Levin Professor of History at Yale. Author of "On Freedom," "On Tyranny," with 20 new lessons on Ukraine, "Our Malady," "Road to Unfreedom," "Black Earth," and "Bloodlands"
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Once in a while I will review a book that I happen to come across. Today that is Philip K. Dick’s 1962 classic novel of oppression and liberation, The Man in the High Castle.
We don’t know why we read what we read, nor what a novel will do to us: and that is the premise of Dick’s story. On the surface it is about the aftermath of German-Japanese victory in the Second World War. But its real subject is reading and world-making.
The other night in Prague I had a few minutes to myself, and chanced to see the mint-colored spine of The Man in the High Castle. Something moved my hand. I was planning to run the next morning on a hill called “Vyšehrad,” which means “upper castle.” Was it that? I was about to go on stage and speak about freedom; perhaps I sensed that Dick had something to say about the subject.
I knew that the The Man in the High Castle was about a German-Japanese occupation of the United States. I had always assumed that the titular figure was a German with a secret to keep. I was wrong. He is an American novelist who had written a counter-factual novel that appears within Dick’s counterfactual novel. The dominant story is that of “reality” -- the German-Japanese victory. But the other version -- the “novel” -- asserts itself ever more over the course of the book.
In the beginning, we have no reason to expect this. We are drawn in to the world of defeated Americans in San Francisco. Dick does not directly describe the Japanese occupation regime. We get the the inner experiences, all too plausible, of Americans for whom life was elsewhere. The Americans have internalized their own subordinate position, each in a way that corresponds to a specific set of character traits. Their language adapts to the way the Japanese speak English; even their thoughts do.
Dick makes imperialism in California seem unproblematic. The place has been run from all sorts of distant power centers, so why not Tokyo? By completely normalizing Japanese rule, Dick achieves something very interesting, which is to show us how other novels set in California, let us say a Raymond Marlowe detective story, normalize American rule.
There is no apparent resistance to the Japanese; what we see is more like the creative protection of individual interests that historians might call “agency.” The Japanese are interested in prewar Americana, much as Americans might have been interested in Native arts and crafts. And so some of the characters produce and sell fake antiques for the Japanese market. A pair of Americans (one of them Jewish) break away from the scam and produce contemporary jewelry and try to sell it as such. A potential Japanese buyer sees the jewelry as suitable only for a global colonial market: as mass-market trinkets, in other words. A lesson is being taught in the relationship between power and taste. The Japanese are themselves buying fake junk, which become masterpieces because they are the masters. Authentic art becomes mass-market trinkets for the same reason.
It all might have been different, Dick seems to be saying, because had it been different it would have been very much the same. Various prejudices can be mobilized to the same effect, different hierarchies can be enforced into the practical invisibility of everyday life, and we would take it all for granted. Most of the culture would simply bend; but perhaps not all of it.
We would need something, a special kind of art, perhaps a book of a different sort, to help us see through our own reality to some sort of other possibility. The man in the high tower, the novelist Hawthorn Abendsen, has written a counterfactual history, a bestselling novel, about a world in which the British and the Americans actually won the war. And so we have a novel within the novel, which turns up everywhere, and of which we are given some striking passages. This book works its magic not only on the Americans but on everyone who reads it, including Germans.
Our view of them is even more askance. We see only a few Germans from the inside. We have very little access to the Nazi puppet regimes in the eastern United States nor Nazi rule anywhere else in the world -- though we are given to understand that the Nazis have continued the Holocaust in America and have tried to exterminate every inhabitant of Africa. Another crime of a similar scale is in the works.
The Nazis are at once sure of themselves and psychologically vulnerable, caught in a cycle of spectacular crimes that distract them from tedious infighting. By 1962, when the book is set, Hitler has gone mad from syphilis, and has been succeeded by Martin Bormann. After Bormann’s sudden death, the remaining Nazi leaders struggle for power, the main contenders being Goebbels, Göring, and Heydrich.
Dick’s counterfactual presentation of Nazism seventeen years after victory is very good. He knew the essentials of what could be known about the mass killing of Jews, about the Hitlerian fixation with Ukraine, about divisions within the regime.
Although Berlin is distant, the succession struggle ripples through across the Atlantic and across North America to the Japanese-dominated west coast. A German from the Abwehr (military intelligence) has come to California undercover (hiding from other Germans, mainly) in order to reach a faction of the Japanese government. The chaos in Berlin makes his mission more complicated. He has to urge the Japanese to support Heydrich, whose enormous crimes he knows very well, because it appears that Goebbels would be more likely to commit the next great atrocity.
The military intelligence officer sees himself as among choices that are worse than imperfect, but that nevertheless must be made. He is pursued by the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, which is ultimately Heydrich’s organization; at their low level, they are just doing their job. He himself sees the Heydrich fraction as the worst of the worst, but it so happens that in one crucial respect that are less awful than the Goebbels fraction, and so in this particular conjuncture must be supported. “We can only control the end by making choices at each step,” he reflects.
The major act of resistance in the book is carried out by someone who has contact with all three zones -- the Japanese, the buffer, the German. She is a woman, a survivor of sexual violence, who over the course of the story moves from being almost mute to the most articulate character in the book. Julianna Crain has left her husband, one of the jewelry makers, for reasons that are private and unclear; they seem to like each other, but something has not worked. That he is Jewish matters to her approach to Nazis. In the Colorado of the buffer zone she encounters, at first unknowingly, an undercover Nazi agent who has been sent to kill the novelist Hawthorn. She does with him what she believes she needs to do.
The puzzling ending is better not described in detail. The gist, though, is that the world in which the story unfolds is one possible view of things, and the world of the novel within the novel is another possible view of things, but that neither exhausts all the possibilities. The last chapter can be understood in various ways, one of which is this: the Americans are, in fact, their own Japanese and their own Germans.
It might be, Dick seems be telling us, that the apparent premise of the book is illusory: it matters not so much who actually won and who actually lost a war as what we do with ourselves afterwards. We don’t need defeat to a foreign power to adapt to everyday authority or to invite atrocious violence; we Americans might do this without any excuse beyond self-delusion.
And while that might seem a dark conclusion, it is also an empowering one: the story, in the end, is ours. Power over us depends on a certain kind of charisma, ultimately on a “bluff.” This does not mean, Dick seems to be saying, that everything is easy; his most effective characters take the chances they are given and are aware that every choice is fraught with risk. It does mean that many of the restraints upon us are the ones that we choose, and that we are more likely to take practical action when we can imagine a world that is very different.
(PS: I should clarify that this review is of the novel, which I have just read, and not of the miniseries, which I have not seen; I believe that its plot is different.)
On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term has since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.
As media gets monopolized the real stories get harder to cover. But also as Leah says — logic. Protests aren’t a video game. They’re not a push-button event. They are the result of the moral, political, and physical effort of organizers who are also doing the other work we need for a democracy.
I was at a No Kings rally yesterday and rather than writing another essay about why this matters I will just say that it is pure joy to meet the people who want to stand out and the people who are doing the work. Thank you.
Tomorrow, March 28th, I will join millions of Americans taking part in No Kings protests throughout the country. I hope you will join in. Everything is at stake.
Prosperity. The wealth of workers is handed to oligarchs.
The Constitution. One person seeks unrestrained power.
Justice. The innocent are punished while the guilty believe in impunity.
Peace. Americans kill and die in a war whose purpose is to keep us down.
Democracy. Those in power seek to eliminate the right to vote. .
All of this can be seen. All of this can be stopped. A better America is around the corner.
And protest is the first step to that better future. We know that non-violent protest works. It helps to stop authoritarian takeovers. And it opens the way for a better politics to come. How?
Protest changes the atmosphere. For authoritarians to win, they need their supporters to be active, the majority to be silent, and their actions to seem normal. Protest shows that their supporters are in the minority, that the majority will not be silent, and that it is the people who set the standards.
Protest summons more protest. When some of us act, others will follow. When you attend a protest next Saturday, bring someone with you. And know that when you do so, you are setting an example. These No Kings protests are the largest such actions in US history, and each one is bigger than the last.
Protest keeps us organized. There will not only be more people protesting this time, there will be more protests. Thousands of them. And this is the work of organizers, of civil society. When you attend a protest, you have a chance to meet others, and see how they organize. When I am speaking next Saturday, I will pause as I did last time to ask people to introduce themselves to those around them.
Protest affirms freedom. We have the right to assemble freely. We have the right to speak freely. But these rights become real when we avail ourselves of them. When we do what we believe is right, in the knowledge that those in power would like it otherwise, we are acting as free people. This is practice that we all need. When we say “No Kings,” we mean freedom.
Protest wins elections. In the situation that we are in now, the opposition must win elections to halt the shift to a one-person, one-party authoritarian regime. And although these elections will be difficult, they can be won. But winning them means building a big, active coalition, of which the opposition party is just one part. Protestors are another part. The groups we build together are what make the difference.
Protest brings joy. It feels good to be active and to be with other people. It dispels the loneliness we might experience when we are alone or online. When we realize that we are with millions of others, we feel we can make a difference, because we are making a difference: in the world, and in ourselves.
Protest changes us. There isn’t any going back. There is only what we make next. When we get to the other side, what we will have to guide us as we make new things is the experience of resistance now. What we can make next depends on what we learn now, on who we become now, by acting, by taking part.
Please step up. And step out. Everything depends on this. On us.
A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or “federalize” the coming Congressional elections.
Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses.
We lack any other explanation for the war, at least from the American side. Trump is incoherent, and his administration is inconsistent. Much of what has been said about Iran is not true. The propaganda is contradictory. It is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started.
We must anticipate, with sadness and resolution. We will be horrified, but we cannot be surprised, if there is a terrorist attack on the United States. If we choose to be surprised, we co-create a moment that Trump will exploit to undo what remains of our democracy. If the unthinkable happens, it will happen because some of Trump’s people thought about it, some of them created the conditions for it, and some of them looked away. The responsibility for catastrophe will be theirs. And the responsibility for democracy will be ours.
This war isn’t an emergency that requires us to give the president more latitude. It’s a monstrosity that requires that judges, lawmakers and above all citizens work to preserve the integrity of elections and the republic.
This “it’s not a war but a special military operation” is very Kremlin March 2022. As is the propaganda that we are not starting a war but ending one. As is the confusion of oligarch media as it tries to be faithful in the confusion…
Starting a foreign war to undo democracy is one of the oldest tricks in the books — and I fear that is exactly what’s happening. We shouldn’t fall for it.
Thoughts on Iran. The facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.
On MAHA and Expensive Suffering -- A Guest Post by Sara Silverstein
Professor Sara Silverstein is someone to whom I listen on issues of health and history. This essay helps us to situate the present American health drama in the history of health care, and thereby to see much more clearly what we face. It draws from her forthcoming book For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health.
Thoughts on Trump's State of the Union. My sense is that Trump needs a foreign war to pull this fascist transition through. But he’s stuck—and while we are stuck with him, we can also push back.
A video I made yesterday. Today marks 4 years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Some thoughts on what Ukrainians have done for all of us and what we can learn from them.
Exactly four years of war, as of today. The cemeteries in Ukraine are larger than they should be. Fresh graves change the landscapes, as seen from a car or a train; the short spans of life, seen inscribed in stone, alter the reaction of the heart.
The Olympics look different from different places, depending, for example, on whether your viewing might be interrupted by an air raid siren or your electricity cut by a missile attack.
