Chieu V. Le: Flight, Exile, and a Long Life of Service

Chieu V. Le was born in southern Vietnam in the early 1950s, into a country already fractured by war and ideology. His childhood was marked by absence. When he was an infant, his father—a South Vietnamese officer captured by the French—was transferred north during the 1954 prisoner exchanges and never returned. Promised repatriation after two years, he instead disappeared into the machinery of the communist state, rising quietly in rank but never joining the Party, never coming home. For Chieu V. Le, the war was not a chapter in history; it was the atmosphere in which he grew up.

Raised largely without a father and without reliable documentation, Le moved through monastery schools and informal education, absorbing discipline and structure where he could find it. By the late 1960s, as South Vietnam’s manpower needs intensified, he joined the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), attending the Thu Duc Infantry Academy. His aptitude stood out. Before he even graduated, he was redirected toward aviation. He began English instruction at the Defense Language Institute and then traveled to the United States for flight training. For a young Vietnamese officer, this was both an honor and a gamble: success meant returning as a pilot; failure meant obscurity or worse.

TH-55 Helicopter

In Texas at Fort Wolters, Le learned to fly the TH-55 helicopter. At Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, he transitioned to the UH-1 "Huey" helicopter. He graduated second in his class, earning selection for gunship training. The Huey—loud, underpowered, forgiving only to those who respected its limits—became his world. When assignments were drawn, Le took the last straw, which sent him to Sóc Trăng in the Mekong Delta. It was a demanding post, but at the time it was considered survivable. He spent his first months flying anything he could, learning terrain, weather, and enemy habits the only way pilots ever truly do: by repetition and risk.

UH-1 "Huey" Helicopter

By 1973, the war had shifted into its final, deceptive phase. The Paris Peace Accords promised ceasefire and political settlement. On January 27, 1973—the very day the agreement was signed—Le was shot down for the first time. Escorting a Medevac helicopter, his gunship was prohibited from firing under the terms of the agreement. The enemy did not observe the same restraint. Fire from a temple—explicitly protected under the rules of engagement—hit his aircraft, igniting the engine. Forced down into a muddy rice field, Le and his crew escaped only because a second helicopter managed to extract them. The irony was unmistakable: peace, declared on paper, had nearly killed him.

After that incident, Le became pilot in command. Between 1973 and 1975, as American resupply dwindled and morale eroded, South Vietnamese pilots continued flying with what they had. Ammunition was rationed to absurd levels. Le conserved rounds obsessively, often flying with full rocket pods and ammunition cans that he dared not use. Gunships became shields rather than weapons, flying “belly cover” for transports and Medevacs, relying more on presence and noise than firepower. It was war reduced to endurance and habit, sustained by professionalism long after strategic hope had faded.

In early 1975, collapse accelerated. Corps areas fell one by one. Units retreated toward Saigon. Rumors circulated of last stands that never materialized. In Can Tho, Le and his fellow pilots were told that senior leaders would arrive to organize a defense of the Mekong Delta. Those leaders never came. On April 29, shelling began. On April 30, surrender orders were broadcast. Le listened, understood, and rejected them. No one, he later said, had ever taught him how to surrender. He told his crew plainly: he was leaving. Anyone who wanted to come could stay with him. Anyone who did not could get out before he lifted off. All four stayed.

Le did not have a destination. He knew only one place by name: Con Son Island. Flying there, he discovered the airfield crowded with aircraft and refugees—and worse, that the island housed North Vietnamese prisoners. With the gates already open after surrender, remaining there meant eventual capture or death. He fueled quickly and made a decision that defined the rest of his life: he would head out to sea, attempt contact with the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and trust whatever came next.

When Le returned to his helicopter, it was already full. People had climbed aboard from nowhere—men, women, children, carrying whatever they could. The aircraft would not lift. Le ordered ammunition and personal belongings thrown overboard, a painful act after years of hoarding every round. Even then, the Huey strained. Pulling torque beyond prescribed limits, he slid along the pierced steel planking runway, praying the engine would hold. At the runway’s end, with open water ahead, the aircraft sagged—then lifted. Twenty-three refugees and a four-man crew were airborne against all probability.

Le climbed into rain and clouds, switched to an international guard frequency he had never used operationally, and broadcast a simple message: “VNAV 354 for freedom.” After repeated calls, a voice answered. The call sign belonged to the U.S. Seventh Fleet, specifically the carrier USS Midway. Given a transponder code and the words “radar contact,” Le knew he had crossed an invisible line—from hunted to guided. For more than an hour, he flew headings through rain, holding altitude, watching fuel gauges sink toward zero. When he finally broke into clear air, the carrier lay ahead like a floating city.

Le had never landed on a carrier. Matching speed by instinct rather than doctrine, he fixed his eyes on the deck until it seemed motionless and set the Huey down. Marines rushed out with weapons raised. Refugees disembarked, stunned and silent. A Marine officer began counting: twenty-three passengers. Le could not smile. He had done what he came to do, and no more. Like many pilots that day, he had saved lives by exceeding every limit the manual warned against.

From the Midway, Le moved through the improvised machinery of evacuation: transfer ships, Subic Bay, Guam, and eventually the United States. He arrived at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, as a refugee—no uniform, no rank, no certainty. He threw away military rations once American food appeared, a symbolic shedding of the war he had carried with him. At Fort Chaffee, he worked as an interpreter, first for five dollars a week, then for hourly pay with the State Department, helping process the flood of displaced Vietnamese. He delayed resettlement intentionally, choosing to remain among his countrymen rather than disappear immediately into an American household. 

Eventually, Le moved east, navigating sponsorships, misunderstandings, and the small humiliations of exile. He improved his English by speaking and listening, passed his driver’s test in a snowstorm, and drifted through early jobs that bore no resemblance to flying. In Pennsylvania, he found work at Armstrong World Industries, starting as general labor and working his way into a skilled trade. He embraced apprenticeship with the same confidence he had brought to aviation: if you could fly a helicopter, you could learn anything. Over time, he built a civilian lifework, family, citizenship—without ever abandoning the identity forged in the cockpit.

In 1985, a chance encounter reopened a door Le thought closed forever. Conversations with senior officers led him to the Pennsylvania National Guard. Paperwork, lost records, and bureaucratic skepticism slowed the process, but his experience paid off. He returned to military service—not as a refugee, but as a pilot once again. The arc was extraordinary: ARVN aviator, refugee, factory worker, U.S. Army pilot. Few lives trace such a path without breaking somewhere along the way.

In later years, health problems—leading to a liver transplant—ended his flying career. Retirement followed. But service did not stop. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Le joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard, standing graveside for veterans of all wars, many of whom never chose to serve, many of whom returned to lives as quiet as his own had once become. For Le, the work was not ceremonial. It is continuity. The same sense of obligation that kept him flying after 1973, that pushed him into the air on April 30, 1975, now places him in uniform one last time for men and women who deserve acknowledgment at the end of their journey.

Chieu V. Le’s is not simply a tale of escape, nor of assimilation, nor even of heroism—though all three are present. It is a story about professional identity surviving political collapse; about skills carried across borders when nations fail; about service redefined but never abandoned. On April 30, 1975, Le flew for freedom with no map, no orders, and no guarantee. Decades later, he stood quietly at funerals, offering structure and dignity where chaos once reigned.

On Monday, November 16, Chieu V. Le will be laid to rest with full honors at the National Military Cemetery at Fort Indiantown Gap in Annville, Pennsylvania.  

He was one of the bravest soldiers I have had the privilege of knowing. It was Chieu who told me about the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard. His life has ended but his legacy of service and dedication will live on.

Barbarossa Unleashed: The Invasion That Was Lost Before It Began

 

A Review of Craig W. H. Luther's Barbarossa Unleashed: The German Blitzkrieg through Central Russia to the Gates of Moscow, June–December 1941

Craig W. H. Luther's Barbarossa Unleashed is 712 pages of extraordinary detail about the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The book follows Army Group Center from the opening days of Operation Barbarossa through its advance toward Moscow and eventual failure to capture the Soviet capitol. By the time I finished it, Luther had convinced me of something that runs contrary to the popular understanding of the campaign: The German invasion was lost before it began. Not because of the Russian winter, but because of inadequate planning, impossible logistical assumptions, and the extraordinary arrogance of an army convinced of its racial and military superiority.

The book concludes with one of its most memorable sections: excerpts from interviews Luther conducted with more than twenty German veterans of the invasion, men who were in their eighties and nineties when he spoke with them. He asked which Soviet weapon they had feared most.

Two answers dominated: the Soviet multiple rocket launcher, known to the Germans as Stalin's Organ, and the T-34 tank.

The rocket launcher terrified German soldiers because it could suddenly saturate their positions with an overwhelming barrage of rockets. The psychological effect was as devastating as the physical destruction. Soldiers who had entered Russia convinced of German technological superiority found themselves facing a weapon capable of inspiring sheer terror.

The T-34 was an even greater shock. With its sloped armor, powerful gun, wide tracks, and excellent mobility, it was superior in important respects to the German tanks that encountered it in 1941. German intelligence had failed to appreciate that such a formidable tank was already operational in the Soviet Army.

The Germans had invaded a country whose military capabilities they fundamentally misunderstood.

That failure of understanding extended far beyond weapons.

Luther painstakingly reconstructs the movement of German formations, the distances traveled, the casualties inflicted, and, most importantly, the supplies consumed. The accumulation of detail can become exhausting, but it serves an essential purpose. The reader gradually understands that the invasion was built upon assumptions that could not survive contact with reality.

German planners expected the Soviet Union to collapse in a short campaign, before winter. They anticipated destroying the Red Army near the western frontier and advancing rapidly enough to secure victory before their logistical weaknesses became decisive.

Instead, the Soviet Union kept fighting.

By the end of August, Army Group Center had advanced hundreds of miles into Soviet territory, inflicted catastrophic casualties, and captured enormous numbers of prisoners. Yet its offensive strength was deteriorating rapidly.

Near Smolensk, German formations had to pause. Tanks and trucks were wearing out. Fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts could not reach the front in sufficient quantities. The distances were enormous, roads were inadequate, and the railway system could not be converted and restored quickly enough to sustain the advance.

The German Army had achieved spectacular battlefield victories while undermining its ability to continue the war.

Meanwhile, Stalin raised new formations. Despite losing nearly a million soldiers in the opening months, the Soviet Union continued mobilizing men and resources. German commanders had assumed that destroying the armies they initially encountered would destroy Soviet resistance. They had not adequately considered the Soviet Union's capacity to replace its losses.

One of Luther's most revealing contributions is his extensive use of soldiers' letters and diaries, from ordinary enlisted men to senior officers.

These accounts expose the ideological foundations of the invasion. Many German soldiers genuinely believed they belonged to a superior civilization and were fighting racially inferior people. Nazi propaganda had portrayed the Soviet population as Untermenschen, or subhumans, and that contempt permeated the army.

The belief in German superiority was not simply a slogan imposed from Berlin. It shaped how soldiers and commanders understood their mission, their enemy, and their prospects for victory.

They believed their weapons were superior, their training unmatched, and their military organization invincible.

Then came the Russian winter.

The familiar explanation for Germany's defeat invokes "General Winter," as though an extraordinary natural disaster had unexpectedly destroyed an otherwise successful invasion.

Luther's evidence supports a different conclusion.

The Germans had planned a campaign that was supposed to end before winter. Consequently, they were inadequately equipped for the conditions they eventually encountered. German weapons, manufactured to exacting tolerances, could freeze or jam when exposed to extreme cold and contamination. Soviet rifles, machine guns, and submachine guns, often simpler and more tolerant of harsh conditions, continued functioning.

The contrast was a powerful demonstration that engineering excellence depends upon the conditions in which equipment must operate.

But winter did not create the German Army's logistical crisis. It exposed and intensified weaknesses that had been present from the beginning.

The most important lesson of Barbarossa Unleashed is that tactical brilliance cannot compensate for strategic delusion.

The Germans were extraordinarily effective at encircling and destroying Soviet formations. Their commanders understood mobile warfare and exploited opportunities with remarkable speed. But they had no realistic means of sustaining their offensive across the immense distances of the Soviet Union against an enemy capable of absorbing terrible losses and continuing to fight.

Their racial ideology compounded their strategic errors. By dismissing Soviet soldiers as inferior, they underestimated their determination, adaptability, weapons, and capacity for regeneration.

Luther's exhaustive documentation makes this conclusion difficult to escape.

After 712 pages, I came away believing that the German Army was not defeated primarily by the weather, or even by one decisive Soviet battlefield victory. It was defeated by the consequences of its own assumptions.

The veterans' recollections of Stalin's Organ and the T-34 provide a fitting conclusion. Decades after the invasion, these men still remembered the terror of confronting weapons they had been taught to believe an inferior enemy could not produce.

Operation Barbarossa was not merely a failure of military planning. It was a catastrophic demonstration of what happens when ideology replaces intelligence, arrogance substitutes for preparation, and battlefield victories are mistaken for the ability to win a war.

In the Vietnam War, in the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, and the recent War in Iran, American forces never lost a battle. But so far America is 0 for 3 and not looking good for victory in Iran.  The lessons of war are seldom learned. 

George Packer at the Hannah Arendt Forum: Rediscovering Solidarity in an Age of Division

George Packer

At the 2026 Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College, journalist and author George Packer presented a personal and provocative examination of solidarity, the conference's central theme. Drawing on four decades of political involvement, reporting, and observation, Packer traced the disappearance of solidarity from American public life and said that its recovery could begin not with political movements or grand ideological commitments, but with neighbors defending their communities against powerful institutions.

Packer began with a recollection of his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America during the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, the organization was approaching extinction, reduced almost to a political book club. Nevertheless, members concluded their meetings by singing the labor anthem Solidarity Forever, set to the melody of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Packer remembered the emotional power of those gatherings. Members felt united with one another and imagined themselves part of an international working-class movement. Yet even then, he harbored a troubling question: Did the working class actually feel solidarity with them?

That question became increasingly important as Packer spent years reporting on American communities devastated by globalization and the Great Recession. Rather than solidarity, he encountered alienation—from government, economic institutions, political leaders, and even neighbors. People felt abandoned by those exercising power over their lives.

The arrival of social media promised new forms of connection, but Packer argued that its results were frequently destructive. Instead of cultivating mutual responsibility, online communities encouraged tribal loyalties and hostility toward outsiders.

True solidarity, he said, requires something deeper than agreement or shared resentment. It requires recognizing an obligation to others.

Even the COVID-19 pandemic failed to produce that recognition. A common biological threat might have reminded Americans of their shared vulnerability. Instead, disagreements over masks and public health became additional sources of political division.

Nevertheless, Packer found reasons for hope in two experiences during 2026.

The first occurred in Minneapolis, where residents organized to protect neighbors from federal immigration enforcement. People acted on behalf of friends, classmates, and strangers, motivated by their responsibility to the community.

Packer called this genuine solidarity because it involved people working together in a particular place, rather than expressing abstract commitments through political slogans.

His second example came from Clinton, Iowa, a Mississippi River community confronting plans for an enormous artificial intelligence data center. The proposed development would cover an area equivalent to 832 football fields.

Residents across the political spectrum—including MAGA supporters, conventional Republicans, Democrats, and progressives—organized against the project. Their opposition extended beyond concerns about noise, lighting, and environmental disruption. They resented the prospect of a distant technology corporation transforming their community without meaningful consultation.

For Packer, Minneapolis and Clinton revealed a common principle: solidarity emerges when people recognize that they share responsibility for a place and its future. Political differences do not disappear, but they become less important than the recognition that neighbors belong to one another.

Packer concluded by considering artificial intelligence itself. Perhaps AI could accomplish what the pandemic could not: awaken humanity to its shared vulnerability. AI offers extraordinary possibilities, but it also threatens human agency and the ability of ordinary people to control their lives.

In confronting that threat, Packer suggested, humanity might discover a solidarity extending beyond geography, nationality, and political affiliation. His argument echoed Hannah Arendt's insistence that political life depends upon people acting together in a shared world.

Solidarity, Packer reminded his audience, is not simply a feeling of agreement. It is the recognition of mutual obligation, expressed through common action. And perhaps the greatest challenge posed by artificial intelligence is whether humanity can recognize that obligation before surrendering too much of its power to machines and the institutions controlling them.

Solidarity is not created by ideological agreement but emerges when people exercise political freedom together. 

Fifty Years Ago Brigade 76 Reinforced Europe

 

 

Fifty years ago in October the four thousand soldiers of Brigade 76 flew from Colorado Springs to Frankfurt. We climbed into fully combat loaded tanks with 63 live cannon rounds and drove to the East-West border at Fulda.

Tensions with the Soviet Union led the US to send more troops to West Germany and show the Soviet Union our commitment to NATO and Europe. Just 15 years later, against all expectations, the Soviet Union collapsed. Of the four wars I served in or during, the Cold War is the only win.

Which makes Trump's love of Putin that much more horrible. He betrays our allies, Ukraine most of all, and support a truly, deeply genocidal war to erase Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine.  

 

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen's critique of liberalism extends considerably beyond the concerns about loneliness he expressed at the Hannah Arendt Forum.

In his influential 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argued that liberalism has failed not because it betrayed its founding principles, but because it fulfilled them. By emphasizing individual autonomy, personal choice, and liberation from inherited obligations, liberalism has, in his account, weakened families, religious communities, traditions, and the institutions necessary for human flourishing.

Deneen has increasingly associated himself with post-liberal political movements, including those inspired by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In July and August 2025, Deneen participated in discussions at MCC Feszt in Esztergom, Hungary, including a panel on post-liberalism with Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and István Kiss.

The participants challenged the liberal political order and discussed Hungary's emphasis on national sovereignty, traditional families, religion, and border protection as an alternative. Deneen has previously described Hungary's government as an example for American conservatives.

Orbán explicitly embraces the description "illiberal democracy," arguing that democratic government need not rest upon liberal individualism. His critics, however, contend that his government has weakened judicial independence, media pluralism, and institutional checks on executive power.

Orban was resoundingly defeated earlier this year, but despite Orbán’s political setback, Deneen has not publicly renounced his support for Orbán’s model. In interviews and writings, he continues to frame liberalism as having “failed” in undermining social cohesion and national belonging, and he envisions a “post liberal future” rooted in traditional, communitarian, and conservative principles. 

This background creates an important tension with Deneen's Forum address. Arendt warned that loneliness and mass society could prepare the ground for totalitarian domination. Deneen draws upon that warning to criticize liberal individualism, while expressing sympathy for a political alternative whose concentration of power raises its own questions about freedom and pluralism.

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Friendship in Politics on Display

Roger Berkowitz opened the Forum by arguing that political friendship means sharing a world with people whose convictions differ profoundly from our own. He invited Patrick Deneen, whose political philosophy challenges some of the liberal commitments that Arendt's defenders hold dear. 

The invitation itself becomes an example of the solidarity that is the theme of this year's Forum. Deneen's talk was an interesting take on the theme of Solidarity.  

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

 

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

The 20th Hannah Arendt Forum, Bard College — Thursday, October 15, 2026

Patrick Deneen, political philosopher at the University of Notre Dame and prominent critic of modern liberalism, addressed the Hannah Arendt Forum on Thursday with a warning about the growing loneliness and social isolation of modern society. Drawing on the writings of Kurt Vonnegut and Hannah Arendt, Deneen argued that the erosion of human relationships threatens not only individual happiness but also the survival of political freedom.

Deneen began by acknowledging Arendt's influence on his intellectual development. Since graduate school, he explained, her writings have served as a North Star in his thinking about politics and its contemporary crises.

He then turned to a fellow Indiana resident, Kurt Vonnegut. Deneen, originally from Connecticut, has lived in Indiana for fifteen years. Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis, repeatedly explored the costs of modern civilization, particularly the loneliness produced by the dissolution of traditional communities.

Vonnegut was immersed in the horror of war. Captured by the Germans during World War II in the freezing Hell of the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken to Dresden the day before the firebombing of that city. He survived the inferno in a meat processing plant, slaughterhouse five, under the city. More than 25,000 Germans died in the attack.  The firestorm and its aftermath  profoundly shaped his writing. Vonnegut's most famous book is Slaughterhouse Five about the Dresden bombing. Yet Deneen argued that Vonnegut ultimately identified loneliness as one of humanity's greatest modern afflictions.

In a commencement address at Smith College, Vonnegut provocatively described loneliness rather than cardiovascular disease as America's leading killer.

His 1976 novel Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! explored the same concern. Vonnegut drew inspiration from anthropologist Robert Redfield's concept of the "folk society," a relatively small, stable community held together by kinship, shared history, inherited traditions, and relationships extending across generations.

Vonnegut believed human beings naturally longed for such communities. Their disappearance left people increasingly isolated despite the apparent freedoms and material benefits of modern life.

Deneen argued that contemporary social science has repeatedly confirmed this deterioration of human connections. Americans are less likely than previous generations to marry, have children, participate in religious communities, join civic associations, or maintain extensive personal relationships.

Trust has declined, while social media has expanded contact without necessarily providing meaningful human connection.

He cited the U.S. Surgeon General's report on loneliness and isolation, which associated loneliness with a 26 percent increased risk of premature death and social isolation with a 29 percent increase. The report compared the mortality risks associated with insufficient social connection to those of smoking fifteen cigarettes daily.

Deneen jokingly suggested that perhaps people should smoke cigarettes with their friends. 

But the consequences of loneliness extend beyond physical and psychological health. Here Deneen turned to Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism.

He urged his audience to read the final pages of Arendt's monumental work, where she examined the conditions that make totalitarian domination possible.

Arendt recognized that totalitarian movements do not simply impose themselves upon healthy societies. They emerge within societies whose traditional relationships and institutions have already deteriorated.

Individuals who once belonged to families, associations, religious communities, and political organizations become members of an anonymous mass society. Their isolation makes them vulnerable to movements promising belonging, meaning, and collective identity.

Deneen quoted Arendt's warning that loneliness, once largely confined to marginal circumstances such as old age, had become an everyday experience for enormous numbers of people.

For Arendt, this transformation was politically dangerous. The isolated individual, deprived of meaningful relationships and a place in the common world, becomes susceptible to totalitarian domination.

Deneen suggested that modern liberal societies should take this warning seriously rather than congratulate themselves on having escaped the authoritarian catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The very freedoms that liberal societies celebrate may coexist with forms of social disintegration that undermine the foundations of political liberty.

He then considered Arendt's admiration for the ancient Greek polis, the political community in which citizens appeared before one another, spoke, acted, and created a shared public world. 

The polis was not simply an administrative arrangement. It was a place where human actions acquired meaning through their recognition and remembrance by others.

Deneen compared Arendt's polis with Vonnegut's folk society. Both represented forms of human association that gave individuals a place within a larger community and connected their lives to a shared history.

Yet Deneen emphasized that neither thinker was simply nostalgic for an imagined golden age. Vonnegut did not propose recreating traditional village life, nor did Arendt advocate restoring ancient Athens.

Both recognized the achievements of modern freedom while questioning whether liberal societies had adequately preserved the relationships that make freedom meaningful.

Their challenge was to recover forms of association capable of counteracting modern loneliness without abandoning the genuine accomplishments of liberal civilization.

Deneen's argument is a provocative contribution to the Forum's theme of solidarity. Solidarity cannot exist among people who have lost the habits, institutions, and relationships that allow them to recognize one another as members of a common world.

His warning was that loneliness is not merely an unfortunate personal condition. It is a political danger.

A society of increasingly isolated individuals may possess extraordinary material wealth, personal liberty, and technological sophistication while losing the human connections necessary to sustain democratic life.

For Deneen, Vonnegut and Arendt present an unsettling possibility: the greatest threat to a free society did not arise from its enemies, but from the unintended consequences of its own successes.

Solidarity: Roger Berkowitz Opens the 20th Hannah Arendt Forum

 

Roger Berkowitz opened the 20th annual Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College with a deceptively simple question: “What are we fighting for?” The theme of this year's gathering, Solidarity, grew directly from last year's exploration of joy. Berkowitz argued that joy cannot remain a private experience. Loving the world means accepting responsibility for the people with whom we share it.

We live in an age when solidarity is proclaimed everywhere—with Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, immigrants, workers, and victims of injustice. Yet our common world seems increasingly fractured. Berkowitz asked whether our declarations of solidarity actually bring people together or simply reinforce the divisions between them.

His answer, drawn from Hannah Arendt, was that genuine political solidarity requires friendship. Not friendship understood as intimacy or agreement, but the willingness to share a world with people who think differently, challenge us, and sometimes disappoint us.

Berkowitz distinguished three responses to human suffering: pity, compassion, and friendship.

Pity, he argued, looks down upon suffering from above. Drawing on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, he described the Grand Inquisitor, who claims to love humanity while denying people their freedom. The Inquisitor offers bread and security in exchange for obedience. His pity becomes an instrument of domination.

Compassion is different. Dostoevsky's Jesus stands silently before the Inquisitor, offering unconditional love rather than judgment or coercion. Berkowitz quoted Augustine: Volo ut sis—“I want you to be.” Compassion recognizes another person's humanity without demanding that the person change.

But compassion alone cannot create political solidarity. It remains personal and largely silent. Politics requires speech, action, and participation in a common world.

Berkowitz turned to Arendt's experiences helping Jewish refugees in Paris during the 1930s. She discovered that refugees needed more than charitable assistance. They needed work, education, games, singing, reading, and discussion—activities through which people could recover their dignity, freedom, and joy.

He also drew on Arendt's On Revolution, contrasting the French Revolution's emphasis on relieving suffering with the American founders' effort to establish institutions of political freedom. Pity for the poor could justify coercion, while republican institutions offered citizens opportunities to speak and act together.

Friendship provides another possibility. Arendt believed that genuine political friendship emerges through conversation, particularly between people who disagree. Friends do not necessarily share opinions. They share a world and try to understand how that world appears to one another.

This does not mean overlooking evil. Berkowitz emphasized Arendt's insistence upon judgment rather than automatic forgiveness or moral condemnation. Some actions make reconciliation impossible. But judgment considers individuals and circumstances rather than dividing humanity into permanent categories of good and evil.

The forum's program of discussion, music, dancing, and shared experiences was intended to demonstrate this understanding of solidarity.

Berkowitz concluded by returning to Augustine, extending “I want you to be” into a political affirmation: “I want us to share a world.”

Solidarity, he argued, is not simply standing against injustice. It is the patient, difficult, and sometimes joyful work of building a common world with people who are different from ourselves.

Last week Berkowitz published A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, a fascinating exploration of Arendt's view of friendship and a life devoted to friendship and her friends.  I reviewed the book here.

A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker.  But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles.  Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange.  At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences.  Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters.  After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf.  Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends.  In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge.  So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating. 

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.  

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship.  Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests.  The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.

 

 

The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson--A Review

 

I am accustomed to thinking of modern life as a world of networks. The internet and social media make networks almost impossible to ignore. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks are not primarily a modern phenomenon. They have always existed, and understanding them can change the way we understand history.

The title comes from Siena, where the open Piazza del Campo—the square—sits beside the Torre del Mangia—the tower. For Ferguson, they represent two different ways human beings organize themselves: networks and hierarchies. The tower is government, church, army, corporation—the formal structures of authority. The square is the less formal world of friendships, families, intellectual circles, merchants, conspirators, correspondents, revolutionaries, and eventually Facebook.

History, Ferguson asserts, has traditionally been written from the tower. We study kings, presidents, generals, governments, and institutions because hierarchies keep records. Networks are harder to see. Yet again and again, networks have changed the world.

Ferguson ranges enormously widely, from the Renaissance and Reformation through the Enlightenment, revolutionary movements, the Rothschild banking network, imperialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and Silicon Valley. Martin Luther did not simply challenge the Catholic Church; his ideas spread through a network made vastly more powerful by the printing press. Revolutionary movements depended upon networks. Financial power depended upon them. So did scientific and intellectual revolutions.

One of Ferguson's most useful ideas is the importance of the highly connected person—the node through which an extraordinary number of relationships pass. Some people matter historically not simply because of their formal position but because they connect people who otherwise would not be connected. 

C.S. Lewis says this brilliantly in his essay "The Inner Ring." He opens the essay with a passage from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace showing a purple-faced general waiting on a mere captain who was part of an exclusive network.

Power can come from where you stand in a network as much as from where you stand in a hierarchy. That idea immediately made me think of Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Strategists and his portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Seen through Ferguson's lens, their networks provide an interesting measure of their effectiveness. Hitler and Mussolini created powerful and hateful fascist networks that helped carry them to power. But power increasingly isolated them. Hitler ended in his bunker, surrounded by a shrinking circle while the state and military he commanded collapsed around him. Mussolini similarly lost the network that had sustained him and died violently at the hands of his own countrymen.

Stalin is more complicated. He rose through networks as well as the Communist hierarchy, but his paranoia repeatedly destroyed the human connections around him. He managed during the existential crisis of the German invasion to restrain some of that paranoia and listen to capable military commanders. The Soviet Union survived and eventually defeated Nazi Germany. Afterward, Stalin again descended into increasingly poisonous suspicion and isolation.

Churchill and Roosevelt were the opposite. Both were extraordinary networkers. They cultivated politicians, military leaders, journalists, advisers, friends, and correspondents across decades. During the war they became principal nodes in each other's networks. Their correspondence and personal meetings created a relationship that connected two enormous political and military systems. Roosevelt died in 1945, widely beloved, just before victory in Europe. Churchill lived another twenty years and died one of the most revered figures of the century.

Networks certainly do not explain everything about those five men or the outcome of the Second World War. But Ferguson gave me another way of looking at O'Brien's portraits. The ability to create networks may help people acquire power; the ability to maintain them may help determine how effectively they use it.

That is what I liked most about The Square and the Tower. Ferguson did not merely give me another history. He gave me another way of looking at history.  And those are the history books I value most.

Rereading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

 Earlier this year I reread Julius Caesar, probably for the fourth time in forty years. I first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and I can trace something important in my life back to that reading: it led me to Shakespeare. I read Romeo and Juliet in high school but it did not resonate then. Reading Julius Caesar a decade later after seven years in the Army I was enchanted.

I knew almost nothing about Roman history then compared with what I know now. Today I can see everything Shakespeare changed. He compressed events, moved things around, invented conversations, and gave Mark Antony a funeral oration that Antony never delivered, nor could have. The real Anthony was much less cerebral, much more soldier.

None of that diminishes the play for me.

Antony's speech remains my favorite passage in Shakespeare. I have read it again and again, and I still marvel at what happens to those Roman citizens as Antony speaks. "Brutus is an honourable man" begins almost respectfully and gradually becomes devastating. Antony never tells the crowd what to think. He leads them there. It was probably my first great lesson in the power of rhetoric—and in what a writer can do with words.

And Julius Caesar opened the door.

Over the next forty years I kept walking through it. I read the histories, tragedies, comedies, and sonnets. I found Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, hardly original choices for favorites, but I don't feel any need to be original about Shakespeare. They are loved because they deserve to be loved.

What has changed is me.

I read Lear differently five years ago than I could have at thirty. An old man raging against the loss of power, the betrayal of children, the deterioration of the body, and finally death meant one thing when I was an undergraduate. It means something else after four more decades of living. The words haven't changed. I have.

That may be one reason Shakespeare has stayed with me. His characters don't become smaller as I grow older. They become larger. Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's inner conflict, Lear's terrible pride and grief, Brutus's disastrous idealism—I understand more of them because life has given me more with which to understand them.

Next on my list Julius Caesar is Richard III. For all his flaws, he is a soldier.

There are writers I have admired and writers I have loved. Shakespeare is something beyond either category. He has been part of my reading life for more than forty years.

I began with Julius Caesar as an undergraduate.

I'm still reading him.

And I'm still enchanted.

Partly Strong, Partly Broken by Nathaniel Popkin

 

Nathaniel Popkin’s Partly Strong, Partly Broken is a novel about a Jewish congregation, but it is really about the much larger question of what it means to belong to a community when almost everyone in that community disagrees about what it means to belong to a community. Especially to a Jewish community.

At the center is a lesbian rabbi trying to hold together a congregation filled with competing convictions, grievances, friendships, histories, and political commitments. She is pulled in multiple directions, particularly because of her determination that Jewish responsibility extends beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community. Around her, Popkin creates a collection of wonderfully imperfect people whose relationships unfold through Torah study, book discussions, friendships, sexual relationships, family tensions, and tragedy.

Running through the novel is Cain’s question after killing Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Popkin never supplies an easy answer. Instead, he keeps asking variations of it. What do Jews owe one another? What do they owe their neighbors? What does a congregation owe the larger community? What does Israel mean to American Jews? And what happens when obligations to one group appear to conflict with obligations to another? I remember the question of Cain coming up in Torah Study in my synagogue.  One guy folded his arms across his chest and said, "Who is my neighbor?"  

One of the pleasures of the novel is that these questions emerge from recognizable Jewish lives, not abstractions. Popkin can be very funny. Theo and Celia spend years as friends before finally becoming lovers after Theo asserts himself in public. After a lot of sex inside a vacation house Celia brings him to, Theo is not sure he wants a blow job by the pool. Throughout the book, the rabbi frets about her relationship with her lover--a Palestinian Arab woman who lives in Israel.  And when the rabbi goes to the beach to have a day alone before the high holy days, she drives her Subaru--of course.

The novel ends just as news of the slaughter on October 7 reaches America.  All of the various conflicts remain unresolved as events in Israel threaten to make every existing division within the congregation deeper. Popkin does not resolve anything. We know that these people are going to continue arguing because the questions they are arguing about cannot be settled. 

I read Partly Strong, Partly Broken while traveling through Europe just before the Jewish High Holy Days, and it made the book personal. I found myself thinking about what kind of Jew I am, what I mean when I call myself a believer, and how much I actually want to belong to any religious community.

Popkin has written an engaging novel about American Jewish life, but also something larger: a novel about the difficult difference between having an identity and accepting the obligations that come with it.

And like the best Jewish arguments, it ends without ending.

The Strategists: Character, Strategy, and the Fate of the World

 

Phillips Payson O’Brien’s The Strategists is ostensibly a study of five wartime leaders—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini—but beneath its military history lies a fascinating argument about character. These men possessed enormous power over the greatest war in history, and the ways they exercised that power cannot be separated from the people they had become long before 1939.

One of the book’s vivid patterns is childhood. With the important exception of Roosevelt, O’Brien’s subjects experienced childhoods marked by serious rejection, deprivation, or violence, even by the standards of their era. Churchill suffered emotional rejection and verbal abuse. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini grew up amid poverty and violence; the latter three were themselves brutal and troublesome young men. O’Brien does not offer childhood trauma as a simple explanation for dictatorship. But these early experiences help illuminate the extraordinary insecurity, vanity, aggression, and need for dominance that later characterized several of these leaders.

Roosevelt stands apart. Born to privilege and raised in a secure environment, he possessed plenty of vanity and self-confidence, but his confidence did not require him to be right about everything. That distinction becomes enormously important. Roosevelt could change his mind, tolerate competing advisers, and adopt new technologies and strategies. His great strategic insight was that the United States should exploit its immense industrial power rather than fight the kind of war its enemies expected.

Churchill, despite a profoundly different personality, shared some of this flexibility. Both men understood that the Second World War would not simply be a larger version of the First. Air and sea power could destroy enemy production, transportation, shipping, and fuel supplies while Allied industry created forces the Axis could never match. Roosevelt especially understood that American factories, aircraft, ships, and logistical networks were themselves weapons of war.

Hitler and Mussolini were far less adaptable. Both remained intellectually trapped in the First World War. Mussolini emerges as particularly inadequate to the responsibilities he had assumed. He wanted greatness without possessing either the military resources or strategic judgment required to achieve it. Worse, he was extraordinarily sensitive to what he imagined to be the will and enthusiasm of the Italian people. Strategy became theater. Decisions that should have depended upon industrial capacity, logistics, geography, and military reality instead depended upon prestige and emotion.

Hitler’s failure was different and ultimately far more destructive. Early victories reinforced his conviction in his own genius. When his decisions succeeded, the successes proved his superiority. When they failed, the failures did not disprove it: generals, allies, weather, inadequate will, or betrayal were responsible. As Germany’s military position deteriorated, Hitler became not more flexible but more certain. Reality increasingly had to conform to Hitler rather than Hitler adapting to reality.

Stalin presents the most complicated case. His prewar brutality and catastrophic purges had badly damaged the Soviet state and military. Yet the existential crisis created by the German invasion forced him to adapt. He learned to rely more heavily on competent commanders and to make decisions based upon military necessity. For a time, survival disciplined Stalin. Once Soviet victory became increasingly certain, however, the old Stalin reemerged. Success reduced the necessity for flexibility.

This is where O’Brien’s portraits acquire implications far beyond biography. The personalities of five individuals helped determine where armies marched, which weapons were built, how economies were organized, and ultimately whether millions of people lived or died. Character became strategy, and strategy became history.

The contrast is especially striking because arrogance was hardly confined to the dictators. Roosevelt and Churchill could be vain, stubborn, and badly wrong. The crucial difference was not that democratic leaders always made better decisions. It was that they remained capable of recognizing new realities and changing course.

That fits the larger argument running through O’Brien’s work. Modern war is not ultimately decided by heroic battlefield gestures alone. It depends upon production, technology, transportation, fuel, shipping, aircraft, and the ability to replace what has been destroyed. Roosevelt and Churchill increasingly grasped this. Hitler and Mussolini never fully did.

Perhaps the most profound lesson of The Strategists is therefore not about World War II at all. Great power magnifies character. An insecure man’s vanity can become a nation’s strategy; an inability to admit error can become an army’s catastrophe. Conversely, curiosity, adaptability, and the willingness to listen can become strategic assets as consequential as battleships and bombers.

O’Brien shows us five enormously powerful men confronting the same global catastrophe. Their circumstances mattered. Their economies mattered. Their armed forces mattered. But so did something much harder to quantify: who they were when the moment came to decide.

Brave New World: The Dystopia We Chose

 

In the swirl of dystopian novels, movies and video series that haunt my mind, I had the idea that I had read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I hadn't read it. The Brave New World is a bright, fun, full of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but at the same time it is a genetically engineered hell where no one is allowed solitude and thinking will eventually get one banished to a remote island.  

The utopia Huxley imagines is more comprehensive and creepy than George Orwell's 1984, which imposes its horror on an existing society, much like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Mao's China.  The Brave New World eliminated birth and parents and family, the state is all.  Children are grown from embryos and seeded in five categories: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon in descending order of mental capacity.  

The population gets daily doses of the drug Soma to keep everyone happy.  Sex is entirely recreational with woman wearing contraceptive bandoliers. Entertainment is everywhere. Solitude forbidden. The only books are engineering and operating manuals.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 follows Huxley in the sense that entertainment--the screens--are the real center of control. Burning books is almost unnecessary. Most people don't want them. They want interactive video.  

The video series Pluribus is a another twist on Huxley. A pandemic makes the whole world "nice" except a dozen people.  The question that animates the series: "Do want to live in a world without conflict? What price will we pay?" 

All dystopian novels in the past century are inspired to some extent by WE written by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

I am glad I read it, but won't reread it. In one sense Huxley got closer to modern reality than anyone else. But while his predictions are amazing, he is not a great storyteller.  I never found myself absorbed into the world of the novel the way I did in reading A Canticle for Liebowitz--the post-nuclear war dystopia by Walter Miller Jr. The irony and artistry of Miller is wonderful.