This morning John Claughton wrote a short but gripping letter to the Times of London attacking Eton and the culture of privilege in the UK. “Whatever wider strategy it adopts, the school itself will continue to educate the global elite or those who will become the global elite,” he writes. “Perhaps its most important mission will be to ensure that its pupils are saved from the sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can produce alumni such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Moog, Kwasi Kwarteng and Ben Elliot and thereby damage a country’s very fabric,” he continues. “Sadly, I failed in that purpose. John Claughton, Master, Eton College, 1984-2001.”
A lot of this is about the absurdity of the intern who became a Baroness in five years. The UK is already in a deep questioning mood over the modern relevance of the monarchy (especially among the young). And now former PM Johnson of the “lockdown soirees,” who reeks of unparalleled, undeserved privilege, raises questions anew about the whole “ennoblement” process. Why is 29-year old Charlotte Owens getting a peerage? “She’s had a few jobs in Parliament,” Sky News’s Liz Bates told The Independent, summing up Owens’s (brief) career thus far. Or, for that matter, former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is as reeking of privilege as his “mate,” Boris Johnson. Or, worst of all, his fucking hairdresser.
This goes, of course, beyond Oxbridge and the UK. There is the global superyacht class, unencumbered by the Channel, which I write about here often. Some superyachts have 25 bathrooms, while some people cannot even afford a single location to rest their weary head. As rents skyrocket and the urban homelessness problem reaches operatic heights, the libertarian billionaire class preach impossible cities and laud the debt ceiling compromise. Here, in the US, the No Labels billionaire-funded third party is making the world kinder and gentler for the overclass. And if the purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, then, well, good luck.
The media is in the hour of the wolf. Full-time statehouse reporters at U.S. newspapers has declined 34% since 2014, according to Pew. But, fear not, the billionaires are making a profit off of that, too. "The media industry has announced at least 17,436 job cuts so far this year, marking the highest year-to-date level of cuts on record, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas," writes Sara Fischer in Axios. Everywhere, it seems, the system is being gamed and the afflicted are being made less comfortable by the already draped in ermine.
And then there is the matter of Henry Kissinger’s 100th. Even more unjust than the seediness of the British peerage scandal, is how the foreign policy elite celebrated Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday. That he has lived to be 100, outliving his natural enemies, seems almost like a cosmic admission of the unfairness of life. There is also, for the progressive side of the aisle, the curious question of Samantha Power.
Jonathan Guyer at Intelligencer does an amazing job afflicting the comfortable at New York Public Library’s 42nd Street entrance, as close as he could get to the swishy 100th birthday celebration of Kissinger. It is unfortunate that Samantha Power — and her husband, economist Cass Sunstein — showed up to fete a war criminal. Unfortunate, but not entirely unpredicted. As early as 2019, John Carl Baker had already seen that Power, after writing her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, had begun following the path of Status over Principle. From Jacobin:
According to Power, diplomats and civil servants are the unsung heroes of humanitarianism — paragons of public service who are above ideology and worthy of reverence regardless of party.
But “public service” is an ideology, too, one that binds liberals and conservatives together in blind dedication to the continued functioning of US empire. George W. Bush, Sam Brownback, Condoleezza Rice, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick aren’t apolitical notables for Power to name-drop — they’re detestable figures who should be roundly denounced.
Kirkpatrick pops up several times. Power met her while interning at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she impressed the young advocate with “her bluntness, which seemed to puncture the otherwise clubby, polite atmosphere.” In the abstract, of course, Kirkpatrick was a trailblazing figure — the United States’ first woman ambassador to the UN. But she also infamously justified US support for murderous right-wing dictatorships in the name of anticommunism. Whether Power, a lifelong human rights activist, is bothered by this history is unclear. The closest she comes is an oblique reference to the “vast policy differences” she had with Kirkpatrick, although these differences remain undefined.
But Samantha Power and Henry Kissinger are a strange pair, even by American foreign policy Establishment standards. Samantha Power was, at one point, a human rights idealist of the highest order. The same cannot be said of Henry Kissinger at any point in his professional career. Samantha Power came to prominence as one of the most ardent advocates of human rights during the aughts. She was a war correspondent in Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Kissinger, who greenlighted Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, when Power was four years old, was, is and always will be a human rights cynic. Further, Kissinger has enough Cambodian blood on his hands to turn the seven seas incarnadine. “Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia,” writes Nick Turse in The Intercept.
Ambassador Powers’ vociferous opposition to Hillary Clinton’s neoconservative pivot during the 2008 Presidential campaign nearly cost her her career. President Obama, however, believed in her. He appointed Power as US Ambassador to the UN from 2013 to 2017, and in January 2021, President Biden appointed her to head the United States Agency for International Development. Power has been a part of the American foreign policy Establishment ever since; on a glide path, perhaps, to be the Secretary of State at some time in the near future. She is most effective as the administration’s point person on the war crimes of Vladimir Putin. And yet Power, before becoming a fixture of the American foreign policy Establishment, was extremely critical of Kissinger. From Truthdig:
“[I]n her book Sergio: One Man’s Fight to Save the World, she documented how Kissinger greenlighted the brutal Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people,” The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani reports. And in her book “A Problem From Hell,” Jilani adds, “she wrote of how Kissinger encouraged Iraq’s Kurds to engage in an armed revolt in the mid 1970s, only to withdraw support to build rapport with the country’s government — leading Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to brutally uproot them in revenge.”
What is the meaning of this thusness? How does one struggle for human rights and equality in the Arena, like her hero Sergio Vieira de Mello, and yet yearn after the acceptance of semi-savages like Kissinger? Do the laurels and worldly glories of superpower diplomacy trump the objective morality of the struggle for human rights? Just to kiss Kissinger’s ring on the occasion of surviving a century? Henry Kissinger, by the way, who obliquely admires and is, in turn, admired by Putin, perhaps the King of war criminals. It boggles the imagination and, quite frankly, hurts my heart to contemplate.
Adam Johnson writes, acidly, of Power attending the Kissinger event: “If the whole point of accountability is to dissuade future war crimes by holding the people who commit said crimes responsible for their actions, something Power mawkishly pretends to care about, then what message is being sent to future US war criminals by renting out the New York Public Library and celebrating the most notorious living war criminal in the US short of, perhaps, George W. Bush?”
How can this be, you ask? There are dark, almost animal pleasures to be gained in partaking of the privilege of the few. Because privilege is also a Tribe, a most exclusive and dangerous tribe to all others — with common schools, child rearing practices, acceptable plumage and shared watering spots.
Often — but not always, is all that I can answer — is Status triumphs over Principle. In the morally weak.
How Silvio Berlusconi Wrecked Italy—and, Sort of, America (TNR/Alexander Stille)
No Labels likely to back off third party bid if DeSantis emerges as GOP nominee (Politico)
“In 2003, a series of financial woes caused (Al) Goldstein to lose his company, as well as his homes in Manhattan and Florida (buh-bye, middle finger statue). Smut had provided stability for Goldstein, and without it he was forced back into taking whatever jobs he could get.” (Avenue)
How torture, deception and inaction underpin the UAE’s thriving sex trafficking industry (ICIJ)
Kenya's tea pickers are destroying the machines replacing them (semafor)
Why Are People So Upset About Elizabeth Gilbert’s New Book? (Bindu Bansinath)
Want to Understand Canada’s Wildfire Crisis? Read This Book (WIRED)