being watched closely by both the FBI and the KGB. While much more than a fanbook, Moscow Nights is less than a full biography. And the non-fanatic might wish the editors had rejected some of the anecdotes that did not really make a point.

Although he lived for 55 years after the Moscow triumph, Van Cliburn’s fate was forever wedded to his one greatest moment. His later career, almost to the end of his life, seems to have consisted in being trotted out to perform for every black-tie event held for Russian leaders. 

Review -- The Noise of Time: A Novel by Julian Barnes

After decades of bans, smears, and threats by Stalin and his stooges, in 1949 Dmitri Shostakovich, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union—temporarily and under supervision, of course—to attend a peace conference in New York. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was promising a more open and tolerant regime. Under Stalin Shostakovich had endured many public degradations and might look forward to a little relief; but now the Americans were about to take their turn and serve him the worst humiliation of his life. At the news conference a journalist working for the CIA was waiting with a list of questions designed to expose the repressive Soviet system. Shostakovich’s dignity would be collateral damage. The questions would force him to deny beliefs that went to the core of who he was, beliefs the whole world knew were dear to him, and to ignominiously spout the official line of the Communist Party.

Did he agree, he was asked, with the condemnation of Western music expounded daily in the Soviet press and by the Soviet government? Yes, said Shostakovich, lying, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Did he support banning from Soviet concert halls the works of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky? Here the knife dug deeper, because, in Shostakovich’s view, Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Meekly he replied that, yes, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Then came body blows. “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed in your speech today about the music of Stravinsky?” Before he went on stage an apparatchik had handed him a speech to read condemning the works of Stravinsky. Hoping to indicate that he did not believe what he was saying, Shostakovich had read mechanically, as if to say, “See the mask I am wearing!” But now his attempt at irony was removed and everyone saw, even in the age of Khrushchev, the iron hand of Soviet Communism in the arts. “Yes,” he said, “I personally subscribe to such views.” Finally there was the question, “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed about your music and that of other composers by Minister Zhdanov?” Zhdanov had been one of Shostakovich’s chief persecutors for many years, once comparing his music to the sound of a road drill. Poor Shostakovich, the great composer, his integrity in tatters, replied for all the world to hear, “Yes, I personally subscribe to the views expressed by Chairman Zhdanov.”  

Underlying The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich, is the assumption of a standoff between art and power, between the transcendence of music and the ugliness of the real world. The final paragraph expresses it poetically. Shostakovich is drinking vodka with two other men. As they clink their glasses together, the composer observes, “A triad.” ”A sound,” adds Barnes, “that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.” It’s a nice flourish, climactic and uplifting, yet out of tune with the rest of the book, perhaps even a little precious. Barnes’s story depicts only the ugliness of Shostakovich’s life, only “the noise of time,” only the relentless depredations of the brutal tyranny. Endlessly kicked and spat upon, the composer endlessly cowers and complies. Even when the harsh Stalinist years are over, he submits, sacrificing one of his last remaining principles by joining what he called the “party that kills.” And he suffers the indignity of seeing articles published under his name without being consulted. What could have sustained him through all this misery? Barnes has little to say. Personal happiness is mentioned once, in connection with his third wife, whom he married at age 56. Some believe that she, age 27, was a perq for him arranged by the KGB.

The Noise of Time presents the unedifying spectacle of an artist with his neck firmly under the jackboot of a tyrant, not bravely resisting, not negotiating, not manoeuvring for space, but forever meek and fearful, suffering everything in silence. A last-minute tribute to the glory of art in the clinking of three glasses is a featherweight when balanced against the rest of the book.

Review -- Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell

As soon as Europeans arrived in North America, they planted flags and boldly claimed possession of vast swathes of territory. Over the next several centuries they imagined that the few towns they set up, some scattered missions and outposts, and the travels of some trappers and traders amounted to sovereignty. In their eyes, small in number though they often were, they took the lead parts in a grand, world-historical drama about the winning of a new continent; the bit parts, the non-speaking parts, belonged to Indigenous people. That was not the reality. For centuries the crucial decisions were not made by the Europeans but by Indigenous leaders and the most fateful events took place not in London, Paris, or Quebec, but in “the woods.”

In the usual narrative, First Nations appear dimly in the background, brought into focus only when they impinge directly upon European ambitions—raiding colonists, fighting as allies in inter-European conflicts, signing treaties, ceding lands. Modern research, however, is revealing that First Nations were clearly dominant in North America from the first arrival of the Europeans until nearly the nineteenth century, after the American War of Independence. Until then the newcomers were utterly dependent on the good graces of the original inhabitants. And historians now understand that, far from fighting as auxiliaries for the French or English, when First Nations stood in battle beside European armies, they did so with their own agendas— agendas that had much to do with managing Indigenous tensions and little to do with wanting final victory for either of the European powers. The geopolitics of the region was settled around council fires, where rivalries and alliances among First Nations predominated over relations with the colonial powers.

Michael McDonnell’s Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America is an important contribution to Indigenous-oriented scholarship. Not only does it present the history of the Great Lakes region by “looking east,” it also reveals that the key players were not the nations of the lower Great Lakes, such as the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) or the Huron (Wendat), but a subgroup of the Anishinaabeg, the Ottawa (Odawa) living at the Straits of Michilimackinac where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. Much undervalued by historians, theirs is shown to be the preeminent influence both on other First Nations and on the European powers. It derived partly from their strategic location in the Great Lakes system, a key point in the fur trade, giving them control over connections between the lower and upper lakes as well as access to the Mississippi Valley and the western plains; but also decisive was the tradition of their women marrying outside the group, creating a dense and extensive web of family connections stretching from Green Bay to the St. Lawrence, easily activated into alliances.

The title Masters of Empire is not a tribute to this network, to a European-style “empire” run by the Michilimackinac Odawa, but to their achievement in managing the nascent French and English empires. In the early period, the new neighbours, the French, were by no means uppermost in the minds of the Odawa. Some traders and a few military personnel were allowed to reside at Michilimackinac and voyageurs were allowed to travel through the region, but the Odawa controlled the newcomers easily through negotiations. The focus of the Odawa was on hunting, cultivating crops, overseeing their extensive trading relationships, and keeping abreast of political developments among other Indigenous peoples. The French were accepted in small numbers because in exchange for furs they provided valuable trade goods, such as cloth, metal cooking utensils, guns, and ammunition; but the grave decisions at Michilimackinac concerned other First Nations, especially Iroquois threats from the east, Fox and Sioux threats from the west, and Catawba incursions to the south. When the French lost their empire, the Odawa found the English more difficult to deal with—haughty and expansionist—so they set about checking English power, aiming to reduce them to fur traders. Only after America became an independent nation and settlers poured over the Appalachians by the thousands, backed by large armies, did outsiders become an existential threat. Even then, however, clever negotiating enabled the Odawa of Michilimackinac to avoid the fate of many other First Nations—being forcibly removed to distant lands.

A recurring theme of Masters of Empire is how events in the backwoods of North America often had repercussions around the world. Although France and England had long been rivals in the New World, their final struggle for supremacy in the Seven Years War began with an effort by Odawa and Ojibwe warriors to rebalance the influence of the two colonial powers, destabilized by recent British advances. Their successful attack on a British fort at Pickawillany in the Ohio Valley, unanswered by any English move, emboldened the French to reassert themselves south of the Great Lakes and spurred First Nations to send raiding parties to remove British settlers from traditional lands. A chain of reactions broadened into a global war between coalitions led by the French and British. Every European great power of the time, except the Ottoman Empire, joined in, and the fighting spread from North America to Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, India, and the Philippines.

At the end of the Seven Years War, First Nations were furious to learn that the French “gave away” their land to the British, and they launched a war against the British to establish that they were the masters in their own land. McDonnell calls it “the first war for American independence in North America.” So effective were they that finally the British promised to ban settlements west of the Appalachians, a move welcomed by First Nations but decried by the American colonies. Then Britain, alarmed at the drain on its treasury resulting from so many wars, decided to offset its costs by taxing the American colonists, thus laying the groundwork for the American War of Independence.

Master of Empire is academic history, offering only moderate concessions to the general reader in terms of prose style and narrative structure. However, its Indigenous perspective easily compensates us for our effort, making us re-think some of what we long took for granted and, like an infrared image of a familiar scene, making the familiar seem unfamiliar again.review -- 

Review -- The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens

When the Panama Papers were leaked in May of 2016, the scheming of the super-rich to avoid paying taxes by hiding their identities offshore was thrown into headlines around the world. Some journalists, scrambling to make sense of the 11.5 million documents, set about trying to uncover the identities of the shadowy figures behind the web of deceit, while others valiantly tried to explain the complex financial mechanisms. What the public needed was an overview by an expert, a clear analysis of how tax havens work, in simple language, with enough detail to make the picture complete yet without being too technical.

In The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, Gabriel Zucman has done that brilliantly—and much more. Eschewing scandals and the naming of individuals, he provides a clear description of how the system works, revealing, perhaps surprisingly, that it is, at its core, rather simple. But he goes much further, calculating the true extent of tax evasion, in dollar terms, by crunching publicly available economic numbers in ways that have not been used before. (Tax evasion, in his analysis, includes what lawyers call “tax avoidance,” the legal exploitation of loopholes, since both evasion and avoidance exist only to dodge the taxman.) He shows that more than 8% of global financial wealth, consisting of stocks and bonds, shares in mutual funds, and bank deposits, is hidden from tax authorities, amounting to 7.6 trillion dollars. That enormous figure is a minimum, because it does not include non-financial forms of wealth such as real estate, gold, jewelry, art, etc. Now that governments are at long last in possession of real numbers, they are much better placed to address the problem of tax havens and lost taxes. Finally, Zucman presents a simple plan for bringing global tax cheating to an end. It’s a breathtaking achievement to do so much in a book consisting of only 120 pages. But is it to be believed? In the foreword no less a luminary than Thomas Piketty, author of the monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century, calls The Hidden Wealth of Nations “probably the best book that has ever been written on tax havens and what we can do about them.”

While the book is certainly an important handbook for policy makers, and while it might yield deeper insights to readers with a background in business and finance, Zucman has written it with the layperson in mind. Because governments, he says, “have not been stellar” in fighting the scourge of tax havens, an informed and mobilized public is needed to drive the campaign against tax havens to its conclusion.

What do his numbers reveal? Nine percent of Canadian financial wealth or US$300 bn is held offshore by Canadian citizens, resulting in an annual loss of US$6 bn in tax revenue. If back taxes were collected and penalties assessed for not declaring assets, the government would reap an enormous windfall. Even more, these numbers do not include losses incurred when governments had to lower tax rates to slow the flight of capital to tax havens. Four percent of U.S. wealth is held offshore, representing $1,200 bn in annual lost tax revenue. Ten percent of the financial wealth of Europe is held offshore, depriving European governments annually of $87 bn. The numbers for Russia show the extent of the oligarchy, with 52% of financial wealth held offshore. Sadly, Africa, which needs its tax revenue sorely for basic services and development, has 40% of its financial wealth hidden from tax authorities.

After tracing the history of tax havens from the end of World War I, when governments instituted progressive taxes in order to offset their huge debts and provide benefits to veterans, and following a chapter on the failed efforts of governments to address the problem of tax havens, Zucman proposes a straightforward solution, a global financial register. Such a record, listing who owns all financial securities in circulation—all stocks, bonds, and shares in mutual funds worldwide—perhaps managed by the IMF, would strip tax cheaters of their anonymity and enable nations to collect the taxes due to them. Reporting must be automatic, leaving bankers in tax havens with no discretion to falsify information about their clients, as Swiss bankers did on a huge scale at two critical points in the past. Also because of past failures to eliminate tax havens, Zucman insists that countries tempted to continue operating as tax havens must be compelled to participate through sanctions. In plain economic terms he demonstrates how the threat of carefully crafted trade tariffs against recalcitrant countries, designed to capture lost tax revenue, would leave tax havens no choice but to surrender, and he points out that such a move is allowed under current treaties.

Fiscal dissimulation does not end with wealthy individuals; there is also the problem of corporations avoiding taxes through profit shifting. Various accounting tricks are used to ensure that branches in high tax countries show little or no profit, while most of the company’s profits show up in countries with low taxes, Luxembourg being a favourite destination because of its “modest”`corporate tax rate of 0%. Again Zucman provides numbers: 55% of foreign profits of U.S. firms are declared in tax havens; and U.S. tax losses amount to 20% of all U.S. profits. Rather than asking governments to play cat and mouse with the corporations over their profits (the tax department of GE consists of almost 1,000 employees), Zucman proposes that corporate profits not be approached country by country; rather, the worldwide profit of a corporation should be calculated. Each country would then be assigned a weighting based on sales, capital, and employees, and based on its weighting the country could then assess taxes according to the rate of its choice. This corporate solution, he explains, would be easier to implement than the global financial register for individuals. He even proposes a method for ensuring that corporations would pay up.

For all his proposed solutions, Zucman preempts objections that they are “utopian” by demonstrating how they are currently operating successfully in smaller jurisdictions.

The big surprise about large-scale tax dodging is how essentially simple it is, resting entirely on anonymity, and how relatively straightforward the solutions are. While the G20 summit in 2009 made a good, if unsuccessful, effort at eliminating the scourge of tax havens, Zucman`s book may make it possible that we truly will one day see the much sought-after “end of banking secrecy.” 

Review -- Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History

Before the United States won independence from Britain, pirates from the Barbary states (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli) had a long history of depradations in the Mediterranean, beginning as far back as the era of the Crusades. In the sixteenth century, upon becoming part of the powerful Ottoman Empire, they expanded into the Atlantic, raiding not only shipping but even European coastal towns as far north as Iceland. Plunder was not their greatest prize; more than anything, they sought captives, some to hold for ransom but most to sell into slavery in the Ottoman and Arab worlds. It is estimated that over one million Europeans were thus enslaved, some doomed to wretched lives as labourers, perhaps manning the oars of a pirate galley, some kept as house slaves, a lucky few given positions as high-level officials, women, and especially young boys, kept as sex slaves. The European powers never subdued the pirates or their political masters militarily, apparently finding it preferable to make annual “tribute” payments as well as putting up with periodic demands for luxury gifts, such as diamond-studded daggers and gold-inlaid pistols, by the various beys and pashaws.

At the end of the War of Independence in 1783, the U.S. lost its protection under Britain`s deal with the Barbary states, and soon several American merchant ships were captured. The Americans on board were enslaved, chained, and set to work breaking rocks. Several died.

The U.S. was not in a position to do much. It had sold off its Continental Navy, and its treasury was so depleted that tribute payments to pirate nations were almost beyond its capacity. Yet it needed to keep its trade with Europe and the Mediterranean free in order to pay off its war debts. In 1786 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, met in London with the ambassador from Tripoli to Britain, hoping to negotiate a reasonable settlement that would free American captives and protect American shipping. Instead, they were met with demands for tribute payments of enormous proportions. And, what shocked them even more, the ambassador blithely told them that the Quran made it a right and a duty for Muslims to plunder and enslave unbelievers. By 1793 ten American merchant ships had been captured and hundreds of American citizens were imprisoned. The pirates built a new fleet aimed specifically at American shipping.

Although it took thirty years of effort, both diplomatic and military, the young U.S. finally achieved what no other nation had done, ending Barbary piracy through military force, although not without some serious setbacks. Today the First and Second Barbary Wars are mostly forgotten, the memory kept alive mainly by the U.S. Marine Corps in a song memorializing their first victory on land (“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”) and in their ceremonial sword, which is fashioned after the Ottoman-style, Mameluke sword presented to the Marine commander who won that battle.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates is a vivid account the Barbary wars, well researched from original sources, detailed enough to satisfy ordinary curiosity but with no unnecessary digressions, always keeping its focus on action and narrative. The big surprise of the story is how badly the effort went for the U.S. for so long, the number of mistakes, defeats, and humiliations. Interesting characters appear amid all the action. Remarkable for his lack of heroism is the American naval commander, Richard Morris, sent with the U.S.S. Chesapeake to blockade Tripoli. His wife wrote to the secretary of the navy for permission to accompany her husband on the mission and before the day of departure showed up with their son, too. Morris delayed his departure a month or two to avoid the rough weather of early spring. Arriving at Gibraltar for repairs, he delayed for three more months while he and Mrs. Morris enjoyed the local social life, hobnobbing with the British elite. Finally under direct orders to join the blockade immediately, he sailed out of Gibraltar but only to visit friendly ports along the southern European coast. In the first report he gave of his progress, he explained that he did not plan to advance toward North Africa until early in the following year because of the “advanced period of the season.” Not long afterward, he was relieved of duty. There is also the renegade Scotsman Peter Lisle who, after being captured, converted to Islam, took the name Murat Rais, and became captain of a pirate ship. Eventually he was promoted to admiral of Tripoli’s navy, and he married a daughter of the dey of Tripoli. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams presented a stark contrast. Adams always advocated negotiating with the pirate nations, even after the dey of Tripoli declared war. During his term as president he reduced the size of the navy. Early on Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, decided that force would be necessary to bring the pirates to heel, and throughout his career as ambassador, secretary of defense, and as president, he sought to expand the navy and gain the authority to use military force.

One of the most shocking incidents occurred when an American ship, arriving with tribute in Algiers, was found not to have all the promised goods. Infuriated, the dey took control of the ship, replaced the American flag with his own, and forced the American crew to sail to Istanbul with the tribute he owed to the Ottoman emperor. Since slaves were part of his cargo, an American naval ship suffered the humiliation, not just of serving as an Ottoman cargo ship but of working as a slave transport.

After several military engagements, not all of which redounded to American glory, treaties were signed with all four Barbary nations. Then, during the War of 1812 Britain urged them to capture American ships again and take captives, and Algiers declared war on America. When the war with Britain ended in 1815, a much stronger U.S. sent a formidable fleet of eleven warships to the North African ports as gunboat diplomacy, and the era of Barbary piracy came to a quick end.