The Fall of the Soviet Union; Knights of the Old Republic 2; Let's Get Out of This Country
Every great historical event happens because of human choices.
This is a truth that is too little recognized in the modern world--and never more than now, in 2026, when the default position on political and geopolitical affairs might be described as "numb resignation." Human history is affected greatly, shaped and molded and turned this way or that, by material conditions and purely natural events: but it is determined by human choices.
These choices, it is true, are not always or primarily individual choices: they are often necessarily understood in terms of things like economics and politics and culture and religion, which together constitute the human and historical material and the human historical consequences of the human power of choice.
I cannot, as an individual, decide what the constitution of the United States will be. I can, however, certainly contribute by my words and actions and inactions to a broader public and political sense of what the constitution of the United States is or should be: and sooner or later, that public and political sense will demand or elicit choices by individual leaders to accept or reject or mold or modify or submit to those trends. It is on such collective and individual choices that the history of institutions and peoples is built.
Sometimes, in the course of human events, one comes to the end of something: which is always and at the same time the beginning of something else.
Faced with the end of a human and historical reality--a state, perhaps, or a relationship, or a school, or a club, or even merely a board game--there are only really ever two choices available to the participants, ordinary and powerful alike. One is renewal: the choice to continue a thing and restore it, which always means in some measure both to return it to its original bases and aim it at its original goals, and at the same time to change it to respond to and take into account new conditions and circumstances and understandings. The second is collapse: which means in practice the repeated, determined choice not to renew the institution, but instead to let it continue to function badly and fail to achieve its ends and fail to respond to changed conditions and understandings--which often means, as well, to at least some extent the choice to prey on that institution, to actively help along its collapse by plundering it for resources or parts or personnel or exploiting it to achieve self-interested ends.
In this essay, we will be looking at three works of art that reflect on this essential dichotomy of choices: one a scholarly study of the collapse of the Soviet Union, another a video game about the fall and rise of the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic, and a third an indie pop album about purity and desire.
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021)
On December 30th, 1922, the Soviet Union came into existence; and on December 26th, 1991 it ceased to exist. This is what the history books say.
States, though, are not born like people; and they do not die like them. A state is an artifact, the product and embodiment of conscious human choices. They live because people want them to live, and they die for the same reason.
Of course, to say this is emphatically not to say that the choices involved are merely arbitrary. People make states, or consent to their making, for the sake of some goal, some good--nearly always a common good. This is natural in the Aristotelean sense, though not always prudent.
The Russian Empire collapsed during WW1 in a military mutiny after a military defeat: shortly thereafter, the German Empire collapsed for the same reason. In a world of dictatorial wartime regimes using force to conscript vast armies from people of every class and occupation, militaries, as Chesterton pointed out, were by far the most democratic and representative institutions around: and they had guns to vote with.
The collapse of the Tsarist Russian Empire in 1917, though it took most people by surprise in its timing and swiftness, was something that had been anticipated for some time, particularly since the abortive revolution of 1905. Properly understood, though, the Empire had been faced with a fundamental crisis of legitimacy since at least the early 19th century: one occasioned, ironically, mostly by the regime's own former successes.
Since the time of Peter the Great, the originally Mongol dependency of Muscovy had explicitly based its legitimacy on imitation of and competition with the European Great Powers in state-building, taxation, military might, and conquest. In the secularizing, competitive-dynastic Western Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries this had meant the subjection and secularization of the Church and the centralization of political and religious authority around a dynastic autocracy presiding over a tax-and-spend bureaucracy and a well-drilled professional military engaged in territorial conquest and plunder--or, in other words, the France of Louis XIV.
Russia only ever succeeded very partially in its endeavor to be France; though it did succeed in producing both a French-speaking aristocracy and the largest territorial, multi-ethnic Empire in Eurasia since the Mongols. Eastern Europe was not really all that much like the densely-populated, wealthy trading cities over which the French and Germans and Dutch competed to extend their sway in Central and Northern Europe; so that what the Tsars ended up creating looked not at all like the expanded, centralized nation-state of France that the Kings of France built, and much more like what Genghis Khan and his Mongols had forged, a thin layer of officialdom superimposed over a vast peasant population spread across enormous territories speaking numerous languages and dialects and following many religions. Whatever legitimacy the Tsar and his forces might have over this promiscuous mass, it was premised in large part on the sheer foreign spectacle and conspicuous success of his French-dynastic state and German-professional military.
And then, unfortunately for the Czar, the French State went bankrupt and collapsed; and Europe entered an entirely different era with entirely different ideas and sources of legitimacy.
This was the essential irony of 19th century Russia: that far from the rigid Tsarist autocracy constituting a pre-modern or "Eastern" throwback, as was sometimes imagined, it was in fact a quite recent European importation--only one that the Europeans themselves had now decided to throw over in favor of fresher models. Even the French model of land-based dynastic expansion had been superseded in most people's eyes by the British model of far-flung commercial-colonial expansion. Ethnic nationalism had emerged from the fires of the French Revolution as a key method of legitimation for European governments, as had new liberal laws and forms of popular sovereignty. Perhaps most threatening of all, at least in the long run, was the French Revolutionary introduction of mass popular conscription.
The Napoleonic invasion of Russia highlighted very well for the Tsarists the strange new world they were entering, where entire armed and conscripted populations would fight, not for dynasties, but for nations and ideologies. Though Tolstoy and others did their best to retrospectively paint this conflict as a popular war of mystical national liberation, the Russian officer corps at the time was largely German, and the Emperor Alexander I an inconsistent Francophile liberal and follower of the Lutheran German pietist mystic Barbara von Krüdener. In the long run, the Tsars were even less able to cope with the 19th century world than Napoleon was able to cope with the Russian winter.
The liberal romantic nationalism fostered by the French Revolution simply could not legitimize 18th century autocratic Empires like Russia; it could only be repressed by force. The defeat of Napoleon and membership in the "Holy Alliance" initially promised the Tsars a way to square the circle by way of a new Prussian-centric model of militaristic centralized nationalistic Imperial-colonial autocracy. this, though, ultimately proved to be an unworkably repressive model for multi-ethnic Empires like Austria and Russia.
Somewhat pathetically, then, the Tsars attempted to use the castrated corpse of Russian Orthodoxy, which they themselves had destroyed, as a basis for a new Orthodox Empire to be carved out of the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire; but found in practice that new Orthodox states like Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro were much more interested in their own nationalist causes and interests than in swearing fealty to either the Tsar or the Procurator of the Holy Synod. In any case, refashioning the avowedly secular and Europhilic dynastic autocracy of the Tsar over the many nations of the Empire into a mystical embodiment of Russian religious and national feeling was no easy task; and to say that 19th century Tsars did not succeeded is a profound understatement.
The 19th century, though, was the era of the British Empire; and so an unsteady Russian regime unwisely committed itself to a long-term rivalry with a United Kingdom, a contest defined by naval power, commerce, and industrialization--three things that the Russians were absolutely terrible at. Russia simply could not compete on any of these fronts, as the Crimean War demonstrated. Hardly had efforts begun to industrialize the Empire when the rise of socialism, anarchism, and other left-wing anti-capitalist movements threatened to make even these efforts delegitimizing; and by the first decade of the 20th century many people across Europe were expecting the fall of the Tsar and the formation of a new regime.
The Tsar was caught in a highly ironic vice: it was precisely his institutionalized adherence to and success in imitating past European ideals that damned him in the eyes of every contemporary European movement. A century of inconsistent efforts at modernization had left Russia, at the turn of the 20th century, a bizarre hybrid: a minimally industrialized, largely agricultural, multi-ethnic state with an extraordinarily autocratic and militarized and expansionistic government grounded in dynastic loyalty and slavish imitation of European (by this time German and British) models and a vague national-religious appeal. Russia was to many people, including many of its own citizens, simply a contradiction in terms: and so in urgent need of revolutionary transformation or overthrow.
The Tsar was caught in a highly ironic vice: it was precisely his institutionalized adherence to and success in imitating past European ideals that damned him in the eyes of every contemporary European movement. A century of inconsistent efforts at modernization had left Russia, at the turn of the 20th century, a bizarre hybrid: a minimally industrialized, largely agricultural, multi-ethnic state with an extraordinarily autocratic and militarized and expansionistic government grounded in dynastic loyalty and slavish imitation of European (by this time German and British) models and a vague national-religious appeal. Russia was to many people, including many of its own citizens, simply a contradiction in terms: and so in urgent need of revolutionary transformation or overthrow.
Even so, the collapse of the Russian Empire was certainly not inevitable--and likely would not have happened in the 1910s without the combination of WW1's extraordinary mass mobilization and conscription on the one hand, and brutal military defeat on the other.
Militaries are always political institutions, dependent for their command authority not simply on force or coercion, but also on highly particular forms of moral legitimation: which have to be strong enough to ensure, not merely general adherence to a government or code of laws, but the suffering of overwhelming hardships and willing sacrifice of lives. In that sense, the collapse of the Russian Empire was straightforward: the multi-ethnic conscripts of the Russian Army reached a point of hardship and disillusion where they ceased to obey the Tsar and his officers, or rather where they began to obey other voices in preference to his.
Still, that the collapse of Imperial Russia resulted in the eventual coming to absolute power of a small faction of militant Socialists has been viewed, and was viewed at the time, as a notable surprise. In a situation of military defeat and starvation, it seems strange to many people that so many would commit their lives and fortunes not to practical men capable of giving peace and bread, but to the most abstracted and extreme group of intellectuals available anywhere. Such people do not understand human nature; or even what the human desires for peace and bread are actually about.
In the never-ending crisis of war, it is true, military mutineers had little scope to conceive or realize any political goals save safety, stability, and bread. It was precisely for this reason that they fell such easy prey, in both Germany and Russia, to determined intellectual minorities promising to monopolize state power for ideological visions.
This is a general historical principle: where material conditions are harsh and material concerns predominate, purely moral legitimacy predominates also.
After all, where the building of a stable and functioning state seems impossible, utopia makes for a better motivation than a stable and functioning state; and where bread is scarce, even bread starts to look like a utopia. Perhaps more cogently, in a Tsarist state and military disorganized at every level and lacking the legitimacy to give commands, the Bolshevists provided the all-important imperatives of organization and initiative. Or, simplest of all, in a military mutiny the Bolshevists were ready and willing to give orders to soldiers desperate for someone, anyone, to obey. And so, the German Empire became a Socialist Republic, and the Russian Empire a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
To do them credit, even once taking power the ultimate ruling coterie around Vladimir Lenin showed themselves by no means the stupid and inflexible ideologues they are sometimes portrayed; they were, in fact, from the beginning a remarkably clever and adaptable new officialdom, eager to modify their schemes to fit conditions. Lenin is remembered for his brutality in consolidating power; but would perhaps better be remembered for his folding in the face of peasant resistance and not implementing either collective agriculture or a pervasively State-socialist economy after all.
As a new government, the Bolshevists were quite conscious that their legitimacy depended on appeal to new European ideas, clear and dramatic breaks with the Tsarist past, and practical successes at feeding the people. And so, they generously transformed the Empire's regions into incipient ethnic nation-states, generously allowed the peasants to retain their land and sell their food to the cities, and generously formed a new centralized autocratic state presiding over a professionalized military. This was from perspective a remarkable accomplishment, and from another a remarkable surrender; it is not always easy to tell these things apart.
This proem is necessary, among other reasons, because it is really impossible to understand the fall of the Soviet Union without understanding its rise; just as it is really impossible to understand the Soviet state's eventual failure without grasping its intermediary successes.
At the very least, as the extensive and bitter scholarly monograph Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok makes very clear, one cannot understand the fall of the Soviet Union without understanding the beliefs and character and decisions of Mikhail Gorbachev; and one cannot understand the beliefs and character and decisions of Mikhail Gorbachev without realizing that he was in his heart of hearts a quite committed and idealistic Leninist.
One could see this as an irony, I suppose; though it is in fact the fundamental question of the Soviet Union and perhaps of the 20th century as a whole. Put simply, the Soviet Union was born under Lenin as a quixotic, adaptive effort at the top-down bureaucratic implementation of the idealistic and utopian values of revolutionary 19th century British industrial Leftism in the un-industrialized multi-ethnic agricultural heartland of Eastern Europe; but under Stalin transformed into a brutal terroristic campaign for the rapid industrialization and collectivization and militarization of that heartland after all.
The two visions, of course, shared in theory an ultimate goal: the inevitable global triumph of state socialism and the emergent "communist" utopia of leisure. Yet in practice, the two operated in almost opposite ways. Where Lenin had yielded, Stalin murdered; where Lenin held firm, Stalin made deals. Perhaps most importantly, where Lenin had been motivated ultimately by a positive vision of a utopian future, Stalin was most motivated by an essentially paranoid vision of Imperial and territorial security.
Stalin pointed out throughout his reign that he was in essence doing little more than completing the basic system of state socialism that Lenin had aspired to; and he had a point. Still, without grasping this relative dichotomy of Lenin and Stalin, one cannot grasp the mind or actions of Mikhail Gorbachev; who was himself obsessed with this dichotomy and used it as his primary guide and leading light in planning and executing the reforms of perestroika.
Collapse gives relatively short shrift to Gorbachev's ideas and ideals--it is in essence a quite cynical post-Pandemic take on this great event of the '90s, and therefore overtly dedicated to portraying the traditional hero Gorbachev as an idealistic fool. I liked and admired the book's detailed narratives: and yet found myself at the end of it entirely unconvinced by its major theses and with a very unexpected and newfound respect for Gorbachev. Such is the life of a scholar with a thesis.
Still, the historical narrative laid out by Zubok does helpfully center one factor without which one cannot understand the fall of the Soviet Union at all: namely, the fundamental underlying economic crisis of the Soviet State, which originated long before Gorbachev but ultimately resulted in him being handed ultimate power in the '1980s as the Communist Party's designated reformer.
This crisis was in immediate terms the fact that by the 1980s the Soviet Union had accrued an extraordinarily bad trade and credit balance with the West, exporting almost solely raw materials in exchange for finished goods and especially food, and in the process greatly indebted to and increasingly outright owned by Western banks. As Zubok correctly notes, all of this was true well before Gorbachev took power; and all of it got worse steadily during Gorbachev's reign. Zubok charges Gorbachev with naiveté and irresponsibility both in failing to come up with and implement a true comprehensive economic reform program, and in his concomitant decision to prioritize political reform of the Union and international contacts.
If there is a weakness to Zubok's treatment of the collapse, though, it is in the lack of realization of the origins of this Soviet economic crisis; as well as in his remarkable naiveté about Gorbachev's political position and choices. Writing in 2021, Zubok has a very straightforward idea of what Gorbachev ought to have done to reform the Soviet economy while preserving the Soviet Union: which might not unfairly be summarized as "just do what China did"!
After all, roughly in parallel to the Soviet Union's collapse, Maoist China used the repressive machinery of a nominally Communist state to force through against widespread opposition the creation of a state-directed and -regulated market economy leading to widespread privatization and entrepreneurship, the building of an urban middle class, manufacturing and trade dominance in cheap consumer goods, and ultimately a housing bubble leading to economic collapse--or, in other words, modernity! The students on Tianmen square, Zubok points out, were in fact protesting market reforms and calling for a return to socialism; and were crushed by a Communist Party now fully committed to using its tanks and bombs and guns to implement state capitalism. In the 1990s, people had naively believed that capitalism could only be fostered by political democracy and liberal rights; but by the 2020s, so the story goes, China had proved otherwise.
I have to say that, in 2026, I am a bit less convinced either that what China did in the 1990s was wildly successful, even economically, or that it was ever even remotely possible for Gorbachev to do the same. It is here that Zubok is not only rather vague on details, but also committed to a version of precisely the "inevitability thesis" that he derides in his introduction. Accounts that see the collapse of the Soviet Union as inevitable simply due to the nature of Communism are indeed quite silly; but so too is Zubok's repeated declarations that Gorbachev simply could not have succeeded in politically and economically reforming the Soviet Union at the same time. This his own narrative seems to bely at numerous points.
There are several reasons I differ from Zubok's assessment, both of which boil down to my belief that he is making the same fundamental tragic mistake that so many have made since the 1920s: underestimating Joseph Stalin. It was because of Stalin in particular that the economic crisis of the Soviet Union was so much more serious and fundamental than the situation of China in the 1980s or after; and because of Stalin that the political crisis of legitimacy was so much more urgent as well.
The world remembers well the mass death and chaos caused both by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China; yet this death and chaos was a marker not of success, but of failure. Perhaps more importantly, the failure of both efforts was widely acknowledged in China; and by the time Mao Zedong died in 1976, decollectivization in agriculture was already well underway as a bottom-up process of the reclaiming of land by a still-existing peasant class.
Put most simply, we can say that China and Eastern Europe were both the heartlands of ancient traditional agricultural peasantries: and that the principal difference in the end between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union was that the former ultimately failed to destroy their peasantry, and the latter succeeded.
Stalin set himself quite consciously for decades to completely destroy the traditional peasant social and economic and cultural structures of all Eastern Europe ethnicities; and he succeeded. The index of his success is the simple, staggering fact that in the decades prior to its dissolution the former breadbasket of Europe had become a massive importer of grain. When the crisis finally hit, as Zubok acknowledges, popular discontent focused overwhelmingly on the empty shelves of state stores and the constant shortages of food for ordinary citizens. Huge portions of the faltering Soviet budget were spent importing and cheaply reselling food and in various complex schemes to win popularity. Even so, by the late 1980s, Gorbachev and his reformers largely regarded the entire agricultural sector as a lost cause--with even the proposed comprehensive reform plans that Zubok lauds failing to tackle it head on. This was a notable and fundamental omission--since, as I have repeatedly emphasized, you cannot in fact eat steel. Inasmuch as it was a mistake, though, it was far from Gorbachev's mistake alone.
1) The first and most important thing to understand, then, is that this basic agricultural failure was not only the most fundamental cause of the Soviet Union's economic crisis, but also the main thing preventing it from following China's path to economic renewal. The heart of the new Chinese economy was the revived agricultural sector, which allowed for outside productive investment, privatized wealth, and state subsidies alike to focus on cheap consumer manufacturing. The Soviet economy, though, demanded massive imports of food to sustain its population at even a moderate standard of living; yet the Soviet economy had little to export in return.
2) The second fundamental factor of the Soviet economic crisis was the failure of domestic state industries to produce economically viable consumer goods. The products of Soviet factories were, by and large, un-innovative in design and laughable in quality; when Gorbachev implemented state inspectors with the power to disqualify goods for defects, they immediately disqualified nearly the entire produce of the consumer economy, worsening the economic crisis. Fundamentally, the Soviet Union could not, like the Great Britain of the 19th century, rely on exports of manufactured goods to pay for imports of food; nor could they rely even on domestic markets to generate credits for such imports.
3) The third factor to the Soviet economic crisis was something that might better be regarded as a positive. The Soviet Union was rich both in natural resources and efficient in extracting them; and these resources were, by design, fully under the control of the state, and not liable for private use.
The combined outcome of these three factors, though, was in the long run the absolute dependency of the Soviet Union on Western finance. Since the Soviet government needed to import food to feed its population, and since it could not export its own manufactured goods but in fact was under heavy pressure from its public to import Western consumer goods as well, the Soviet government was fundamentally incentivized to sell the only three valuable things it had on hand: natural resources, military hardware, and debt. By the time Gorbachev became Party Secretary in 1985, the Soviet Union had already been fully transformed into a petrostate, its basic ability to feed its people and run its government tied inexorably to the urgency of interest payments to American and European banks and the fluctuating price of oil on the global market. Put another way, we might say that the entire Soviet Union had become, from the perspective of the global market, mostly just a bank-owned corporation for the extraction of oil and metals from Eastern Europe. The simplest answer, indeed, to the question of why the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s is just "because oil was cheap then."
A fundamental thing to understand, though, which Zubok does not help his readers understand nearly as much as he should, is that all three of these factors follow directly from the overwhelming successes of Stalin's programmes of rapid industrialization and militarization from the 1920s to the 1950s.
To make collectivization and industrialization a reality in an overwhelmingly agricultural society, Stalin plundered and devastated the agricultural sector: with his campaigns having as their goal not merely the "collectivization" of the peasantry but their outright robbery of resources and food and their fundamental annihilation as social and cultural groupings. The grain plundered from these peasants, as well as increasing amounts of grain grown by subjugated peasants on collective farms using short-term high-yield methods destructive of long term yield, was exported to the West, where it paid for heavy machinery and experts and materials that Stalin use to build new factories worked by workers recently driven off the land. Hence, the short-term success of Stalin's efforts at industrialization led directly to the long-term failure of Soviet agriculture.
Similarly, the failure of Soviet consumer industries was even more of a conscious choice on Stalin's part. Stalin, as I have pointed out, was in essence a very 19th century sort of man, obsessed with borders and military technology. He also possessed an extremely paranoid worldview centered on the idea of repeating inevitable global wars precipitated by capitalism into which the Soviet Union would be inevitably drawn. Consumer industrial goods were in this worldview at best a distraction, and at worst a total waste. In a real sense, the Soviet economy built by Stalin was simply a war economy; only one that lasted long after WW2.
In this, it should be said, Zubok does excellent work in destroying the most common Western myth about the Soviet Union and its economics; the idea that the Soviet defense industries were either inefficient or a crushing burden on the rest of the economy. Indeed, as he points out, nearly the opposite is true: up until the very fall of the Soviet Union, the Soviet military-industrial sector remained the global standard in discipline, morale, efficiency, scientific research, and manufacturing knowhow, and in fact were far more efficient and took up a far lower percentage of GDP and economic resources than the American defense sector. While Soviet consumer industries produced shoddy goods that no one wanted, Soviet military industries turned out the very best of military hardware and technology. Put differently, while few people were willing to pay for a Soviet-produced bike or frying pan, everyone in the world was willing to pay for a Soviet tank or assault rifle--often in preference to the American articles.
This inexplicable superiority of the Soviet military-industrial complex was recognized both in the West and in Russia; and Gorbachev at various points attempted to take advantage of that superiority by redirecting military-industrial resources and personnel to reforming the consumer sector. By and large, though, these efforts were resisted or outright rejected; with one military factory owner famously complaining to American visitors that it was unworthy of their dignity that a factory that ought to be making the very best and most advanced electronics was reduced to making frying pans for housewives.
The reason for the defense industry's success, though, was among other things this sense of superiority: which stemmed, finally, from Stalin himself. Joseph Stalin had cared a great deal about military technology and industry, and consequently imparted to the officials and workers alike in his favored sectors of the command economy a very real sense of public discipline and duty and status visible in numerous superiorities of pay and privileges and public respect. A command economy, it should be said, is not at all a bad model for a military economy; indeed, properly understood a command economy is simply a term for the kind of economy adopted by all modern states for the mass-conscript wars of the 20th century.
Following WW2, though, the US and the USSR took highly divergent paths, premised on different fundamental gambles. The USSR maintained and increased its military economy, continuing to field the largest army in the world and build up and modernize its armaments and technology. The USA, meanwhile, took its centralized military command economy and redirected its output almost totally towards consumer goods. The difference here, it should be said, does not amount to the simple difference between capitalism and socialism; since the American turn towards consumer goods was largely driven by top-down government policy and regulation, just like the USSR's continuance of the military economy.
For Stalin, the governing urgent imperative of the Soviet government and economy was military production and technological research in preparation for an imminent Third World War. This was the imperative that made the military-industrial workers and scientists and managers the most important people in the world; and the managers and workers of consumer industries among the least valuable people to work for the state.
Such attitudes are not easy to change at the best of times; but even harder when there's no food at the store.
It is therefore extremely important to realize that the above factors of the "economic crisis" of the Soviet state were all at the same time cultural and political factors, that together added up to a crisis of legitimacy so extreme that under any leader whatsoever, even Joseph Stalin, it would have threatened the existence of the Soviet State. In a sense, this cultural crisis simply recapitulated and renewed the fundamental cultural inferiority-complex and fixation on imitation of the West extending back in Russia to Peter the Great and the foundations of Muscovite statehood. No Tsar, though, had ever had to face a popular fever of emulation as extreme--or one that had penetrated so deeply into the basic psychological assumptions of every level of officialdom.
1) Once again, the power of the first factor, the failure of Soviet agriculture, towers above the other two. As Zubok points out, an unintended consequence of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost or openness is that it led to more Soviet citizens traveling to the West, hearing about the West, and consuming Western media.
Via those channels, a new disease began to take hold of the Soviet population like a fever, affecting both the poor and the rich, hardened Party elites and liberal democrats, equally: this was the “American grocery store experience.” More or less every Soviet citizen to ever travel to the West gave some version of this story, avowing the sheer impact on them of ordinary grocery stores in American cities and suburbs well-stocked with both common and exotic foods (the presence of “canned pineapple” on store shelves was frequently invoked), with no one forced to stand in line for hours waiting for scarce allocations. Boris Yeltsin’s visit to a Houston-area Randall’s supermarket was, in his own and his fan’s accounts, a key part of his transformation from Communist apparatchtik to fervent liberal Americanizing Russian nationalist.
At least in the language of anecdote, these visits produced a kind of radical ideological dislocation--an image, as Zubok points out, of "normalcy" and prosperity from which the Soviet Union had inexplicably shut themselves out. In the long run, there is no doubt that Gorbachev's inability to fix Soviet agriculture, and unwillingness to try, was his greatest failure.2) The power of the second factor, the failure of Soviet consumer industries, was less important overall; but still contributed to the fever of growing America-mania. The Cold War had begun with a deliberate, overwhelming asymmetry: with Stalin continuing to maintain a massive peacetime military capable of invading Western Europe in a heartbeat, while the Americans rapidly transitioned their economy towards producing an overwhelming glut of consumer goods and mass media while relying primarily on the threat of a genocidal nuclear annihilation of civilians to (it was hoped) keep the Russians at bay. As I discussed elsewhere, this was an inherently unstable situation, and that it never resulted in World War 3 owes more to Stalin's paranoid and defensive mindset and the grace of God than to American war planners or Mutually Assured Destruction.
Still, what had been produced by the overwhelming and to an extent irresponsible American transition of wartime industry to consumerism--a policy crafted quite deliberately to reabsorb the thousands upon thousands of traumatized and potentially destabilizing veterans back into civilian life--was now, decades later, visible once again to the Soviets whose society had chosen a directly opposite path. Stalin had bet that within roughly two decades after WW2 a new war would arise involving the Great Powers of America, Germany, Britain, France, Japan, and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. If he had been right about that, he would no doubt have looked like a hero, and the American government would have looked quite foolish indeed to have gotten so soft while investing billions in a military technology with no useful military applications.
Since, in fact, such a war had not happened (again, see grace of God above), though, Soviet citizens faced anew through glasnost with the Western world rather quickly developed a profound inferiority complex and almost cargo-cultish fixation on American and European consumer goods. In the last decades of the Soviet Union, entire parallel economies, black markets, and organized criminal syndicates had developed to import Western goods into the Soviet Union in exchange for raw materials, plundered state resources, and outright slaves. When Gorbachev gave workers and managers and bankers more economic control, by and large they simply did the same thing--with a particular fixation on American personal computers, which took on a profound status-symbol glamor.
Unfortunately, the truth is you cannot eat personal computers; and no amount of exporting of raw materials and importing of Western consumer products could possibly do anything but exacerbate the inflationary and agriculture crisis of the Soviet state. What it could do was to pervasively convince all Soviet workers and consumers alike that everything the Soviet Union produced or could produce was and always would be inferior to Western consumer goods; and that there was therefore not much point in working to improve or invest in their own factories and cooperatives, even for the domestic market. Why try to improve your frying pans when you know that your customers, and also you, prefer to save up for a black-market German frying pan, or maybe an iMac?
3) In the long run, the third factor, the Soviet Union's status as an almost limitless source of valuable natural resources, buttressed by Stalin's mining and transportation infrastructure, only accelerated the basic "Third-World-ization" of the Union.
The irony here is rich. Stalin's goal had been to make the Soviet Union totally independent in resources and military infrastructure and so capable of fending off any invasion--his means, though, had been from the beginning to drastically increase the dependency of Russia on the West, first through the export of grain in exchange for Western machinery and expertise, and later on through the American lend-lease program, which transported 17 billion tons and more than 11 billion dollars worth of industrial and military supplies and food to Eastern Europe, effectively feeding and paying for the entire Soviet war machine. Whatever this was, it certainly was not independence; and everything that came after in Soviet history was in a sense merely the extension and furthering of this basic, fundamental economic dependency created and cemented during Stalin's long reign.
Here, again, the irony is that Stalin had succeeded in building a resource-extraction sector that was very much desirable to Western banks and businesses and investors. He had done so, though, by giving the Soviet state an absolute monopoly on natural resources and their extraction and transportation, and in a real sense building the state itself around this network. Hence, when Soviet citizens began selling off natural resources and resource-extraction infrastructure to the West, what they were doing was not merely giving away a secondary industry, but pawning the Soviet state itself.
Zubok treats Gorbachev's economic reforms as entirely wrong-headed inasmuch as they aimed to improve the quality of consumer goods not only through inspections, but through the devolution of economic power and authority to "workers' committees" and "cooperatives" newly put in charge of factories and able to attract investment from a new breed of commercial banks.
I am not quite so sure about that. In broad strokes, trying to increase economic incentives to produce saleable commercial goods was indeed a necessary move. That such efforts failed owed more to the ingrained attitudes of workers, managers, and bankers alike--who took the opportunity, by and large, to sell off more resources and infrastructure, import Western goods, and pad their own salaries--than to the economic structures Gorbachev created. In this, as Zubok persuasively argues, Gorbachev's biggest mistake was allowing for the first time the conversion of breznal--or "cashless" allocations of resources and materials from the state--into nal or cash, which accelerated the sell-off of state resources even further.
Still, Zubok's main charge against Gorbachev is not that the broad direction of his economic reforms--gradually transitioning to a market economy while avoiding the disastrous privatization and plunder that ultimately resulted in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin--was wrong. In fact, Zubok generally faults Gorbachev for not moving more quickly and supporting one or more of the "grand plans" that economists in Russia came up with during the late '80s and '90s.
Most of those plans, though, as Gorbachev knew well, required as their sine qua non massive commitments of Western investment and assistance to stabilize the Soviet economy during the transition: and this, as discussed below, was always being dangled in front of Gorbachev, just out of reach, by the American President and his allies during these years. Drastic economic reforms without massive Western assistance would (and later did) devastate the living standards and life expectancies of the Soviet population; and again and again, the Western powers who would have to provide that assistance pushed for political reforms as a precondition even for initial negotiations. And so, Gorbachev prudently chose to go so slowly, to work to build popular and and political support within the Union for perestroika, to build global and international support outside the Union for the investment and humanitarian aid these reforms would require--and not to take any sudden steps off of cliffs in the hope of attracting Western investment.
With hindsight, it is easy to see, as Zubok does, the various grand reform plans as lost opportunities: given how Boris Yeltsin's grand reform plan ultimately turned out, though, it seems to me fairly straightforward to say that Gorbachev was right.
Zubok's bigger, repeated contention is that Gorbachev was a fool to try to combine these economic reforms with political reforms that created new democratic institutions for the Union and a gradual devolution of power to the Republics, thereby, as he accuses, removing the strong centralized state and party apparatus necessarily to implement, China-style, rapid economic reforms. Here, though, it is again somewhat hard not to see Zubok as naive himself--and naive in a way that, perhaps, only someone writing in the early 2020s could possibly be.
The basic root and cause of the crisis of the Soviet state, it should be stated clearly, was an overwhelming and growing legitimacy deficit with its own people. This deficit arose from very many sources, including the economic factors discussed above, the determined efforts of the pro-American and democratic intelligentsia, the gradually growing awareness of Stalin's horrific crimes, and the more general shock of Gorbachev's glasnost policy suddenly allowing criticism of the state after decades of silence--what they amounted to, though, or rather what they revealed, was the straightforward fact that more or less no one in the Soviet Union with the possible exception of Mikhail Gorbachev believed in any of the bases of Soviet legitimacy any more. No one believed in Stalin's paranoid vision of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist world order into World War 3; no one believed in Lenin's vision of a global worker's revolution; no one believed even in Kruschev's vision of Soviet Communism and American capitalism working competitively to develop the world and prove which model was superior. With no world war or revolution in sight and tales of American grocery stores spreading cult-like through the general population, it seemed unanswerable, in a way that half-truths often suddenly seem unanswerable under particular historical conditions, that the Americans had in fact demonstrated the superiority of their model of development and way of life tout court and forever.
Even more alarmingly, the fact was that disbelief in Communism and commitment to Americanism were concentrated, not on the fringes of Soviet society, but on their center. Put simply, the closer one got to the genuine levers of power, the more one discovered eager would-be capitalist entrepreneurs. Russians were more pro-American than other ethnic groups; Muscovites more pro-American than other Russians; and Party apparatchtiks more pro-American than other Muscovites.
Given this basic political crisis, the need to find new bases of legitimacy, and new structures that would foster such legitimacy, was in fact just as urgent as Gorbachev thought it--and hardly amounted to putting the cart before the horse. The economic shocks produced by any plan of grand economic reform whatsoever would have threatened the political stability of the Union, let alone such profound pre-existing political instability that Gorbachev found himself faced with. Gorbachev was thus caught quite truly, at least by the 1980s, in a bind that not even the Chinese Communist Party could have found its way out of.
Once again, working to build legitimacy within the Soviet population and garner support and assistance with the West before proceeding with drastic market reform, was, at the very least, a perfectly reasonable approach--if not simply the necessary way of proceeding. That Gorbachev made many mistakes within that framework is undeniable--that his basic approach was as unequivocally "absurd" and "wrong-headed" as Zubok repeatedly and unilaterally declares it is simply an absurd and wrong-headed historical claim.
A minimally plausible but absolutely false narrative accepted far more than it should be by many people in the world today--including by both Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin--is that the Soviet Union was ultimately destroyed by fervent nationalism and separatism among the non-Russian populations of the Union. This narrative is absolutely false, as Zubok highlights; but even Zubok does not sufficiently, I think, underscore his point in this regard.
Gorbachev, it is quite true, does not seem to have anticipated how quickly nationalist impulses and movements would grow in the non-Russian Soviet Republics. He was, though, well aware from the beginnings of perestroika that these movements could become obstacles to his reforming plans.
Gorbachev's basic bet, though, which Zubok derides over and over again while affirming it via his narrative, was that strengthening the national Republics could become means of achieving his ends, in two ways: 1) first, by devolving political and economic control to national Republican leaders, who were in fact in every case simply local Party bureaucrats, he could indirectly further his economic and political reforms and attract Western investment; 2) and more importantly, he could help overcome the Soviet Union's crisis of legitimacy by appeal to (in most cases only incipient) democratic and nationalistic sentiment in these nations as well as the West. By transforming the Soviet Union forged at gunpoint into something approximating a genuine multi-ethnic economic and political federation, he could in one stroke create a new legitimizing basis for the state in both the eyes of the Union's people and the eyes of Western leaders.
Critics of Gorbachev during this time and since (including Zubok) argued that this was essentially giving away the farm, all but encouraging the Soviet Union's dissolution. Yet viewed from within his time and place, Gorbachev's belief that devolution to Soviet Republics would not destroy the Union, but preserve it, seems like very good sense.
Fundamentally, Gorbachev believed that the basic state-owned resource and transportation infrastructure on which every Eastern European economy depended, combined with pervasive trade and economic ties, would hold the Union together even through a process of devolution. With the exception of the Baltic states, which Gorbachev planned to eventually let go, the Soviet Republican governments and economies were fundamentally dependent on allocations of resources from the center and on the vast logistical network of centralized Soviet transportation and on machinery and factories owned by the Soviet state and on trade with each other and on the common currency of the ruble. Put simply, the supply chain for virtually all of the domestic industries of the Soviet Republics required materials from across the Union.
More immediately, every Soviet Republic wanted and needed to transition their economy towards the West and the market; and this required massive investment from the West. Gorbachev had successfully built up a near-celebrity status in the West; and was thus in an absolutely unique position to secure such investment. He could get a lot more money out of the German premier or the American President than the President of an independent Kazakhstan; and the President of Kazakhstan knew that. This gave him and his imagined federal center a powerful position from which to deal with the new states.
To summarize, then, Gorbachev and the heads of Soviet Republics were all well aware that the collapse of the Union would prevent more or less every industry in every Soviet state from functioning and immediately trigger overwhelming economic depression. And, Gorbachev assumed, no leader of a Soviet Republic, scion of the Communist Party trained and indoctrinated in Soviet schools, would ever choose this option; no sane nationalist would choose it either. The empowered heads of the Republics would negotiate for control and resources, but in the end sign a new Union Treaty that would legitimize Gorbachev's position and give him what he needed to move forward with economic reforms and attracting Western investment.
Up to the very day he resigned, Gorbachev continued to work on his dream of a new Union Treaty to replace the one signed by Lenin. On multiple occasions in 1991, this signing was even scheduled--and then prevented by events that Gorbachev had not predicted.
As Zubok lays out quite straightforwardly, though, the cause of the Soviet Union's dissolution was not in fact the minority Republics' desire for independence. Gorbachev's logic was perfectly sound so far as it went--as shown by the reluctance and suddenness with which the leaders of the Soviet Republics, virtually all Communist bureaucrats, ended up embracing nationalism. At least for the leadership, nationalism was more symptom than cause: with Party leaders alarmed by the collapse of the center opportunistically taking for themselves everything they could, on the understanding that if they did not, they would lose out in the inevitable scramble. Most, though, fully understood the economic interdependency of the Soviet Union, and had no desire to end it.
In the end, then, the truth about the collapse of the Soviet Union is in basic strokes much simpler than either Zubok or I have made it.
What is really striking about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it was chosen quite deliberately and consciously and across the board by many people who could have prevented it--above all, I would argue, by only two men who came to hold the ultimate balance in 1991. These two men were the Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the American President George HW Bush.
The point that cannot be made enough--the point that was never made to me by anyone that I can remember at any point in my education or participation in intellectual discourse--is that the Soviet Union was destroyed by Russian nationalists.
What Gorbachev does not, indeed, seem to have anticipated at all; the thing that he struggled to cope with or adjust his plans to and every stage of perestroika, was what can only be called a Rebellion of the Center: a revolution carried out by Russian nationalists in Moscow who were almost to a man past or present Party members and officials in the Soviet government, and led by the ex-member of Gorbachev's Politburo Boris Yeltsin.
From this perspective, the collapse of the Soviet Union represents a quite straightforward process: Boris Yeltsin succeeded, through a combination of popular and democratic appeals and bullying pressure, in setting up a "Russian government" under the aegis of the Soviet Union which was in both intention and reality from its beginning a rival to the Soviet government headed by Gorbachev. Yeltsin then succeeded in gradually and almost entirely extra-legally transferring resources and institutions from the Soviet government to his Russian government. Though done in part in the name of nationalist autonomy for all Soviet Republics, the actual goal of this process was to gain control of as much former Soviet state resources and infrastructure as possible, starving the other Republics and rendering them permanently dependent on the new Russian ethnic state. It was in response to these moves, by and large, that nationalists in other Soviet Republics tried to shore up their own power and take their share of Soviet resources.
Gorbachev very clearly did not expect this rebellion of the center--after all, in ideological terms, it was very strange for a Soviet Union centered in Moscow to be overthrown in the name of Russian nationalism. It was even stranger for it to be overthrown by Boris Yeltsin, a Communist aparatchik and habitual drunk.
In this, one could argue that Yeltsin's rise was more symptom than cause; the result of the combination of growing American-mania in Soviet society with Gorbachev's delegitimizing failure to provide food for the people. In this, Yeltsin's personality and skills were probably of less moment than his over-the-top declarations that he would bring Russia into the "normal" world of democratic capitalist nation-states like the US, and also his somewhat vindictive approach to dealing with the increasingly unpopular Gorbachev.
Probably the most important thing Yeltsin promised, though, was precisely the same thing that Gorbachev promised: Western capital.
Here, the overriding power and importance of the President of the United States George HW Bush cannot be elided. Reading this book, in fact, has largely convinced me that Bush Sr is one of the two or three most important American Presidents of the 20th century, and far more important for the triumph of America in the Cold War than his predecessor Ronald Reagan.
Admittedly, Bush Sr's importance is rather paradoxical; since probably his most important role was played in his preventing other people from doing things.
Reagan came to power a radical anti-Communist and a believer in preemptive nuclear warfare; while in office, though, and after watching a TV movie called The Day After, he largely changed his mind, and spent most of his second term in fact doing his best to forge close ties with the Soviet Union in general and Mikhail Gorbachev in particular. Reagan was quite sure that the moral imperative was for the US to do everything in its power to support Gorbachev and his efforts at perestroika; and it is therefore quite unlikely that he would have done what Bush did next.
As the Soviet economic and budgetary crisis escalated in the late '1980s, it became clear to everyone that the only way for the Soviet Union to successfully transition to a market economy without overwhelming suffering and likely political and societal collapse was for Western governments and banks to provide some form of direct debt relief and/or humanitarian aid and/or investment. While this eventually took the specific form in the early '90s of the so-called "Grand Bargain," a joint proposal between American and Russian economists that was on American and Soviet desks during all the crises of these years, and which called for a "new Marshall plan" to provide $150 billion in financial assistance over about five years to stabilize the Eastern European economy and allow it to transition smoothly to capitalism, the basic reality behind the plan become clear quite a long time before 1991.
This represented both a problem and an opportunity for Gorbachev; and, characteristically, he attempted to work it as much as possible to his advantage. First, he successfully built up a global celebrity status and established personal relationships with and collected commitments from leaders and intelligentsia throughout the West; and then used them to his advantage in internal conflicts by pointing out that only he could secure the needed funding from the West. Even Yeltsin accepted this basic logic until the end of 1991--and so kept Gorbachev in office for months even after stealing all his powers and personnel, and only decided to dissolve the Soviet Union impromptu and as something approaching a drunken dare. By forging these relationships Gorbachev ensured that the Western money, when it came, would come to his hands, to the Soviet institutions he controlled, and so serve to keep the Union together.
On the other hand, a great deal of Boris Yeltsin's appeal with the general public came from his loud declarations that only he could secure needed Western investment, preicsely by giving the West more of what it wanted: faster decommunization, faster market transitions, true Russian nationalism. It is questionable if even he believed this; but no doubt many in Russia did.
In this crucial moment of change, George HW Bush's actions can hardly be construed as more important than they were. With Soviet communism thoroughly delegitimized throughout the Union, America had in some ways more legitimacy with the Soviet population than their own government. Pro- and anti- Gorbachev and pro- and anti-Yeltsin actions by the American government could at almost any point have easily tilted the struggle for power one way or the other; and American money could have easily guaranteed the outcome.
So what did Bush decide? His choice, properly understood, is a kind of key not only to the fall of the Soviet Union, but to the entire America-led global order of the past thirty years.
In retrospect, Zubok regards Gorbachev's trust in America and George Bush as one of his great follies--the ultimate sign of his fundamental nature as an unrealistic idealist. Yet what should be emphasized is the pragmatic, even cynical nature of Gorbachev's calculation here--and the fact that it was, from his perspective, or indeed from the perspective of almost anyone in human history other than 1990s Americans, an absolutely correct conclusion.
Gorbachev did not expect the American and Western governments and banks and businesses to give him money and investment and debt relief because he was a good moral person and they were good moral people who supported the cause of international peace and justice. He expected them to give him money because the alternative was so obviously bad for them--and therefore the deal he was offering them was quite obviously a bargain.
For decades, Western governments had poured trillions of dollars into the pit of Cold War defense and intelligence and technological spending: Gorbachev was offering them a permanent end to those expenses, at a fraction of the cost. In addition, he was offering them an easy and cheap way to prevent any number of scenarios that would be potentially disastrous for them: including Eastern European wars, a massive hit to the global economy, the selling off of Soviet military hardware to every terroristic organization in the world, and unprecedented nuclear proliferation as Soviet missiles and nuclear material were seized by post-Soviet Republics and sold on the black market or simply stolen. All of these things in fact happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union; and all of them were quite predictable to people in the early '90s. By this time, Western leaders up to and including George HW Bush liked and respected Gorbachev and trusted him completely to stick to his commitments; all of them regarded Yeltsin as a dangerous and irresponsible demagogue whose revival of Russian nationalism could prove the germ of wars and conflagrations; none of them, in fact, with the notable exception of the American Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and his allies, wanted the Soviet Union to collapse.
And yet...after years of delay, George HW Bush made the decision to give Gorbachev nothing; and to actively prevent any other Western nation from giving him anything either.
Why he did that, given what he himself wanted and said he wanted, is a relative mystery; though also not too much of a mystery. Bush wanted the Soviet Union to not collapse; but he also wanted to win the next election, and was aware that a Soviet loan would be unpopular with the general public; he was also committed in theory to balancing the budget and reducing Government debt after the expensive and irresponsible Reagan years; and had just spent well over $100 billion on the Gulf War. For all these reasons, giving the Russians nothing was the path of least resistance: and Bush took it.
What makes Bush's choice not merely unwise, but actively foolish and dishonorable, though, was that he really took the path of least resistance. If Bush had made it clear that the Soviet Union could not expect money from the West, Gorbachev and Yeltsin alike would have taken very different paths. Instead, Bush did what he did best as a lifelong CIA member; he lied. On occasion after occasion from 1988 to 1991, Bush said explicitly or implicitly that money would come if Gorbachev met certain standards; he sometimes even specified these standards. Every time the standards were met, though, Bush continued to demur. "Capital flows" would come, he told Gorbachev in the summer of 1991, only once Gorbachev had reassured the West further; but they would come.
One could see Gorbachev as a fool for accepting, even reading into, these declarations; but one can also admit that this was, from his perspective, perfectly rational. Gorbachev did not expect the American President to simply hand him a check for $150 billion; he came into each interaction fully expecting a negotiation; and took Bush's hemming and hawing and delays and requests for concessions as bids in just such a negotiation. With the Europeans indeed, he did manage to negotiate his way to small amounts financial assistance from the German and Italian governments; and they would no doubt give more once the Americans took the lead. Bush would negotiate; he would delay; but sooner or later, he would bend to inevitability and give Gorbachev what he needed. Certainly, his "good friend George Bush," with whom he had ridden horses and played horseshoes and discussed his woes on the Presidential ranch, would not simply lie indefinitely and give him nothing ever and veto any significant assistance even from the Europeans. This was not merely dishonorable; it was nonsensical.
Still, the money did not come; and it never would. As Bush finally told his European allies, Soviet financial assistance would not take place regardless of what Gorbachev did or did not do. Nor would the he permit the Europeans take the lead in providing such assistance, since this would make America look bad. At most, the Soviets could one day apply for an IMF loan; but not under any special treatment, and only once they had joined as a member by the regular process. Until then, the Soviets were on their own.
During 1991, the American Secretary of State Robert Baker visited the Soviet Union and came away with a remarkable emotional mix of shame and contempt. Everyone he met, he was surprised to discover, loved America and was eager for his help and affirmation and advice. Everyone assumed that American money and assistance was on the way; everyone accepted his vague, consciously dishonest reassurances as better than guarantees. Baker, like many Americans then and since, found himself torn between a sentimental identification with the Russians' plight and derision at their stupidity. What he could not explain, even to himself, was why all these people should trust him when he and his President and his country were all liars. This psychology, I think, is at the heart of the American Empire of the last fifty years--and is still very much operative now.
Even with all this, though, the Soviet Union might not have collapsed; and Yeltsin might not have succeeded in dismantling the central government.
At the core of the Zubok's narration of events is a very strong identification with the growing feelings of frustration in the Soviet Communist Party with Gorbachev. In particular, from the late '1980s onwards, more and more bureaucrats in the central government wanted, or even outright asked, Gorbachev to simply take control; suspend his new Parliaments and Soviets and Constitutions, rule by decree for at least a while, arrest Boris Yeltsin, dissolve his pseudo-government, suppress nationalist movements in the Republics by force, and implement market reform at gunpoint. This, after all, is how the Soviet Center had always ruled, at least since Joseph Stalin; and very many observers both in the Union and the West expected throughout the 1980s for Gorbachev, or someone else, to eventually take this route. Zubok indeed appears to agree with all these people; seems to believe that Gorbachev could have in fact taken the "Chinese route" and used the Party bureaucracy to centralize power and enact market reform and succeed at both simultaneously. If even in 1990, Zubok argues, Gorbachev had seized power and used the Party to implement his advisor's radical economic plan, he could have outflanked Yeltsin, garnered Western support, and saved the Union.
I am, really, not so sure about that; more precisely, I very, very, very much doubt it.
The 2020s have so far been marked by a really quite absurdly exaggerated faith in the power of force to accomplish political goals--one that has only escalated as other forms of political legitimation have faded. Writing in the Pandemic, Zubok was, like everyone else, amazed at the ability of states around the world to coercively enforce lockdowns; he was also impressed by Vladimir Putin's success in consolidating power in Russia after the chaotic collapse of the '90s. He had not yet seen Putin's reliance on force blow up in his face in Ukraine; or the political chaos and military defeat of Trump's second term. He certainly had not seen the AI bubble.
In any case, the basic truth that must be repeated again and again and again to everyone before it is too late is that physical force is in fact in every instance not a cause but an outgrowth and means of moral and political legitimacy. Demonstrating military power and threatening people with death are both, under the right circumstances, effective means of legitimation; both are also, though, under different circumstances absolutely destructive of moral legitimacy. Understanding the difference between these two sets of circumstances is very important, and also not as easy as it seems.
Put very simply, the more you want people to use drastic force effectively for your cause in any remotely effective way, the more you need to make sure that they are already very committed to your cause; and the more you want that force to accomplish any genuinely political goals, the more you need to make sure that your uses of force will ultimately give people more reasons rather than less to support you.
Zubok's account of the Soviet coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 is perhaps the most straightforward parable for those two points I can imagine. Put simply, the coup failed, as Zubok chronicles in great detail, entirely because none of the people involved in the coup in fact believed in it, and because every action and inaction alike by the coup leaders gave the people fewer reasons to support it. The inevitable result was something rather like a Greek tragedy: the inevitable unfolding of moral character and choice into total failure and disaster. It would make an excellent movie; and it is a shame that no one has made one yet.
The Party officials around Gorbachev, including his Prime Minister and Vice President but led by the head of the KGB, were horrified by the Union Treaty that Gorbachev ultimately negotiated with Yeltsin and the other Republics; which, while it preserved the central Soviet government, gave away both Soviet assets and powers to the new national states. Gorbachev's calculation, obviously, was that by signing a treaty he could at least limit Yeltsin's continuing takeover of institutions and resources and bind him and his new Russian state to at least some kind of contractual and political relationship with the Union. To Gorbachev's closest allies, though, this was literally inconceivable; why negotiate when force was available?
It is here, I would say, that Gorbachev appears most remarkable in the broader light of history. Many things can be said against the man, intellectually and morally; virtually every decision he ever made can be, as Zubok largely does, regarded as a mistake. Gorbachev can be derided as an abstract thinker, as an idealist, as a moralist. Nevertheless, the fact remains that on the accounting of the totally unsympathetic Zubok, Gorbachev appears to have acted throughout his governance of one of the world's largest superpowers largely or entirely out of rational principles seeking rational goals and for what he sincerely regarded as the common good.
In other words, Gorbachev acted morally; and he also refrained from acting immorally, even under extreme pressure. More or less everyone in Russia and the world, including emphatically the Americans, expected Gorbachev to at some point cut himself some slack and indulge in massacre or repression or extra-constitutional action. Most, it should be said, did not regard such actions as likely to be all that effective; nevertheless, they regarded them, given the nature of Russian and Soviet history and governance, as more or less inevitable. The overwhelming majority of them, up to and including the President of the United States, fresh from causing the death of 200,000 Iraqi civilians in the Gulf War, would have easily forgiven such peccadillos.
Yet Gorbachev never did these things. For Zubok, this is ultimately a weakness, a character flaw of indecision and inconsistency and abstraction and subserviency to Western opinion. This conclusion belies every reasonable analysis; which would make repression very much the path of least resistance for such a person in such a culture in such a situation. Whether Gorbachev was right or wrong to refrain from such actions, there can be no doubt that this restraint was, for him, a matter both of rational calculation and of moral principle; and that it took considerable strength and considerable courage to make such a choice again and again and again in the face of the pressure of what amounted to his entire government and all his closest allies.
It was by and large these allies, and not fictitious Communist hard-liners, that carried out the coup: which was not really a coup at all, but an attempt to force Gorbachev to finally do what they wanted and seize power with them.
Here, though, was the fundamental contradiction that ensured the rapid failure of the coup: their plan to overthrow Gorbachev absolutely required Gorbachev's support to succeed. This was not a promising beginning for a new government.
Fundamentally, the Soviet state was locked in a power struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, in which the most important deciding factor was the prospect of American money and help. In this struggle, Gorbachev still had the military and KGB and the upper leadership of the Party; Yeltsin, though, had the overwhelming support of the Russian people, the backing of American conservatives, and the loyalty of many lower members of the Party and Soviet institutions and the military.
What the coup members wanted was to use the force of the military and KGB and remaining Party bureaucracy to defeat Yeltsin and retake the parts of the state he had annexed by force--and then to continue perestroika, make a new, less centralized Union with the Soviet Republics, and transition to a market economy with Western money and support. In other words, they wanted Gorbachev.
They also, it turned out, needed Gorbachev as well. When the coup began, its leaders flew down to the Crimea, where Gorbachev was vacationing with his family, used his KGB bodyguard to render him a prisoner, and immediately had a meeting where they begged for his help. Ideally, they pleaded, he would simply back their declaration of emergency, defend it and be its figurehead and legitimize it in the eyes of the West and the Soviet people alike; at the very least, he could sign something that would give their coup some cover.
Again, this is a situation that would be, in a film or play, unbelievable. Gorbachev and his entire family were the prisoners of these men; they could kill him or them at will. Yet they were begging him for help. And when he refused, again, to yield, they quite literally did not know what to do. Such is the power of moral legitimacy over physical force in history.
As later recounted, Gorbachev's initial reaction, when the coup plotter's plan finally became clear to him, was frustrated resignation. These people, he told his wife, were idiots; they understood nothing, and had now irrevocably destroyed both his position and the Soviet Union.
Many of the coup plotters apparently felt the same; as many of them immediately had panic attacks, got sick, drank themselves into stupors, and/or in one way or another stopped functioning over the following days.
As Gorbachev understood things, he and Yeltsin were locked in what was essentially a struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of the American government, the Soviet bureaucracy, and the Soviet people. A forced seizure of power by the KGB and military in the service of violent repression of the opposition would immediately lose him legitimacy in the eyes of all three; and since this was, in fact, what happened, it is difficult to argue with his analysis.
It is indeed rather hard for me to avoid the conclusion that Gorbachev was right, not only in his moral stance, but in his rational calculation; and that his refusal to use force to repress Yeltsin and the Russian people was in fact more practical as well as more idealistic than the alternative. Not only would such a coup, even led by Gorbachev, come up against the pervasive opposition of the Soviet people and doom the Soviet Union to lose Western financial support and so very likely collapse anyway; but as events proved, the Communist Party and Red Army, and even their alleged hard-liners, manifestly lacked the moral belief that would enable them to carry out effective campaigns of repression.
The situation of the coup plotters was far more desperate than such an imagined scenario. Gorbachev was a celebrity in the West and as such the coup plotter's only conceivable ticket to getting Western money and support. Once Gorbachev was off the table, there was no imaginable way the IMF, the Europeans, or the Americans would write checks to the KGB and Red Army. Yet the legitimacy of the Soviet government had come to depend tout court and even within the Party on the promise of American assistance in the service of Americanization. Unpopular Gorbachev might be, but he was also their only hope of gaining support among the Russian people at large--particularly if they turned the wildly popular Boris Yeltsin into a martyr. Even the Party and Army, stocked with Yeltsin supporters, was much more likely to kill and die in service of its elected leader Gorbachev than a few unpopular bureaucrats with poor reputations.
To underscore the point, Zubok recounts the story of the wife of Marshal Dmitry Yazov breaking down in tears and berating him after seeing him on television with the coup leaders: she was so ashamed, she told him, to see him in company with such people.
Once Gorbachev refused to negotiate with them, the coup plotters had no real backup plan, and largely settled for temporizing. Terrified, they attempted to placate the Americans by promising to avoid purges and not harm Gorbachev; they even, unaccountably, failed to arrest Yeltsin. They would proceed gradually, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB and real kingpin of the coup, assured everyone; no drastic actions would be taken; the Soviet people and Party bureaucracy and national Republics would all acquiesce quickly to the change of power at the top, and so, eventually, the Americans as well. Meanwhile the nominal new leader of the Soviet Union, the Vice President Gennady Yanayev, drank himself into oblivion in his office and did his best to avoid questions.
Then, of course, the people of Moscow, the absolute epicenter of Russian nationalism, support for Boris Yeltsin, and America-mania, took to the streets en masse in defense of the elected Russian Parliament. Boris Yeltsin, psychologically energized by the unaccountable, inexplicable fact that he hadn't yet been shot or put into prison, came out, too, famously climbing atop a tank to regale the crowd with calls to resist the Communist Party in the name of Russia. Soldiers, many of whom were Yeltsin or Gorbachev supporters themselves, found themselves marooned in the city without proper food and water and faced with catcalling crowds; and waited for the inevitable order to kill them all.
The order never came. Faced with this popular rebellion and with the growing indecision of the other coup leaders, who seemed interested in little save placating the Americans and hoping that things would stabilize, Marshal Yazov told his soldiers to stand down and leave Moscow. When Kryuchkov called to complain, he cursed at him. The coup was over in less than two days.
Even then, with their government in ruins, the coup plotters could think of nothing to do but to take a plane and rush to Gorbachev as fast as possible, hoping--well, the point was a bit unclear. In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, aided by numerous bureaucrats, was systematically destroying the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, transfering all powers and properties of both the Party and the Soviet Government as a whole to himself by fiat decree and physically driving the apparatchiks out of the Party headquarters in Moscow. Meanwhile, Estonia and Latvia were declaring independence.
Rather than try to stop any of this, the coup leaders flew to Gorbachev to beg for his help again. By the time they met in his dacha, with Gorbachev's wife weeping and in the grips of a nervous breakdown that would lead to her death in a matter of years, Gorbachev was effectively all that remained of the Soviet government. He, at least, continued to have legitimacy in the eyes of at least some KGB agents and soldiers--who confronted the coup plotters and threatened to shoot them when they arrived--at least some members of the Soviet people--who cheered him on his return to Moscow with tears in their eyes--and in the eyes of most of the West.
Unfortunately, that was all he had left. By the time Gorbachev returned to Moscow, the Soviet government was effectively gone, transferred to Russia and Yeltsin; and all Gorbachev really had left was his ability to appeal to the other Soviet Republics on the basis of their need for a new central government, and to the West for money on the same basis. Yeltsin agreed with this approach; and though he banned the Communist Party in November, and though Republic after Republic seceded from the Union in fear of repression from another coup, Yeltsin kept Gorbachev around and indicated that he would in fact sign a new Union Treaty that would fund a new central Soviet government to oversee the now voluntary economic and political federation.
Then, on December 8th, 1991, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the leaders of the three Soviet Republics of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, together for a secret meeting at a sauna in Minsk, unexpectedly took the suggestion of a secretary and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union on the spot--despite not having the authority to do so, despite the objections of other Republics, and reportedly with most of the leaders drunk: Yeltsin reportedly took a shot for each one of the six articles of the treaty. Then Yeltsin immediately called George HW Bush on the phone--and after a great deal of delay caused by not having his official number, finally got him on the line and told him the good news. President Bush congratulated him.
On December 25, 1991, Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time; the next day, the Supreme Soviet dissolved itself. And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, founded nearly seventy years before, was no more.
Over the next decade, the life expectancy of people in the former Soviet Union would decline by nearly five years; every post-Soviet state would undergo extreme economic crisis; a new class of oligarchs would rise; organized crime would swallow up what remained of the productive economy; Yeltsin would storm and dissolve the Russian Parliament; an IMF loan would be finally granted; and when the dust settled Russia was a petro-state financially dependent on the West and engaged in exporting natural resources in exchange for imported food and goods, and run autocratically by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. In 2022, Putin would initiate the bloodiest war since WW2 against the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine--and in 2026, that war continues.
Whatever happened in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion, looking back, that it happened all wrong. Whether Gorbachev made the right decision in any of the thousands upon thousands of desperate decisions that he made, it is very clear that George HW Bush made the wrong one.
I a not a fan of the Soviet Union as a historical state, or of Soviet Communism as historical economic system. Given the collapse of legitimacy, though, any reform of the Union Gorbachev could have carried out would have meant in effect the end of that state and that economic system.
Ending Soviet Communism and Soviet tyranny was a worthy goal, sought by many good men. Allowing Eastern Europe to simply collapse into economic catastrophe and nationalistic division, though, was something else entirely. It was neither moral nor wise, nor was it in the interests of any nation in the world, including America.
George Bush could have prevented this; indeed, wanted to prevent this. Yet he ultimately made the decision not to; simply because he didn't think it was important enough.
It is this overwhelming American insularity and security, the sense that nothing that happens in the rest of the world could possibly affect America, and the resulting refusal to use power for anything but servitude to the goat-headed finance-god that passes for economics in America, and above all this overwhelming self-conscious shirking of responsibility that has rendered the American Empire such a burden and a curse to the world since 1991; and which now threatens to doom that Empire entirely.
In these times, as the depth of American perfidy and irresponsibility in Gaza and Ukraine and the Iran War becomes more and more visible with each passing day, we would be wise to look back to George HW Bush, the most important man of his generation; and figure out how he could have used his power responsibly, and, perhaps, saved us from our present plight.
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords (2004)
In my continuing efforts to Make The Adventures of Captain Peabody Weird Again (MTAOCPWG), I realized that I have not yet discussed a video game in this space. This is unacceptable.
Unfortunately, I am, as the people in their 40s say today, a Fake Gamer--unworthy to claim the mantle of the most oppressed group in America. I do not play nearly enough video games, nor do I buy enough new video games. I play a few games of Starcraft 2 every few weeks, or sometimes months. Every 3-5 years I replay Skyrim or KOTOR 1 or 2 or Civilization 4. Every Lent I try to play through Doom 2 from the '90s. Last year I got a Star Trek video game and actually liked it. I used to play Hearthstone occasionally but got sick of the RNG. I am a fraud.
Nevertheless, even in the short list of Games That I Like, it remains difficult for me to claim the mantle of the accursed Video Game Journalist. After all, I have ethics. Ethics in gaming journalism? Anyone?
The status of video games as Serious Art was once fervently debated on the Internet; I don't think it is any more. The people who used to angrily post on forums about how the video games they liked about pink-haired anime princesses defeating the devil with the power of the Taipeng Heavenly Kingdom were masterpieces on the same level as Michelangelo's David are now old and no longer talk to people who disagree with them. Meanwhile, the people who didn't play video games at all still continue to not play video games; and everyone under 25 just plays slop games on Roblox. Sic transit clamor mundi.
The interesting truth, though, to those who still care about it, is that video games vary in basic form and intention quite a bit more than any other medium of art I can think of. There are "video games" that not only have no story, but precious little in the way of narrative and precious little in the way even of visuals; I have played rapid-fire clicking games of squares and circles and swarms without worrying very much what was happening to who or what (if anything) it was supposed to represent. On the other hand, from the early days of personal computers there have been Story Games, designed to present a more or less linear narrative to its players. Falling somewhere in between have been the "normal games," RPGs and RTSes and TBSes and MMOs and AAA games of all sorts that felt obliged to include both some kind of multiplayer experience and some kind of story or campaign with some kind of margin of player choice.
Video games are works of human creativity, and so by definition art; social and multiplayer and Massively Online games are, in fact, far more human as works of creativity aimed at and formative of social networks and institutions and relationships. Neither point should be controversial. It is with interactive video games as a carrier of story and narrative, though, that a genuine quandary arises.
The crux of this dilemma is the simple fact that a narrative video game gives its "reader" something unknown to any other form of art; the power to do things within a fictional world, to make choices and decisions and alter the people and objects and narratives around them. This is, from one perspective, a remarkable bonus; and from another a intolerable burden.
Power, it should be said, is a rather double-edged sword for art; since it creates immediately an intense, experiential dichotomy of frustration and release, resistance and freedom, that if not carefully controlled simply overwhelms any possibility of narrative. Narrative, as I have emphasized, is in the real world an outgrowth of the teleological nature and orientation of substances; and most forms of narrative art are therefore essentially contemplative. We watch substances and persons unfold their natures and goals--at the most, we support their unfolding by our attention, our consideration, our emotional investment and support. Fundamentally, though, the story is not about us; and we cannot change it any more than we can change the natures of the real substances around us.
This remains true, oddly enough, even for the act of creating narrative art--at least, when trying to create narrative art that is good. The author does not decide what happens in the story in the same way, say, as I decide what to eat for breakfast. If he wants his readers to be invested in what he writes, he must create at least the illusion of real things and people unfolding and interacting according to their own natures; and at best, he really does tell us what would happen or what would have happened if such people in such a place had done such things.
The art of storytelling, though, is emphatically not an art that aims to emphasize the arbitrary power of the author over his fictitious creations and his fictitious world; even less so is it an art compatible with the use of the author's power to indulge or deceptively gratify his own desires. Those who forget this point are destined to bear the Mark of Cain of the writer of Mary Sue--the person who makes art about their own untrammeled ability, as would-be authors, to warp and twist people and objects and events around their own petty desires. Put another way, every author of this type is fundamentally a pornographer--aiming to falsify desire and its objects by arbitrary power not in accord with the natures of things.
Interactive narrative video game storytelling unavoidably walks the line between art and pornography much more closely than any other medium or genre I know of. By this, of course, I do not mean that video game storytelling is any more often pornographic in sexual terms than writing or film or any other medium. About that point I am unavoidably agnostic; I don't play video games very much and have never played a sexually explicit video game. What I mean, rather, is that most video games, even video games with stories, are to a large extent about not merely contemplation but action, about the power of the player within the world of the video game to do whatever he wants; and this emphasis on power, in any video game I have ever encountered, is perpetually threatening to go off the rails and destroy all sense of immersive narrative and reality whatsoever.
Of course, video games of all types not only give the player power, but also sharply limit it. Even an "open world" game lets the player wander only so far, and do only so much. A story game might give players no control over the structure of the narrative; an RTS campaign like Starcraft 2 might let the player decide to do a few planets in a different order. Even these limited freedoms, though, inevitably create problems for story, narrative, and character.
Very few RPGs avoid what might be called the basic "hero problem"--which is that however important or noble or alien the hero of the story is supposed to be, he seems to spend an awful lot of time killing strangers and stripping their bodies for loot and trading body parts for gold to acquire better armor.
The crux of the matter is simply that RPGs, by allowing a real person to incarnate himself, so to speak, within a fictitious world, to both become a fictitious person on the same level as other fictitious people, and interact with and wield power over fictitious people and objects, create a kind of relationship where equality and genuine relationship is intrinsically impossible.
What such games teach us is a very elementary truth indeed; that our actions are shaped infinitely less by our physical power and physical desire and physical limitations than by our relationships with other persons.
The basic truth is that I have much more power over my physical body in the physical world than any video game character has ever had over his or her surroundings. I can at any moment get up from the table I am sitting at, pick it up, and throw it through the window. Very few video games allow me to do something like that; and even those that do would not allow me to set that broken table on the golf course, stand on it, dance a jig, and recite Catullus 51 to the golfers in Latin.
The physical world is in an absolutely basic and immediate sense receptive to human will and human power; the virtual world is not. As player, I am not in fact in a world receptive to my will, but engaged in a quite straightforward back-and-forth binary interaction with the program and (ultimately) its programmer; and if he has not given me the means to perform an action, I cannot perform it. It is the author that is in the real position of power over me, the player; and even the licenses I possess are licenses he has given me.
Nevertheless, the reason why people in the real world do not do the kind of things that people in video games do all the time without thinking--such as wandering through the woods looking for giant killer bears, going into stranger's houses to steal their belongings, stripping the clothing and goods off of freshly-slain corpses, or even simply jumping up and down over and over again while running down the street, is not at all the physical limitations of the real world. The reason we do not do the overwhelming majority of things that players in video games do is simply because of our real personal and social and political relationships with other human persons like us. I can do far more impressive and interesting and bizarre things to the house around me with a pickaxe and a few hours than any magician in a video game can do with magic: if I do not do so, it is primarily, I confess, because of what my neighbors would say, and what my landlord would do, in response.
This issue, though, is only the means for a much more basic problem with video games as narrative art; namely, the difficulty of giving the player character any character, in the proper sense, at all. Human character and personality is first and foremost a function of the relation of a human person to other human persons--and is by its nature pervasive and totalizing. The player, though, has no real relationships with any other people within the world of the game at all; nor does he have the kind of relationship with his in-game avatar that would make his actions congruous even considered as the activities of an embodied being in a physical world.
In this, the control of the player over their avatar is perhaps the most extreme example of a basic disjunction between reality and fiction. In one sense, we have far more control over our own bodies than we have over the bodies of our in-game avatars. The kind of control video games often give us over our avatar's though, is fundamentally unlike our relationship with our own bodies--precisely in the lack of connection that virtual body has with our own embodied selves, and the lack of relation it has with other embodied persons. Even in MMORPGs and multiplayer games more generally, the avatar is at best a creative work of art, and at best a middle finger to other players. In neither case is it at all like the body of a person.
All this sounds quite negative about the potentiality of video games to convey story. It is not designed to be. What it is designed to do, in fact, is to point out to video game storytellers and those interested in them that the effectiveness of video game storytelling depends essentially and not accidentally on the author's ability to limit the arbitrary power of his player and direct that player's actions and reactions to get the player to act according to the fictitious nature of the character he is playing. In other words, for video game storytelling to be effective, the player must be made to be something less like a god and more like an actor. He must be given reasons and incentives and restrictions to be contemplative in relation to the fictional world and people around him, to act as if he were in fact watching and considering and reacting to the unfolding of the natures of real people and things in relation to himself.
This is a difficult task; and I do not personally know of a work of video game narrative art that completely achieves it--but then, I'm not a gamer. If such games in fact exist, I do not necessarily think they would be all that popular; especially since, in our increasingly anti-social post-Pandemic civilization, video games are in fact sought out to a large extent and by very many not as a way to reflect truthfully on relation and selfhood and narrative, but as an escape from all these things into a realm of aloneness and self-deception and arbitrary power. It is for this reason, and not merely because they feature guns, that video games have certainly contributed to anti-social violence in our society.
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords does not perfectly achieve its narrative goals; it is, however, by far the most interesting and effective video game narrative I have encountered. This is so because it is, to the greatest extent I have encountered, a profound and contemplative reflection on the idea of the player character and what this entity is and means both for the fictional world of Star Wars and the real person in the real world playing a video game. It is the only video game I play and replay, not for the "fun" of action and interaction, but to contemplate the story.
What story does it tell? This is in a sense easy to recount--and in a deeper sense, very difficult to explain.
(I should caveat for the benefit of future players that by KOTOR 2 I mean the "completed version" including the material from the game files that was not implemented due to time constraints and was re-added in the TSL Restored Content Mod; you should download and install it before playing.)
(I should caveat for the benefit of future players that by KOTOR 2 I mean the "completed version" including the material from the game files that was not implemented due to time constraints and was re-added in the TSL Restored Content Mod; you should download and install it before playing.)
The player character is "the Jedi Exile," a former Jedi Knight of the Old Republic who followed the rogue Jedi and later Sith Lord Revan to war and served with him as a General in the campaigns against the Mandalorians, culminating in the atrocity of Malachor V, where a super-weapon was used to destroy simultaneously thousands of Mandalorians, Republic soldiers, and Jedi. After the battle, though this Jedi General lost their connection to the Force, and was the only follower of Revan to return to the Jedi Council and accept its judgment for their actions: upon which they were sentenced and formally exiled from the Order.
As the game begins, this Jedi Exile wakes up on an abandoned space station and encounters an old woman named Kreia, a former Jedi herself, with whom the Exile has formed an intense Force bond. This bond allows the Exile to access the Force again, while also threatening both their lives; and Kreia takes the Exile as her apprentice and promises to teach him what he needs to defeat the enemies pursuing them. These enemies are a new breed of Sith, who track and feed on their prey in the Force, and are dedicated to exterminating all Jedi; they are led by a mysterious triad of Sith Lords, including Darth Traya, the master of betrayal, Darth Sion, a zombie-like living corpse who feeds on pain, and Darth Nihilus, a barely human wound in the Force who survives only by endlessly devouring life.
With Kreia's aid, the Exile gathers a party of followers and trains them in the Force to replace the previous Jedi Order. The Exile also gradually finds and gathers the surviving Jedi Council members. When they assemble on Dantooine, though, these Council members again condemn the Exile and are murdered by Kreia, now revealed as Darth Traya, the lord of betrayal and the exiled former leader of the Sith. She has used the Exile to draw out and destroy her enemies, which include the Jedi Council, Darth Nihilus, Darth Sion, the fallen Jedi historian Atris, and ultimately all her own Sith followers and even herself--as well as for her very personal quest to understand how the Exile was able to survive the atrocity of Malachor and turn away from the power of the Force. Kreia now hopes to use the power of the Sith temple of Malachor to cut the entire Galaxy off from the Force and, possibly, to destroy all life; but is stopped by the Exile.
Even this summary suffers from the effects of player power on narrative--since KOTOR 2, like its predecessor, is designed around a high degree of player choice, including the choice of the protagonist's gender and ultimate decision for the Light or Dark Side. In the case of KOTOR 2, however, the power of these choices are in fact the whole point of the story--as is the essential teleology of character and narrative and the Force itself pushing one towards the ultimate "canon" story of the Light Side.
Put simply, a Dark Side Exile is confronted, at the critical moments of the story, by Kreia's utter rejection. By the Exile's thoughtless Dark Side actions of petty self-interest and cruelty, they have destroyed the Jedi Order and allowed the Republic to collapse into a new era of anarchy and darkness; and, most importantly, they have utterly failed to teach the exiled Sith Lord anything at all. Even if the Exile kills their master, they have failed utterly at everything they were intended to do and be.
In the theology of KOTOR 2, the choice to follow the Light Side is presented in part as the choice to follow the intended narrative of the author: who is, depending on how one looks at it, the Force or the game's writer Chris Avellone or God. This intended narrative, though, is not merely a top-down imposition on an indifferent world; it is precisely the narrative that emerges out of the natures and goals and teleologies of the people and things within the game's world, and culminates, as it must, in a planet called Telos.
The characters we encounter want to live, and grow, and heal, to be part of a vast network of relations and impact them positively; to follow the Light Side of the Force is simply to help them do so. The choice to follow the Dark Side, on the other hand, is the decision to turn away from the natures and teloses of all things around one, to exploit bonds with other people and things for petty self-interest and bottomless individual hunger and pain and fear.
Each of the three Sith Lords represents a distinct modality of this turning away from nature and teleology, this embrace of death and chaos. Darth Sion, the most straightforward of the three, exists in a perpetual state of torment by everything and everyone around him, but harnesses that pain simply for the sake of individual strength and survival. Whatever happens, he cannot die; but he also cannot live. Darth Nihilus, the most cosmic of the three, is simply a bottomless pit of all-consuming hunger, and thus, depending on how one looks at it, either all-powerful or absolutely weak. As Kreia points out, Nihilus no longer has a will or the capacity to make choices; nor, as his apprentice Visas Marr argues, can he even relate to persons as persons anymore. He must feed because his hunger demands that he do so; he cannot perceive anything around him except as sources of energy and life to be consumed en masse. He sees planets, and cannot even notice individuals.
Finally, Darth Traya is the master of betrayal; which means that she is motivated first and foremost simply by fear of everyone and everything around her. There was a rather unfortunate Internet trend in the 2010s of taking Kreia as a genuine moral teacher whose ideals might be studied and emulated by people in the real world--which does not surprise me given how insane everyone in the 2010s was.
Kreia does not, however, really possess a philosophy, let alone a workable approach to life. What she has is a bottomless reserve of fear that at one and the same time binds her to the people and things around her and demands that she exploit and use and betray them before they do the same to her. This fear is ultimately rooted in backstory real or imagined; by her possible identification with a Jedi Master who was exiled from the Order for having an affair and bearing a child, by her experiences in the Mandalorian Wars, by the failure of her past students, by her abandonment by her former apprentice and master Revan, by her violent overthrow by Nihilus and Sion, and above all, I would suggest, simply by her own gnawing disappointment and rage and guilt at her own fall to the Dark Side.
When the Exile helps others selflessly, Kreia is annoyed, and argues that the Exile is in fact weakening these people by bear their burdens for them, preventing them from requiring the necessary strength to survive and improve themselves. This pop-Nietzscheanism, though, here as in real life is little more than a cover for other concerns. Ultimately, Kreia cares nothing for anyone except the Exile; the Exile is "precious to her," and she would gladly destroy the Galaxy for their sake. It is only if the Exile defies her teachings and walks the path of the Light Side to the end, though, that Kreia does not regard the Exile's choices as a betrayal.
The central mystery of the story, then, is precisely what is so special about the Exile--what makes Kreia focus both her manipulations and her devotion so singularly around this one person.
The answer to this question of the Exile can be treated two ways: one according to the fictional world of the story and the setting of Star Wars, and another that completely abstracts from those things to make a point about the real world, about people, and about the failures and potentials of video games as a form of art.
In fictional terms, Kreia is fascinated by the Exile because they have, alone among the persons of her experience, turned away from the Force and cut themselves off from it while continuing to live. The Exile was a Jedi, defined by positive connections with all persons and all life through the Force; then, at Malachor, the Exile watched and felt almost all those they were connected to, friends and enemies, perish at once at their command.
The effect of this atrocity was overwhelming, and in most cases, as Kreia points out, led in the Force-Sensitive to one of two outcomes: either death or a fall to the Dark Side. The sudden, violent destruction of so many living things caused a wound in the Force, a painful absence in the web of connections and relationships that make up the Galaxy and the Force; this in turn produced "echoes," deafening, growing, compounding screams of pain and loss that overwhelmed all connected to these people and places. Faced with what can only be called an overwhelming psychic and cosmic trauma, most living things and people simply broke and died. Others, though, recognized the overwhelming, defining power present in this wound and the psychic echoes that accompanied it; and learned to use this power for their own selfish ends, spawning a generation of Sith, including Kreia, adept at using human and natural connections as producers and carriers of pain and fear and loss, at deafening others with echoes and feeding on them for power.
And then there is the Exile; the only person, as Kreia understands it, who genuinely faced such a horror and neither died nor fell to the Dark Side. Rather than doing as all the Sith spawned from Malachor had done and feeding on natural connections for his own power, the Exile had renounced all power over others and wandered alone. And it is this that makes him, for Kreia, more precious than the Galaxy itself.
Kreia's teachings, it should be emphasized once again, are not profound truths, but deceptive betrayals grounded in fear; yet the story of the Exile gives a quite straightforward and natural reason why someone like Kreia would be drawn to someone like the Exile. It is this flattering attention and interest, I would suggest, nearly maternal in its intensity, that has made so many players wish to follow Kreia's teachings and live them out in the game and real life.
In this, though, they miss the central irony of the story--which is that Kreia does not want the Exile to follow her teachings, and indeed regards the following of those teachings as a bitter and personal betrayal.
For, after all, Kreia's teachings amount really simply to the art and practice of betrayal--the manipulation of others to strengthen them and oneself as individuals and direct them towards them the breaking of all connections and the death of all life. As Kreia ultimately admits, what she hates is ultimately simply the Force itself: or, as she herself understands the Force, the connections between persons that strengthen them and give them life and direct them to their ends.
Kreia has been betrayed, and betrayed others; and so knows perhaps better than anyone else that each such connection is not only a source of life and strength, but also a terrible vulnerability. Kreia has seen such bonds used to betray and hurt her; and has also seen herself driven by hunger and fear and hatred and anger to use such bonds to betray and hurt others. All the while, she has seen a kind of will operative in her actions and those of others; a will that allows her to sin, to do terrible things to herself and others, and yet uses even these actions in service of its allegedly benevolent plan.
What Kreia hungers for, then, is merely respite: an escape from the terrible, tempting power of human relationship. It is this, and not any external violence, that is Kreia's true wound: the fact that she herself cannot control her own hunger and her own fear and her own anger, cannot turn away from the promise of arbitrary power over others and herself, cannot prevent herself from doing and enabling and suffering horrible things. In her own failure to resist temptation, Kreia sees the will of the Force; and the only hope she has left, amid the ruins of her life, is to hope to betray this will too.
It is for this reason that the Exile is for Kreia such a miracle: because the Exile is the only person Kreia has encountered in a long life who has ever turned away from the power of human and natural connections, and yet lived. In the Exile, then, Kreia sees the hope that others could learn to the do the same; that she could learn to do the same. Kreia is doomed by herself, by her own obsessions and wounds and choices and teachings, to again and again use her connections to manipulate and destroy, and again and again see those connections be used by others in just the same way. The Exile, though, provides her the hope that she might be able to cut herself off from the Force, from all the power of these cruel and malicious and manipulative and betraying connections, and so at last be free.
Kreia's final plan, then, is that she can do to the entire Galaxy what was done to the Exile: create overwhelming echoes of pain and fear and loss that will deafen all living beings to each other and the Force, sever every connection and bond between every thing and every other thing, and so set the Galaxy free. She knows very well that the most likely result of this action would be to destroy all life everywhere; yet she hopes against hope that there might be something or someone out there like the Exile, that would turn away from connection and survive.
Ultimately, though, this hope of Kreia is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding; which only an Exile that follows the Light Side can dispel. This misunderstanding can only really be expressed, though, by going beyond the world of Star Wars altogether.
At a number of key points in the story, allusions are made, in what can only be called a "meta" way, to the fact that the protagonist is a player character--and so, within the world of the story, a being somehow strangely removed from, and strangely more real than, the things and people around them. The Jedi Council points out the simple, disturbing fact that the protagonist grows more powerful by killing--a strange literalization of what is essentially a game mechanic. Similarly, allusion is made frequently to the effect the Exile has on their companions, the way they follow and obey the Exile without question--or, in other words, to the fact that these seeming other persons will, once they join the party, do anything the player says when you click on them.
In this, we might say that the Jedi Exile as a character takes advantage of two unavoidable concomitants of a player character in this kind of RPG; first, the strange, emotional and personal distance of the player from other characters, and second, the power of the player and their choices over these characters.
KOTOR 2, though, is not fundamentally a story about the power of player characters over NPCs: it is, rather, a story about the reality and consequences of personal connection and disconnection, of different kinds of relationships between real people and the good and harm they do. The player character's disconnection from others is thus made, within the world of the story, the result of the traumatic experience of loss contained in Malachor V. The player character's power over others, on the other hand, is ultimately made simply an emblem of the very real power and terrible power of human relationships and human choices as such.
In the face of the traumatic experience of loss, there are finally only two choices: one is the choice to exploit and abuse the power of loss and pain, and the second is the choice of acceptance and renewal. For Sion and Nihilus and the Sith that follow them, both acceptance and renewal is impossible, and the only alternative to their choice of violence is weakness and death, which both the Exile and the Jedi have chosen. Yet as Kreia points out, and as she knows by bitter experience in herself, it is their choice, the choice of cruelty and violence and all-consuming hunger, that ultimately and inevitably creates and feeds off of and culminates in death. If Nihilus is not stopped, he will inevitably consume all life, and finally himself. Violence is only an extended path to death.
Kreia's hope, in contrast, is that there is ultimately a third choice: the choice of the rejection of relationship and survival exemplified both by her own teachings of manipulation and by the Exile. Yet the truth is, both in the real world and in the world of the story, that this choice, too, collapse finally into the two alternatives of life and death, acceptance of relationship and its rejection. For all Kreia's hopes of indifference, her manipulative way of being is deeply, overwhelmingly implicated in the very connections she claims to hate and the Force that she claims to abhor--an irony that she herself acknowledges and ascribes to weakness and self-deception.
Kreia, though, is from beginning to end an absolute failure in her own eyes both in her actions and in her teachings; all her hope is founded on the Exile and the strength that allowed them to survive the death of relationships.
Yet as the fundamental, inescapable structure of the game and its mechanics tells us, even the Jedi Exile is caught between the absolute dichotomy between the two paths and two choices. Depending on the player's choices, the Exile's turning away from relationship and power in the face of overwhelming trauma was at best a temporary respite giving way to true healing and renewal and an even greater acceptance of relationship in love, or the embrace of indifference as a pathway to an even greater and crueler manipulation of human relationship in the service, finally, of absolutely empty and bottomless and self-destructive hunger. There really are only two paths, for the Exile and for all of us; and even Kreia has to admit this in the end.
This is a very real choice that more or less every human being will at some point in their lives face; and what makes KOTOR 2 ultimately a great work of narrative art is the mix of realism and emphasis with which it portrays that choice in different characters and situations.
In this, the role of fantastical elements is not so much to make greater and more emphatic what was originally small, but to put in external view what was originally interior. Those who choose to exploit human connections to overwhelm and devour do not usually or often wear masks and speak in alien tongues and consume all life on a world other than a single woman that they make their slave; yet, properly understood, this is exactly what they are and exactly what they do. Those who choose to embrace death in the face of loss do not often leave their bodies to be crushed in the grip of artificial gravity around on a barren planet for all eternity; yet this not is not too extreme an image for what they are doing.
And, finally, the choices made by individual people like the Exile really do have effects like those in the story of KOTOR 2; effects to save states or allow them to collapse, effects to spare life or take it, and most of all effects to help others accept and overcome loss and pain, or effects to deafen and prey on them.
The heart of the story of KOTOR 2, I would argue, is not in what is done or spoken between the Exile and Kreia, but in what is done and spoken between the Exile and their companions--or rather, disciples. The game's most famous "mechanic" is the influence system, or rather the outcome of the influence system: the ability to train your companions as Jedi. One gains or loses influence by saying or doing things that your companions like; but the outcome of the relationship comes always in a scene of high drama in which you convince each of these disparate people to follow the path of the Force and the Jedi. In the game's telling, this choice is in every instance the choice to accept the connection between oneself and other people--to heal the wounds and conflicts caused by malice and pain and loss within those connections--and to use these connections for good, for the healing of wounds, the forgiving of sins, and the giving of life.
The heart of the story of KOTOR 2, I would argue, is not in what is done or spoken between the Exile and Kreia, but in what is done and spoken between the Exile and their companions--or rather, disciples. The game's most famous "mechanic" is the influence system, or rather the outcome of the influence system: the ability to train your companions as Jedi. One gains or loses influence by saying or doing things that your companions like; but the outcome of the relationship comes always in a scene of high drama in which you convince each of these disparate people to follow the path of the Force and the Jedi. In the game's telling, this choice is in every instance the choice to accept the connection between oneself and other people--to heal the wounds and conflicts caused by malice and pain and loss within those connections--and to use these connections for good, for the healing of wounds, the forgiving of sins, and the giving of life.
For the flyboy pilot Atton Rand, this involves the discovery of his past as a Sith soldier and hunter and torturer of Jedi--at the heart of which lay his ability to shut himself off from connection through overwhelming, disordered feelings of lust and greed and hatred. Atton used these emotions to keep Jedi from seeing his true thoughts and intentions--but was broken by an encounter with a Jedi who saw his true self, and yet chose to love and forgive him even as he killed her. To convince him to become a Jedi, then, you must convince him to do the same: to open his true self up to connections with others, but to use this, not to deceive and torture, but to protect and heal. Similarly, for the young orphaned bounty hunter Mira, ensconced in the chaotic metropolis of Nar Shadaa, Jedi-hood means true, interior acceptance of the overwhelming network of connection and cause and effect in which she has lived her life--but now with the discipline and strength and grace to not let those connections overwhelm and harm her, but rather to use those connections to heal and direct and guide and make this society a web of life and growth and harmony rather than predation and violence. For the technician Bao-Dur, architect of the superweapon of Malachor V, it is the simple choice to accept his own responsibility for this atrocity, and, rather than allowing this guilt to crush him into despair, to begin to make up, little by little, but with infinite faith in the power of small actions, for the damage done by his creation, and in so doing heal at one and the same time his own wounds and the Galaxy's.
All this the Exile helps his companions to do, precisely through the power of connection and relationship. By lending these people the Exile's strength and insight, he enables them to make the free choice for good they would otherwise be unable to make; and the Exile in turn draws strength from their choices. By connection, by relationship, neither party is preyed upon or violated or wounded; both are not only healed, but strengthened and made free as well. It is this that is the essence of the Light Side of the Force.
As Kreia warn the exile, though, such a connection between two persons is always perilous. Any relationship can be a source of strength and healing for both parties, or a source of destruction and violence and death for both. This depends on the nature of the relationship, and on the intention from which it springs. And this is quite literally true, Force or no Force.
Even where intentions can be trusted, though, relationships are never safe; and they always depend, in some measure and to some degree, on the ability to let go. As Kreia warns the Exile, the stronger and more positive and more harmonious the relationship, the more the loss of one party to it will devastate and vitiate the other; and for a leader, the loss and pain of every follower is ultimately echoed and magnified in themselves. It is this kind of totalizing loss that happened to the Exile at Malachor; and it is such loss that happened to Kreia as well, somewhere in her life, and which she is terrified, clearly, will happen to her again. It is ultimately out of the fear of loss, and not out of a hunger for power, that Kreia embraces indifference and pride and manipulation, and so falls to the Dark Side.
The irony, though, is that it is not only for Kreia, but also for the lost members of the disbanded Jedi Council that the Exile's power of connection is ultimately a threat. The Exile is merely a cipher, they say, forming bonds promiscuously and drawing power from them, leeching individual wills and dominating life. What the Exile is doing, they ultimately decide, even inspired by love and at the behest of the Light Side of the Force, is ultimately too dangerous and uncontrollable to allow to continue.
Paranoid and frightened by the downfall of the Jedi and the rise of vampiric Sith, these men choose to hide in the shadows and avoid actions that would destabilize events or draw attention to them. Their intentions are good--the survival of the Order, the protection of innocents, the unmasking of the Sith--but, in short, they are afraid. The Exile forms bonds, gains strength from them, and uses them to heal and live: and they reject this, and so die.
Paranoid and frightened by the downfall of the Jedi and the rise of vampiric Sith, these men choose to hide in the shadows and avoid actions that would destabilize events or draw attention to them. Their intentions are good--the survival of the Order, the protection of innocents, the unmasking of the Sith--but, in short, they are afraid. The Exile forms bonds, gains strength from them, and uses them to heal and live: and they reject this, and so die.
Here lies the social and political point behind the essentially personal story--or rather, here lies the story's deceptively simple thesis, which could be regarded, depending on one's tastes, as either quite mundane or absurdly fantastical.
This thesis is that the decision of the Exile to embrace connection or prey on it is cause and effect and emblem and allegory and image of the decision of communities and societies and planets and Galaxies for renewal or collapse. As the story begins, the ancient Jedi Order is all but disbanded, and the Galactic Republic, like the Soviet Union, is only months from total collapse through political and economic causes.
In all cases, real or fictional, micro or macro, the nature of the crisis is the same, and depends on the essential choice between connection and the rejection of connection. The planet Telos was ravaged by war, and the Republic has committed to restoring its ecosystem as the first of many such projects. The project, though, is torn between two methods of proceeding: one that is generous and harmonious and balanced, exemplified by the Ithorian architects of ecosystems, and one led by Czerka Corporation that is predacious and exploitative and will ultimately result in the collapse of the planetary ecosystem into a chaos of predators destroying all prey and finally starving themselves. If the Telos restoration fails, though, we are told, then the Republic will not finance another, but turn inward, abandoning the Outer Rim and shortly collapsing itself. For the Telos project to succeed, though, it requires animals from Onderon, a society likewise torn between a Queen who wishes to embrace the connection with the Republic and the Galaxy, and a General who wishes to reject the Republic and join the Sith in a campaign of conquest. The project also needs fuel, which can only be provided by the Hutts of Nar Shaadaa, and then only if they are motivated by a release of the piratical reign of terror of the droid G0-T0, who preys on their fuel shipments and attempts to impose sterile robotic order on the life of the Galaxy. At every level, the picture is the same: worlds are poised between a choice between connection and disconnection, and between a generous method of connection and a predatory one: or, in other words, between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. In each case, it is the Jedi Exile and his companions who, as Kreia says, have been led by the Force into the right place and the right time to turn events one way or another--resulting in either the rebuilding of the Jedi Order and Galactic civilization, or their collapse into an era of barbarism.
It may well seem fantastical that the collapse or survival of entire planetary ecosystems, and entire Galactic civilizations, might depend on a small number of choices made by individuals: yet the story of the collapse of the Soviet Union would, if properly understood, make the same point. It is my firm belief that that collapse was far from inevitable, but was ultimately determined by the choices of people--and could have been prevented by those same people. The Exile's choice between acting generously to heal wounds in people and societies and civilizations, and acting predaciously to exploit those people for greed and selfish desire and ultimate indifference, was made by many people during those years--and never more decisively than by the President of the United States George HW Bush. It is needless to say again that he did not make the right choice.
Still, KOTOR 2 is right to point out, too, that such choices are not merely made by Queens and Generals and Presidents--that since the world is in fact a network of connections, even the smallest choice for kindness and cruelty can have incalculable effects on human hearts and human governments and through them the ecosystems of entire planets. And while the Force might be fictional, it is one of the core beliefs of Catholic Christianity that the world can indeed be pictured as a network of grace, where souls across time and space are bound together by a God beyond time and space, so that, as Therese of Lisieux said, even the humblest and most hidden soul can be the spark that lights the blaze of a great saint and a great salvation, and, as Dorothy Day said, a single impulse of grace can have more effect than an atom bomb.
Still, if the Exile is called upon to make a choice, the question remains how such choices are made; and who is the person who makes them. For Kreia, this mystery ultimately centers on the person of the Jedi Exile: or, in other words, us.
What makes the Jedi Exile special is not simply that the Force has placed them in the right place and the right time to make a difference in Galactic events; it is who they are, and the choices they have made. This is true for us as well--since God's grace acts not despite our personalities and selves and choices and stories, but precisely through them. There are things that only the Exile can do in the world, because of who the Exile is. But who is the Exile?
The essential mystery, then, which Kreia is desperate to discover, boils down to two simple questions. 1) Why and how was the Exile able to turn away so completely from the deafening pain and the tempting power of traumatic loss when so many others had died or embraced darkness? 2) And, second, why and how (contingent on the player's choices) was the Exile able to restore those broken bonds and use them to bring healing and life to both others and themselves?
The essential mystery, then, which Kreia is desperate to discover, boils down to two simple questions. 1) Why and how was the Exile able to turn away so completely from the deafening pain and the tempting power of traumatic loss when so many others had died or embraced darkness? 2) And, second, why and how (contingent on the player's choices) was the Exile able to restore those broken bonds and use them to bring healing and life to both others and themselves?
It is only if the Exile follows the Light that Kreia is able to answer the former mystery, with the simple truth that "it was because you were afraid." The very same fear, then, that made Kreia turn away from connection and embrace the power of manipulation made the Exile turn away from both connection and power. While the basic trauma and fear and turning away was the same, then, it was the consequent choice for love or hate that made all the difference.
The answer to the second question, then, is given by the redeemed apprentice of Darth Nihilus, Visas Marr. As she tells the Exile, both the Council and Kreia are fundamentally mistaken to see only danger and death in the Exile's power of connection. If the power of human connection can be bring death, it is also what gives life; and even where its loss wounds, it remains the only possible hope of healing those wounds. The Exile turned away from relationship out of fear, to survive; it is the Exile's ability to turn again to others and embrace connection in love, despite the pain and the wounds of former connections, that is the greater miracle. It is precisely this willingness to love again, even in the face of incalculable loss and pain, which allows Visas Marr, the victim of genocide and destruction, to make the same choice and so find healing at last.
The root of both answers, though, is ultimately the same: which is, as Kreia says knowingly, that the Exile is after all not a Jedi, not really. Nor is there "truth in the Force"; there is, though, truth in the Exile, and in his choice for renewal. Rather than prey on others, the Exile turned away from all power over them, and from the power of loss and pain and destruction over him; in this sense, he turned away from the Force. He did not, though, even then turn away from all connection whatsoever--since, at the end of the day, and in the real world, such connections are rooted not just in a mystical energy field but in far more fundamental realities. Even banished and alone and traumatized and deafened, the Jedi Exile remained in relation to all they had ever known, connected by choices and memories and emotions and relations, and even by the pain and sorrow and absence of loss itself. After all, as Chesterton taught, all sorrow and pain in the face of loss depends entirely on the recognition of the value of what is lost--and so on its genuine being and goodness. It is this sense most immediately that love is stronger than death.
Most fundamental of all is a knowledge I have come to by direct experience: the knowledge that even in absolute isolation the self is not alone, but remains in relation, remains a relation, not just to persons present and absent, but by way of one absolutely unbreakable connection that binds us to the one thing that knows us and sees us and gives us life continually, which upholds us weightless amid absolute nothingness, and which continues to uphold us even when violated and deafened and silenced and afraid and alone.
It is all this which Kreia, mired in relations of manipulation and violence, fails to understand--that she can destroy people, and deafen them, and even turn them to violence and predation, but never remove relation from the human heart. This is true even for her own heart, as her ultimately selfless love for the Exile reveals--her desire that whatever happens to her, the Exile find themselves, find healing, and do what they were meant to do.
It is this, though, that Kreia confesses only at the end, once she has been defeated and surpassed by the greatest of her students: as she tells the Exile that they have, by their actions, saved the Republic and rebuilt the Jedi Order, an Order to be led by the Exile's students whom they loved and healed and strengthened to whom they gave the true power of human choice. And by defeating and forgiving Darth Traya at the heart of Malachor, they have brought an end to a lifetime of of betrayals, and saved her at last.
All this, though, KOTOR 2 quite correctly points out, came down to the choices of human persons, torn between the love that allows healing and the indifference that precipitates collapse. Today, in 2026, all our future depends on the same choice.
Let's Get Out of This Country (2006)
I still consider myself a loyal adherent to the Indie Movement.
The Soviet Union ended on December 26, 1991. Indie died on February 13th, 2011, when Arcade Fire won a grammy for The Suburbs. Win Butler is probably a Leninist. As Kreia said, it's all connected.
I do not like the 1990s very much; for reasons that can be easily summed up by simply pointing vaguely in the direction of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. The 2000s, though, saw a genuine shift in art and culture alike: one that had something to do with 2001 and the War on Terror, but in retrospect probably more to do with the Fall of the Soviet Union a decade before. After all, most cultural trends take at least five to ten years to get going.
Then, too, 2000s culture was noticeably retrospective; and never more retrospective than in the mavens of the Indie Movement. After two decades of breathless forward progress, people began to look back--at what had been gained, and what had been lost. The latter was ultimately canonized under the rather vague form of "authenticity": an elusive fixation that permeated music, culture, television, film, politics, and religion alike. Neither George HW Bush nor Bill Clinton had been at all authentic--quite the contrary. George HW Bush was a WASP-y CIA agent from nowhere, emblem of the ability of the Ivy League colleges to form a flexible, culture-less, morality-less homo Imperialis for a new era of global commerce. Bill Clinton was something even better--a Southerner who didn't act or talk or think like a Southerner, the ultimate de-racinated elite for an age of teflon.
George W Bush, though, was something very different: a de-racinated homo Imperialis from nowhere desperately engaged in pretending to be an authentic Southern Evangelical from Texas. Barack Obama, of course, embodied this thesis in even greater purity, to even greater effect.
Still, there could be no doubt that the ethos of both the indie movement and the broader culture of the 2000s told us to look to our roots--real or imagined. This emphasis took many forms, honest and pathological. It was very visible in the solipsistic appeals to democracy and freedom and refusal to come to grips with the reality of other cultures and religions that marked the War on Terror. Faced in Islamism with a genuine ideological opponent and critic for the first time since the Cold War, America by and large turned inwards and refused to see anything except its own feelings and founding stories.
There were more positive manifestations of this trend, though: and the noblest of all was contained within the cultural matrix that I have chosen to call the Indie Movement--and to which, as I said above, I remain a loyal adherent.
In music, the Indie Movement meant a return to the roots of the genre of modern pop music: or, in other words, the rock & roll and early country and Spector-pop of the 1950s and 1960s in America and Britain. These genres had emerged out of a similar cultural nexus, and had agglomerated and influenced each other and been influenced by each other all through the period.
What defined them all, besides an emphasis on guitars, bass, drums, vocals, and melody, was a kind of idealized purity of image and emotion and intention that, in a considerable paradox, defined so much of the 1950s and 1960s in America, one of the most thoroughly corrupt places and times in history.
Still, after the chaos and destruction of the 1930s and 1940s, it was natural that people would turn with increasing desperation to the simple and elemental emotions and experiences associated with childhood and youth and first love--just as those same people gave to their children, the rising generation of the Baby Boomers, a degree of license and a central cultural importance unknown to youth in all of human history. It was the very managerial class and generation that labored day and night to build an absolute Empire of centrally planned resources and food supply and transportation networks and vast dams and factories to enslave nature and the world that, when coming home after a long day, chose to consume nothing but wistful, positive art by and for and about their own children. You can call this infantilizing if you want, and deride it as Escape; but as JRR Tolkien pointed out, the more society is turning itself into a prison, the more imperative it becomes for people to think about and imagine other things besides metal doors and bars.
It is natural to connect 2000s culture and the indie movement to a similar kind of pressure, and similar kinds of technical plans, overseen by an at least broadly similar kind of administrative class. Certainly, the contrast between the anti-Communist security fever and paranoia of the 1950s and the wistful art of the time is at least broadly paralleled by the contrast between the Patriot Act and anti-Muslim hysteria of the 2000s and the emotive art of its time.
Speaking for myself, though, I would say that the main trauma and pressure that 2000s art and the Indie Movement are responding to predates 9/11 altogether, and is really the much more extreme trauma of having won the Cold War. America had stood face to face with the Soviet Union for fifty years--and then watched as the Union collapsed into chaos and destruction and humiliation and suffering, leaving, Malachor-like, an echo and a wound in America's heart that endures to this day. At least this perhaps helps to explain why all the most powerful people in America in 2026 can talk about nothing but the necessity of defeating Communism as justification for all their wars and terrors.
Influences and parallels from the 1950s can only get one so far, though; and what the 2000s and the Indie Movement ultimately produced were creative works far deeper and far less infantilizing than Leave it to Beaver. Ultimately, I would argue, the experience that united the two eras most profoundly was not the external experience of pressure or regimentation or paranoia, but precisely the internal isolation and desire produced by this pressure.
Alongside this, though, was the simple fact of a new mass culture that can only be described as "do it yourself." In this way most of all the art of the 2000s stood opposed to the centralized mass art of the 1950s and 1960s. If, as the culture maintained, art was a function of authenticity, then this could only mean (even etymologically) that art had to come from an author--not an assembly line or a corporation or a nation. The CD-ROM and the early Internet served to enable this as never before: making it quite easy for any kid in the suburbs or the slums to listen to the best music of the past and emulate it with art of his own. This sense of an overwhelming cultural impulse to push and encourage and pressure and inspire and draw out anyone and everyone to make their own unique and authentic and personal art is quite dead today; so it is hard for people to understand how powerful it once was. As Tracyanne Campbell said, in Glasgow in the late 1990s, if a man wanted a girlfriend, he had better be in a band, or at least hang around one.
The Indie Movement (to which I loyally adhere) really started in the '90s with the fall of the Soviet Union, which spawned the novel cultural pressure to express oneself authentically in the idioms of the past; but it flowered in the 2000s. And the band Camera Obscura, I humbly believe, was its greatest achievement.
One of the hardest but most important things to do in life is to draw people out; which is very different from simply getting them do something. Some kinds of people are eager at the slightest provocation to express themselves--and generally do it badly. Expressing oneself, though, requires knowing oneself--and knowing oneself is one of the two or three hardest things in life.
Self-knowledge, like knowledge of anything, requires contemplation: which is essentially an interior, not an exterior, act. Self-expression is born within through contemplation, then exteriorized and communicated through desire and relation. The process of knowing oneself, though, makes it clear that the self is defined and marked at every level by relation and knowledge and desire with things and people without; and therefore that the communication of the self is first and foremost a matter of establishing a particular kind and sort of relation, one that enables contemplation and elicits self-expression.
As a loyal adherent of the Indie Movement, it is my firm belief that this movement was thus, in substance, a social and even political movement: one that aimed at producing the relational and communal conditions that would make contemplation possible and enable people to safely and joyfully desire one another and communicate themselves to one another and love one another truly.
Obviously, the movement failed; I remain, though, as much as ever a loyal supporter of its aims.
What makes the discography of Camera Obscura (six albums and a number of EPs and B-sides from 2001 to 2024) a great and profound work of art and a valuable contribution to the fund of human culture is that it, more than almost any other work from the era, expresses the essential goals and means and obstacles to the process of helping people know and communicate themselves and love one another, and also is itself the triumphant result of such a process.
Put most simply: I like Camera Obscura because I like the kind of person it expresses, and also because the kind of person it expresses is not generally the kind of person who expresses themselves through art.
Tracyanne Campbell, the lead singer and auteur of Camera Obscura, was by her own admission an extremely interior and shy and nervous and even somewhat pessimistic person--one who in preparing for her earliest shows threw up from fear before every rehearsal. Such people require for self-expression a great deal of external, personal, and social support: and Tracyanne Campbell found it in her band, in her fans, and, to a lesser extent, in the broader ethos of the Scottish society and culture of the 2000s.
What makes this kind of person particularly worth listening to in their self-expression, though, is that they are, perhaps the most of any ordinary human personality type, the instantiation of an absolutely paramount truth: namely, that human beings know and love and enjoy interiorly and by receptivity and desire, not exteriorly and by force and indifference. Or, in less philosophical language, people like this are sensitive and anxious and frightened not because things and people are hateful to them externally, but because things and people are intense and real and desirable and above all knowable to them internally. Or, in other words, such people are vulnerable because they are sensitive; and sensitive because they really want to know.
This is a philosophical and historical proem to a discussion of the indie pop album Let's Get Out of This Country, which is my favorite Camera Obscura album, and a seminal album of my youth.
I did not hear this album when it came out in 2006; I was too young for that, alas, and also not nearly plugged into the Indie Movement. It was not until the Indie Movement had died that I became a really dedicated adherent of it. It was from within the hopeless decadence of the post-2008 world that I became enamored of the crystalline purity of 2000s indie music; which is another way of saying that I am completely out of touch.
My childhood and youth were a difficult time; which is not really the point. What is the point is why they were a difficult time, which was not merely because of external events and traumas (though those were present), but above all because of an internal state that became a perception that became a choice that became a habit that became for me the entire world--a world of darkness penetrated by strange, frightening flashes of light. This perception was simply of the terrifying power and complete corruption of personal relationship, emotion, and desire, and their necessary concomitant of absolute rejection and aloneness: and while straightforward on its face, no words can convey the totality of this perception in the psychology of the small child and the adolescent.
Yet from very early on, there were exceptions to this totalizing worldview--or rather, challenges to it. One, the most important in the long run, was the Catholic Church in its doctrines and arts and history as dimly perceived by a Protestant child in Alabama. The most immediately powerful and decisive one was the works of G.K. Chesterton, which let in oceans of light and showed me for the first time the complete world of light and darkness, a world of miraculous overwhelming good generously poured out in every being by a loving God, but threatened and ignored and devalued and laid waste by small petty indifferent malice. Yet after these two, there was probably no greater influence on my conversion than Camera Obscura.
The reason is found quite simply in the vision of the album "Let's Get Out of This Country": of the fundamental goodness and purity and strength of true relation and true desire, of the need to reject disordered and false relations and disordered and false desires to escape corruption and devastation, and of the one and only method to doing so: letting go of the false to grasp the true, letting go of self-centered pain to grasp other-focused love, letting go of small and petty and finite evil to grasp overwhelming and generous and infinite good.
Such efforts depend entirely, though, on one's ability to perceive goodness, in oneself and other people and the world. I had lost such perception almost entirely; and though G.K. Chesterton did much to give it back to me, nothing else in my teenaged years gave me this perception and this faith so much as listening to Camera Obscura; which was for me a quite unprecedented and unique experience of perceiving clearly the goodness and beauty and purity of human desire and human relations, not in myself, but in another person and a woman.
Let's Get Out of This Country represents, within Camera Obscura's broader arc, the moment when singer-songwriter Tracyanne Campbell became fully central to the band's art. The album's first two albums were made in a kind of loose partnership between Campbell and the band's male vocalist and songwriter John Henderson. After their second album, though, John Henderson left the band; and they band travelled to Sweden to work with producer Jari Haapalainen, who pushed them in a more orchestrated, more grandiloquent, more Spector-ian direction. Their first album, 2001's Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, had featured multi-layered, strings-heavy arrangements from Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch, while their second album, 2003's Underachievers Please Try Harder, leaned on the band's "twee" credentials with '50s-style reverb guitar and warble.
Both of these were based in large part on the gentle, vulnerable quality of Tracyanne Campbell's voice; they were reflections of her exterior affect and relative position. Haapalainen's orchestrations, though, took essentially the opposite approach: casting Campbell's vocals and lyrics and emotions squarely amid crashing Walls of Sound and trusting they would fully hold their own. This approach was extremely successful in a rather paradoxical way. If the gentler approach of the first two albums reflected the exterior and social affect of Campbell and people like her, Let's Get Out of This Country is a reflection and magnification of overwhelming interior experience. Genuinely sensitive and intense and so vulnerable emotion, the album declares, is not weak or childish or insignificant: it is, rather, the crashing, resounding, thunderous substance of human life itself, as pure and clear and flowing as water, but as strong.
This somehow water-like clarity is for me the overwhelming note of the album--a note I do not think I have seen paralleled in any other work of art. Despite the sometimes bitter and complex content it carries, despite the changes in form it undergoes, its very receptivity and adaptability is the mark of its purity. Or, put another way, the purity of emotion and desire is found precisely in receiving and bringing together disparate elements and conflicting impulses and directing them to their end. Like clear water, one sees other things reflected in it or carried by it; but one also sees the current. Everything in Let's Get Out of This Country is like a stream of clear, cold water rushing from its source to its end.
The album's first song, "Lloyd I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken," is on its face a rather sarcastic statement: a declaration of the seeming futility of innocent desire, the fact that "you can't stay a girl while holding a boy's hand." The tempo and instrumentation, though, is the stuff of '50s pop--a melancholy melody repeated and exulted and turned into a song to dance to.
"I've got my life of complication here to sort out," Campbell sings. But after all, is complication such a bad thing? Or rather: isn't love itself intrinsically a kind of complication, a mixing together of one person and sex with another? "Hey Lloyd," Tracyanne Campbell sings six times in the chorus, "I'm ready to be heartbroken: 'cause I can't see further than my own nose in this moment." But if love is a kind of blindness, if love is even a kind of brokenness, it is not for that any less desirable. Even the simplest and most childish romantic desire is already immured in the transcendent heights of personhood and relation and self-transcendence and procreation and the eternal mystery of sex--before it has had any chance to either succeed or fail.
"He said, 'I'll protect you like you were the crown jewels,'" Campbell sings; and though she seems rather in doubt about the veracity of the sentiment, she does not reject it out of hand. Instead, she will "take myself to an East Coast city and walk about"; but it is unlikely she will find a way out of the bind.
"He said, 'I'll protect you like you were the crown jewels,'" Campbell sings; and though she seems rather in doubt about the veracity of the sentiment, she does not reject it out of hand. Instead, she will "take myself to an East Coast city and walk about"; but it is unlikely she will find a way out of the bind.
By the time the ironic chorus is repeated for its sixth time, it has stopped being ironic, and started being an expression of desire. Or rather, more properly, it is still ironic, but nonetheless sincere for all that: for what could be more ironic than the eternal juxtaposition of having and not-having, success and failure, love and hate, that is romantic desire?
Hey, Lloyd, I'm ready to be heartbroken!
Tears for Affairs, the album's second track, is a more negative account of the consequences of mistaken desire; its negativity, though, is very far from despair, or even resignation, but a compound of regret, repentance, and indignation. Though the narrator is "shedding tears for affairs," her overall mien is rather aggressive than yielding: "I can tell you this for nothing: affairs don't win." It is the female narrator who has decided on her own volition to call the whole thing off, who cannot "handle one more dirty secret, one dirty night." To this end, she will do her best to distract herself and resist temptation; she will "take an interest in illustration--should be a laugh." And though "your words are with me still," Campbell's final note is simple defiance: "I can tell you this for nothing: you won't win."
This basic concept, of a lover trying to resist the temptation of an unwise relationship, is quite a common one in art. Yet what is really exceptionally strange and truly singular about this song is that at no point does it come off as sleazy or seductive or double-minded or even weak. We have no doubt at all, at any point in the song, that Campbell wants to resist this temptation; and very little doubt that she will. The current is clear and strong, and will wash away any filth.
The song's repeated chorus, then, is no celebration of disordered desire, but of a genuine desire for satisfaction, for expiation made however unwillingly: "You had to drive, look me in the eye, whisper 'Don't cry': so I cried."
Tracyanne Campbell sings on the album's second track, "Come Back Margaret," about dreams. She is singing to her recently deceased grandmother, but the track is again upbeat, lilting strings punctuated by crashing drums: the melancholy is in the melody and the plaintiveness of the voice and the sorrow of the words and in the strangely unreal, dream-like quality of the music.
"Come back, Margaret" the narrator all but begs, again and again. There is love here, but also desperation: she is in a plight that requires maternal aid. "Do you see the tears in my eyes for the love of him I disguise?" she asks: then a minute later, "do you see the tears in my eyes, for the love of him I despise?" Surely her grandmother would know what to do in such a situation. While the verses dwell on the narrator's plight, the chorus moves inward, to the contradictory heart of the matter: "Darling you will always be around, whether my mood's up or if it's down; in dreams I try to take you far away, but you never stay." Present but absent, consoling but heartbreaking, dead but alive in dreams; most of us, probably, have had such a presence in our lives. We would do well to pay attention to it.
"Come back, Margaret" the narrator all but begs, again and again. There is love here, but also desperation: she is in a plight that requires maternal aid. "Do you see the tears in my eyes for the love of him I disguise?" she asks: then a minute later, "do you see the tears in my eyes, for the love of him I despise?" Surely her grandmother would know what to do in such a situation. While the verses dwell on the narrator's plight, the chorus moves inward, to the contradictory heart of the matter: "Darling you will always be around, whether my mood's up or if it's down; in dreams I try to take you far away, but you never stay." Present but absent, consoling but heartbreaking, dead but alive in dreams; most of us, probably, have had such a presence in our lives. We would do well to pay attention to it.
"Dory Previn" is one of the most remarkable songs I know of; or rather, I know of no song like it. Taken literally, it is a breakup song; but it doesn't sound like one. There is no personal anger in the song, and if there is bitterness, it is only an element in counterpoint to the overwhelming note of the song: rueful, wistful, conflicted, but nevertheless overpowering longing.
In the opening lines, Campbell is already "fed up with girls in pretty dresses, and boys who want to teach them a lesson." She is "sick of the sight of her old lover," and sick, too, of her own actions in response: "I went under sheets and covers to get away from him." Yet this is not really what the song is about; it is not really even what the emotion is about. Anyone who has parted with a lover knows that anger and even hatred is quite often manufactured as protection from continuing desire. However necessary, however true in respect to facts, it is a false emotion relative to the self: and there is no false emotion in this album.
Yet this is a song, uniquely, not only with an interior but with a background: the view out the window of a bus looking at the changeless expanse of the American Great Plains toward the mountains. "But I caught a glimpse of Montana; and now nothing else matters; I'll heal eventually." Another way art frequently falsifies life is through excessive concentration, which itself is often aspirational than literal. However angry we might be at a lover, we can only live this emotion in the spaces in between other things: which are not distractions, but the very substance of the emotion.
Yet this is a song, uniquely, not only with an interior but with a background: the view out the window of a bus looking at the changeless expanse of the American Great Plains toward the mountains. "But I caught a glimpse of Montana; and now nothing else matters; I'll heal eventually." Another way art frequently falsifies life is through excessive concentration, which itself is often aspirational than literal. However angry we might be at a lover, we can only live this emotion in the spaces in between other things: which are not distractions, but the very substance of the emotion.
A human rational self, after all, is a relation to everything. When one self is joined to another, in whatever way, an additional relation, an additional dimension is added to every object and place and time and person, and indeed to the universe itself. We grasp the absence of a person in the unaccountable flatness of each object and moment of time--and never more poignantly than in the smallest things.
The struggle of "Dory Previn," then, is not the petty struggle with self-centered anger and bitterness, but the interior human struggle of the letting go of desire, and the impossible human task of letting go of another person: in the chorus, the narrator repeats over and over again, like someone having an argument with herself in a trance in the passenger seat looking out of a window: "Do you think it's time I put him out of my mind? I think it's time I put him out of my mind; yeah, I think it's time I put him out of my mind; I think it's time I put him out of my mind..."
The truth, though, is that relation and desire are not secondary things, but the innermost core of our being; and we cannot finally turn away of either. The only way, then, to let go of a lesser desire, the only way to undo a lesser relation, is to at least attempt to grasp a greater one: one that calls to us somehow through the expanses of prairie and mountain, through the crystal-clear moments of time looking out of a window thinking of someone far away, and through the sudden sharpness with which a song pierces our heart.
The heart of the song, then, is not the gradual letting go, but the sudden grasping leap for something transcendent: "How I adore you, Dory Previn, I'll turn you up to eleven, for the band's ears to bleed."
"The False Contender" is in a sense the album's harshest song; yet it is still the harshness of empathetic desire, not the harshness of rejection. "I once had a love, but soon had enough, for he was the false contender." If there is anger in the song, it is the anger of the true for the false, of the honest for the deceptive. The impulse is not to condemn, but to understand: "He was so thin; there must have been deep sorrow gnawing away at him."
There is no more foolish belief than the idea that human desire is at its core material and irrational. The overwhelming intensity of human desire comes not from the body's impulses, but from the rational mind's receptivity to being. We want to know, to understand, to possess and to enjoy in a way that is, properly understood, entirely intellectual--that uses but transcends every possible sensation of the body. The depth of desire is a measure of the depth of capacity; and it is because the mind can know totally and truly that we desire to know totally and truly.
"What will I do? Will it always be you?" Campbell sings again and again over an almost fair-like dirge. The crux of a harmful, disordered relationship is entirely truth and falsehood. The narrator wanted to know a human person, but was lied to; yet she still wants to know. What she got instead was no compensation: "Oh let's not pretend I needed the lesson that you taught me well."
The conclusion is the same as "Dory Previn"; the only hope of the letting go of a false relationship is in grasping a true one. Here, though, the conclusion is more urgent, more desperate, and arguably even more to the point: "I hope and I pray you'll leave me one day." What man has joined together, only God can separate.
The titular "Let's Get Out of This Country" has always been for me a song about confession and absolution. This is in part a personal connection: since my encounter with this song and this band played a strange but central role in my conversion to Catholicism at the age of 17.
"Let's get out of this country," Campbell sings urgently in the opening lines. "I'll admit I've been bored with me." Evil is not overwhelming and terrible, but petty and uninteresting and fundamentally unreal: "I drowned my sorrows and slept around, when not in body at least in mind." A sin in intention is often worse than a sin in fact, because more interior.
The solution, though, is simple: "Let's find a cathedral so that you can convince me I am pretty." The paradox of the human condition is that the self's goodness depends on the self's desires and relations, but the self's desires and relations depend on the self's goodness. Or, more accurately: the self's desires depend on the self being desired. Or, even more accurately: the self's goodness is ultimately something received from another. Properly understood, this is the essence of the Sacrament of Confession, which is less about the taking away of sins as the renewal, the re-giving, of the divine gift of lovability.
The point of leaving behind small and petty things is that one is freed to embrace great and beautiful things. The narrator and her companion will "pick berries," "smell the jasmine," contemplate the beauties of nature and man alike. The city and country that is left behind, the frozen island realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, symbolizes the realm of illusion, false desires and false goods, just as Carthage did for Augustine of Hippo: "What does the City have to offer me? I just can't see; I just can't see." Across the channel, though, there is beauty, and love, and Catholic churches. "We'll find a cathedral so that you can be handsome, I'll be pretty."
When I was eleven, I saw a Catholic cathedral for the first time, and my whole world was transformed. The summer after I became Catholic, I went to France for the second time, and saw the same Cathedral of Notre Dame in Strasbourg, and received communion there. In a very literal sense, my conversion to Catholicism was an effort to Get Out of This Country, to "find a cathedral" where God could indeed convince me that I, and the world, were good after all.
"Let's get out of this country," Campbell concludes, simply: "I have been so unhappy." It is only by rejecting false goods that one can accept true goods; it is only by escaping false relations that one can find true ones; it is only by letting go of unhappiness that one can find happiness; it is only by confessing one's sins that one can become good and beautiful. "I feel like getting confessional."
My first confession took place in a darkened church in Birmingham, Alabama, in the middle of a sudden, violent thunderstorm, with rain beating down on the roof and lighting flashing outside. Without the violence of that renunciation, though, I could never have accepted God. I have a vivid memory from around this time, whose date I cannot precisely place, of returning home and to bed at midnight on New Year's, but before sleeping listening to the song "Let's Get Out of This Country"--and feeling, quite correctly, that a new life had begun.
"Country Mile" is, in the broader arc of the album, the emblem of such new life, which is precisely the restoration of the purity of desire, and also, and unavoidably, the restoration of its power. Again, desire is expressed best through the sudden significance given to mundane things, "silver birch against a Swedish sky," and through the sudden poignancy of emotion evoked by them: "the singer in the band made me want to cry." But absence is only a loss where presence is desirable: "I wish you could be here with me: I would show you off like a trophy." The narrator reassures her absent companion that "I don't believe in true love anyway"; but this is mostly just a joke in an imaginary dialogue. "Who's being pessimistic now? I could document this as our first, as our last row." The desire for another person, even in the absence of that person, is always dialogic, double-sided, grounded ultimately in the kinship of human hearts, in the fact that the other is a person like us, with desire and emotion like ours: "The more you look forlorn, the more to you I warm."
When one sees clearly, then, there can be no doubt about the goodness of a human person and a human relationship, or about the inconsolable sorrow of leaving such a relation behind: "The road it winds, it twists, it turns, oh my stomach burns."And so the song ends, after a single verse, with a single, perpetually repeating chorus like the turns of a perpetually repeating road: "I won't be seeing you for a long while: I hope it's not as long as these country miles: I feel lost." Yet one is lost because one is centered; and so, in a sense, located and found after all.
The next two songs can be taken together in their combination of empathy with frustration; which is rooted precisely in the will to extend the self's interior redemption of desire to others. In "If Looks Could Kill," Campbell sings in frustration to a man who "is cross with every woman he's never had," threatening that "if looks could kill" he would "be the first to make me mad." Yet the fervor of the anger is rooted both in empathy and fundamental goodwill, above all in the repeated, sincere refrain: "Tell me where it all went wrong, and maybe I could make it better." Amid the glory of human life, there is no time for the nonsense of evil; and the recognition of the goodness of the human person, of human relationship and human desire, is precisely what inspires anger at their squandering.
"I Need All the Friends I Can Get" is a more resigned take on the same theme. "I can see that you are leading her on," Campbell sings ruefully to another male friend. "I think I know what you are." He is making "a long distance call to a mystery blonde"; he claims to "want to soothe her distress." It is all false, though, a mere symptom of "feeling listless," emblem of a dull, chaotic culture where "people are tired and commitment is gone," where desire is false because it is grounded not on the goodness of the human person, but on boredom and disinterest and perpetual self-centered complaining about "all the stupid people that you hate."
The narrator tries in vain to protest: "Can't you see that are leading her on?" In the meantime, she is reduced to simply repeating the ironic truth that "you can't see that you're just the same as all the stupid people that you hate"; along with the accompanying ironic truth that "you can't see that she's just the same as all the stupid people that you hate"; and the most ironic truth of all, that "you can't see that I'm just the same as all the stupid people that you hate." These are all, though, truths uttered in the moment only in the narrator's head, and after the fact in a song, and not to her companion. In her failure to tell the truth openly, the narrator admits that she is ultimately not "free from blame." But if, like many similarly shy, inward, pure, fervent, intense, good people, she fails to tell the truth to the people around her, the reason is quite simple: "I need all the friends I can get."
"Razzle Dazzle Rose" is more instrumental outro than song; its simple purpose is to affirm and, as it were, punctuate the value of what has gone before. "Rose, I'm feeling older," Campbell confesses. Though "it wasn't easy," she had in fact "tried to be happy." Some lessons were learned along the way, including the unfortunate truth that "expecting softness can lead to foolishness"; but for all that she has not accepted defeat. "Courage, my love, will make be bolder." The point here is made more by the grand, orchestral swelling of trumpets, strings, and synthesizers than by the words: that pure, true desire, grounded on a clear perception of the good, is worth the cost.
This happens to be true; and it is a truth on which the possibility of renewal entirely depends. People choose indifference and escape all the time: sometimes, like the Jedi Exile, because they are afraid, sometimes, like the men Tracyanne Campbell sings about, because they are wounded, but most of the time, like George HW Bush, simply because their desire is not strong or pure enough to do otherwise. Choice is free; but it depends nevertheless entirely on our ability to clearly perceive and truly desire the good. This is a critical truth to remember, now and always.
The Soviet Union collapsed because no one, with the possible exception of Mikhail Gorbachev, perceived its preservation and reform as good enough to desire strongly enough to actually and consistently choose against opposition. Virtually everyone, up to and including the President of the United States, preferred the continuance of a reformed Union to other and much worse alternatives: alternatives that we have been living through for the past thirty years. No one, certainly, wanted the mass impoverishment of Eastern Europe, the spreading of ex-Soviet arms and nuclear material across the whole world, and war and genocide in Ukraine. Yet the determining factor is that people did not want any alternative enough to prevent these outcomes from taking place; any more than the people of America, today, want the alternatives to perpetual massacre in Gaza and continual slaughter in Ukraine and forever war in Iran enough to prevent these things from taking place.
If the collapse of the Soviet Union and the downfall of the Galactic Republic and the failure of love tell us anything, then, it is that the choice of indifference and escape is ultimately far more perilous than the alternative.
The question of life, though, is not what you prefer, or what you fear, but what you actually desire: and whether that desire is pure and true enough to reach its end.
It is for this reason, above all, that I remain a loyal adherent to the Indie Movement.
Indie will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die.
Oh, for a few years - maybe many years - it'll be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented and caricatured and sneered at, or - worse - completely ignored. People will laugh about Stuart Murdoch, Zoe Deschanel, fedoras and converse sneakers and reading Pitchfork Magazine, but we had nothing to do with those things and still loved indie. Those who didn't understand will never understand: indie was much more, and much better, than all that.
Indie was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It's got to come back someday.
Indie was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It's got to come back someday.
I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.
No comments:
Post a Comment