Realism in 19th Century America

In 2019 Tanisha M. Fazal and Paul Poast published an article in Foreign Affairs titled “War is Not Over.” The article argued that war is alive and well despite some arguments to the contrary and that the field of IR has been skewed by World wars I and II.

[…] World Wars I and II have severely skewed our sense of what war is. Scholars and policymakers tend to view these conflicts as emblematic of war. They are not. Most wars are relatively short, lasting less than six months. They tend to result in 50 or fewer battle deaths per day—a number that pales in comparison to the figures produced during World War I (over 5,000 dead per day) and World War II (over 7,000 per day). In fact, if one excludes these two outliers, the rates of battle deaths from the mid-nineteenth century until 1914 are consistent with those in the decades since 1945.

There have, in fact, been a number of great-power wars since 1945. But they are rarely recognized as such because they did not look like the two world wars.

They also note that interstate conflict can come out of intrastate conflict — wars like those in Korea and Vietnam led to the US and China coming to direct combat. One of our cases comes into being in this manner.

As a result of our skewed baseline, there are several conflicts and regions that have been neglected. I mentioned Latin America as one such neglecting before. There have been interstate conflicts in the Western Hemisphere; they have flown under the radar for their lack of great power participants and World War-like chaos. I hope to begin the change in that.

There is also a movement in the history field to take a more hemispheric approach by viewing the entire American continent as one unit, instead of dividing it between the United States (and Canada) on one hand, and Latin America and the Caribbean on the other. Looking at interstate conflicts in the Americas allows for this hemispheric approach, as well as finally adding some variety to the IR field with non-great power warfare.

The Mexican-American War, the Paraguayan War (or War of the Triple Alliance), and the War of the Pacific all touch on these issues. The Mexican-American and Paraguayan Wars bridges cultural gaps; the United States represents the North American, anglo-sphere, while Mexico is Spanish-speaking and in many ways, the heart of Spanish-speaking Latin America. The Paraguayan War includes Portuguese-speaking Brazil along with Spanish-speaking Argentina and Uruguay facing off against Spanish and Guraní-speaking Paraguay. Border changes were significant in each as well, with Mexico losing about half of its territory to the US, Bolivia becoming landlocked, and Paraguay losing significant territory too.

As far as casualties go, in So Far from God, John S.D. Eisenhower states “Of the 104,556 men who served in the army, both regulars and volunteers, 13,768 men died, the highest death rate of any war in our [US] history,” in regard to the Mexican-American War. The Paraguayan War was the bloodiest war in South America’s history, with Paraguay’s losses estimated around 300,000 by some sources.

With conflicts this costly and impactful, there is no reason they shouldn’t be utilized as case studies in International relations to expand the universe of analysis and test hypotheses. So with that said I will analyze these three conflicts using IR realism. All three cast studies allow for excellent examples of internal and external balancing. Internal balancing takes center stage in the Mexican-American War leading to the US’s victory, and also plays an important role in the War of the Pacific with Chile prevailing over its opponents. External balancing is the most important factor in the Paraguayan War, although Paraguay did have internal balancing factors working in its favor.

Mexican-American War

The war between neighbors gives us a clear window into war and how different factors must be taken into account. The war was the result of, and resulted in, the US gaining territory at Mexico’s expense. The US was on a quest to the Pacific and Mexico was in its way. So when James K. Polk came to the White House, he was determined to make good on his goal of extending the borders to the Pacific Ocean.

This was a war fought, for the most part, on Mexican soil. So naturally Mexico enjoyed a home field advantage. The country also had an advantage of numbers. Not only were there more Mexican soldiers on the fields of battle, there was also the added advantage of Mexican civilians. But this seems to be where the favors ended for Mexico. The first Mexican negative and American opportunity was the administration of territories. Alta California and Nuevo Mexico were for all intents and purposes autonomous regions under a Mexican flag. Alta California wasn’t even administered as a single de facto unit, with Pío Pico operating around Los Angeles and José María Castro holding sway over the north at Monterey. These territories were also sparsely populated with the population density of California, in 1846, being one person per twenty-six square miles with the population coming to roughly 25,000 people and only about 10,000 being white.

As a result, Eisenhower notes:

Manifest Destiny, in practical terms, was far from unrealistic, for the territories the United States coveted were nearly empty, and the people living in Texas, New Mexico, and California were already enjoying a state of semiauntonomy within the republic of Mexico. They constituted the portion of the old Spanish Empire where “Spain’s imperial energy had faltered and run down…”

While Mexico was troubled with leadership problems — Santa Anna was exiled and took power again during this period, and there was plenty of infighting among military leadership — the United States was able to field a, not perfect, but effective authority to execute the war. The quality of the leadership was higher for US forces as well. The war is famous for being a sort of training ground for the future leaders of the American Civil War, but Winfield Scott led a brilliant amphibious invasion of Mexico and campaign to occupy Mexico City. Zachary Taylor fought well in Texas and Northern Mexico, stonewalling Mexican forces which resulted in Santa Anna combating the American invasion with diminished manpower.

The United States, according to John S.D. Eisenhower, fielded much better organized, disciplined, and motivated forces than Mexico, “but in some instances, as at Buena Vista, Mexican numerical superiority was so great that decimation of the American force would have been inevitable save for one factor: superior weaponry and the ability to use it.” The United States’s naval power also fits into this internal balancing equation. Using the navy in critical operations in the western theater to capture California and to invade Mexico at Veracruz and support ground forces tipped the scales that much more in its favor and against Mexico, which had no naval capabilities worth speaking of. When it comes to internal balancing, in this instance the United States was masterful. Taking on negative aspects such as fighting on foreign soil with outnumbered forces, the US took on this mission with superior artillery, small arms, and organization, along with leadership that put it in a position to prevail. Mexico failed to keep pace technologically or tactically and strategically and suffered defeat.

Paraguayan War

The Paraguayan War, also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, was fought between Paraguay on one side and an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay on the other. Like our previous case, it ended with a total victory by the Triple Alliance. The first thing to notice here is the external balancing. Brazil, Argentina, and Colorado-led Uruguay aligned themselves to take on Paraguay; and Paraguay wasn’t able balance externally, being forced to do battle on its own after the defeat of the Blancos. This alone was enough to be the deciding factor.

War began after the creation of Uruguay and the subsequent civil war between the Blancos and Colorados, with Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay all jockeying for influence in the new state. After the Colorados prevailed, the Paraguayan War kicked off.

The Paraguayan War is a pretty simple example of how balancing, or lack there of, can determine the outcome of a conflict with certainty. And how far misunderstandings can go, leading to complete disasters.

First, let’s take a look at the Triple Alliance, the best example of external balancing during the conflict, and one of our two cases of the phenomenon. Unnatural allies Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay formed an alliance to combat Paraguay. It could be argued that this alone was enough to secure a victory for the allies. Paraguay was in no position to counter this. With the Triple Alliance formed, for all intents and purposes, Paraguay was surrounded. The human resources if the alliance dwarfed those of Paraguay as well. The allies could call on three times the personnel that Paraguay could; during the battle of Corrales, Argentina “outnumbered the Paraguayans by over eight to one…”

The three nations, bringing their powers together, also had use of a sophisticated navy and were able to use a combined land and naval strategy to over power the Paraguayans.

Paraguay, on the other side, was dealt a very limited hand. It was already landlocked and had a smaller population. The smaller nation was able to implement some hit-and-run tactics early on on land and in the rivers, being able to deal some blows to the Brazilian navy and shake the alliance’s forces on land. Another form of internal balancing practiced by Paraguay was with the structure of it’s military. In order to increase the manpower, universal conscription was implemented and Marshal López began to build up his military in preparation of a fight against his much larger neighbors. The Paraguayans were well-trained, loyal, and disciplined. But there was only so much upside to a military that was working with “the most antiquated flintlocks, unrifiled cannons, locally made sabers, and bamboo lances.”

The balancing that did and didn’t take place among the belligerent nations of the Paraguayan War determined the outcome almost before the battles began to take place. This was one of the most devastating conflicts in the Western Hemisphere, sharing that infamous distinction with the American Civil War.

War of the Pacific

The War of the Pacific is a conflict that has been widely overlooked. Sharing a nomenclature with the Pacific theater of World War II has contributed to this, but so has location and participants. The Andean region isn’t exactly as central to the world’s eye as Western Europe or the Middle East. Although William F. Slater devoted significant real-estate in Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884 to explain the military consequences of the conflict, the balancing displayed during the War of the Pacific is informative. One can see how states behave while dealing with impending conflict.

The war began over contested claims to territories on the Pacific coast of South America that contain nitrates. Peru and Bolivia held de jure control of these provinces and Chile needed access. There were also geopolitical aspects to this conflict that Slater clearly explicates in his prose. The focus here, though, will be what the belligerent states did to strengthen themselves in an attempt to emerge victorious against their opponents.

It must be noted that because the participants didn’t learn the lessons of recent conflicts (American Civil War & Franco-Prussian War) they doomed themselves to repeat the mistakes. Using modern weapons with antiquated tactics spelled disaster for all involved. But to the balancing, the most obvious is Peru and Bolivia’s alliance. This external balancing instantly gave the allies a population advantage. The two states had as much as 100 times the combined population as Chile and as many as three times as many soldiers. But internally, both states struggled. Military composition, arms, and ineffective administration hindered both Peru and Bolivia.

On the other hand, Chile practiced enough self-help to eventually prevail. For starters, Chile had an officer corps that had been educated at its Escuela Militar. To go along with this educated officer corps, Chile also reorganized its army to have larger, more standard-sized infantry units; it also used standardized weapons. The allies lacked all of this, most damaging being the lack of standardized weapons that compounded their supply problems.

Although the naval campaign, from which Chile emerged victorious, neither of the participants really had much worth speaking of. Bolivia effectively had no navy and both Peru and Chile had disorganized naval forces that suffered from under training and heavy desertion rates. Chile arguably had a better officer class, but both employed foreign mercenaries and had navies composed of ships purchased from Great Britain and the US.

Chile prevailed in the War of the Pacific because of the internal balancing it practiced. Better training for its officer corps in both the army and the navy along with weapons standardization and better organization allowed it the overcome the Peru-Bolivia alliance and capture territory on its way to victory.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can see how balancing affects the outcome of war. All of the victors effectively balanced internally and/or externally. The United States and Chile practiced self-help and prevailed over Mexico and Peru and Bolivia, respectively. On the other hand, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay combined forces and utterly overwhelmed a Paraguay that failed to balance internally.

By beginning to examine oft-overlooked conflicts such as these, new and existing hypotheses can be tested. Variety of cases will also add to the validity of findings. Work is being done, but there are so many possibilities.

Cold, Hard, and Constant

As I’m sure is well-known at this point, in 2020 I took a dive into Russian literature. Starting with Dostoevsky, I ended up getting some recommendations from a few friends and ended up falling into some grade A literature. After consuming four works of varying degrees of autobiographical slant, I came across a few common threads. First, from the perspective of someone who has a very surface level knowledge of Russia, the area has a high level of diversity. For one, all four take place outside of what I call in my mind “Russia proper.” The Cossacks takes place in the Caucasus during the Russian conquest of that region. Notes from a Dead House and Kolyma Tales are set in Siberia in prison camps, while the events of The Cancer Ward occur in a hospital in Kazakhstan. Naturally there are Kazakh, Chechen, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Tatar, Cossack, Polish, Circassian, Armenian, and German characters in addition to others. The presence of these characters across works and time periods indicates their presence and importance in the everyday lives of Russia and Russians.

I spoke on this before, but there also exists a common sentiment of loneliness and melancholia among all of the main characters in each book. This melancholic mood is presented by physical and emotional separation among the characters. In The Cossacks Olenin leaves Moscow, after finding himself unsatisfied with his current life, for the Caucasus in order to live among the Cossacks and fight the Chechens. He longs to find happiness in his new life to no avail. In the other three works we find protagonists and supporting characters that have been forcibly removed from their former lives to prisons and exile. Their exile to prison camps contributes to their emotional suffering as they have no connection to the outside world or any loved ones. In The Cancer Ward we actually get the opportunity to see the aftereffects of prison life and subsequent exile. Not only was Kostoglotov emotionally damaged by his time in prison, but with the exile after his “liberation” he is disconnected from everything that was his life. He has no family, no hope of future happiness, no one who really cares about him. And it’s reflected in his inability to even attempt to find happiness even when it was possibly in his grasp.

One of the most surprising elements across all four works is the consistency of Russia. As someone with limited knowledge of Russia, I just always assumed that 1917 was a hard shift and everything changed then with the revolution. But to the contrary, it seems like nothing changed except the explanations of legitimacy for the government. Russians have lived under the same type of authoritarian pressure since the time of the Czars. Dostoevsky’s time in a Siberian labor camp for political subversion (killing his wife in Notes from a Dead House) eerily similar to the experiences described by Varlam Shalamov and even Kostoglotov is Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward. Kostoglotov was put in prison after serving in the Eastern Front of World War II because he thought too freely and refused to fully submit to the ideology of socialism after seeing its flaws first-hand. The state’s heavy hand is seen not only in the penal experiences, but also in medicine. Patients of the cancer ward in the Uzbekistan hospital had to abide by strict regulations and endured regular checks and searches. Dostoevsky even writes that “Searches were frequent, unexpected, and thorough…” The idea is clear, anything less than full submission to authority, whether that be the Czar or the Communist Party, would lead to your absolute ruin. And the characters shared a goal to free themselves of the pressures brought on by the governing authority.

There is an obvious chasm between Tolstoy on one hand and Dostoevsky, Shalamov, and Solzhenitsyn on the other. The station of the authors influenced their writing styles and content. The latter three fictionalized their experiences for safety reasons. Dostoevsky and Shalamov even wrote in first person perspective in epsitolary. And although The Cancer Ward puts the reader in the shoes of several characters from the patients to the doctors and nurses, there is still a very ground-level, first person perspective about the prose. Dostoevsky’s prose even mimicks someone slightly unhinged, unnaturally tense with a sort of tick. There’s the feel of reading the comman man’s experience in these authors’ prose.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, writes in a broad, third person omniscient style. You never quite feel like you’re looking through Olenin’s eyes, nor Lukashka’s or any of the others’. It feels as if this is a reflection of his higher station in life relative to the other authors. This is also reflected in the fact that Olenin is the only character to voluntarily remove himself from his life, and he makes that decision in an effort to find happiness. So even though he ends up on a similar journey to the others, it’s not a one-to-one comparison. But through this, we see that people have similar experiences across class, location, and motive differences.

Russian literature offers a lot. Not only is it pleasurable for logofiles, but it allows a peek into the psyche and lifestyles of people in that region. As an American, we’re given a certain stereotype of Russians and the people associated with them (Chechens, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Cossacks, Ukrainians, etc.) and never peel back that layer to explore the reality. These authors, and others that I have yet to read offer the opportunity to do just that. We get the full human experience through the authors and its beautiful. It even teaches us about ourselves. There are similarities among Russia and America, the most obvious being our experience of expansion — westward for us and eastward for them — and the cosmopolitan lifestyles that encouraged. I finished my year with three Russian novels and Kolyma Tales and The Cancer Ward are among the best books I read all year. Happy to share my thoughts on these reads and Happy New Year!

A New Great American Novel

The Son by Philipp Meyer definitely lives up to all the praise it has received. I was introduced to the story through the television series, and enjoyed that so much I had to read the book… especially when I realized there were several changes to the story with the TV adaptation.

The simple description of The Son is “a modern western.” That is true, but it’s so much more. Philipp Meyer covers so much ground in under 600 pages — it’s nothing short of remarkable. First, I’ll speak to the structure. The story is told through three characters’ perspectives (up until towards the end when a fourth is brought in). All three characters are part of the same family, but exist in different eras. There is Eli McCullough, his son Peter McCullough, and Eli’s great granddaughter Jeanne Anne McCullough. Eli and Jeanne Anne’s chapters alternate between first and third person narratives, but Peter’s are in the form of a diary (except for the last one). So where we get the stories of Eli and J.A., Pete’s is even more intimate. It makes the reader feel as if Pete’s diary has survived from 1917 to the present day and we’re getting to read these entries in a normal, curious fashion. Despite the rotating chapters, the plot never gets muddled; if anything, it keeps the reader engaged.

Set mostly in south and west Texas, The Son covers a temporal range from the early 19th century up to the 2010s. Eli’s story begins as a boy in the sparsely populated Texas that is captured by the Comanches. He eventually becomes a member of the band and from that point on thinks of himself as a Comanche. We see how violent the life was in the 19th century and how that shapes a man. Eli is the hero of this storyline; he fits in here. He also spends time with the Texas Rangers fighting Native Americans and fights in the Civil War, before becoming a cattlemen. He eventually builds a fortune that secures his family financially for the next few generations.

Eli’s son Peter is the complete opposite of his father. He’s a gentleman who is seeking out a peaceful existence during a time of conflict. He represents a change in society. In the 20th century, some of the deadliest wars occurred, but the frontier in America was coming to a close, with laws finally making their way west. Peter is the personification of this change. While his father, and brother Phineas, are more comfortable using force Peter sees that as something from a bygone era. He’s right for the most part, but there is a conflict between him and his father much like we saw in the world around him, with the Mexican Revolution and World War I taking place in a world where violence was increasingly looked at an an archaic tool. Pete goes on to break with everything he was raised with and forsakes his family in order to live the type of life he believes is right.

Jeannie is the most complicated character of the entire story. She was a child when she knew Eli, so she has an idealized version of him, knowing of his exploits through tales mostly. This causes her to not respect others — especially her father — because they don’t live up to the version of Eli she has created. She also thinks of herself as the closest thing to this idea of Eli so she spends her life in a perpetual loneliness. She is the culmination of the McCullough line. Because of her unrealistic view of her great grandfather, she inadvertently seals the fate of her family. In a way, she represents the confusion caused by the vast changes in the late 20th and 21st centuries. She’s done everything she could to secure her family financially, but she’s lost the soul of the family and can’t see that. She meets a tragic end, not due to violence, but tragic because she could never figure out her own flaws.

Philipp Meyer crafted a candidate for the Great American Novel with The Son. He was able to tell the story of American society through a multigenrational family story. The prose is free flowing and efficient. The structure keeps readers engaged. And the story is just gripping. This should be a must-read for anybody interested in American history, the western genre, historical fiction, and anyone who just enjoys good writing and storytelling.

Marine Corps and Internal Balancing

As I mentioned before, I’ve taken a little break from all the doom and gloom of today’s world recently, occupying my time increasingly with fiction. But I haven’t completely divorced myself from all that is relevant today. Recently, I began rereading a collection of essays in IR theory edited by the IS (International Security) team at the Belfer Center and published by the MIT Press. The essays were written in the 90s so they have a little age on them which is nice for evaluation purposes. You’re able to see not only how scholars explained the past from the vantage point of the 90s, but you can also see the predictive power (or lack thereof) of these theories.

Those interesting tidbits aside, reading these got the gears in my head spinning once again. One of the concepts John Mearsheimer handled in the first essay was balancing. He focused on external balancing. Although we have seen external balancing recently, internal balancing is lauded as the favored method of balancing for countries. And recently, we saw this on display in the United States.

Last June the Commandant of the US Marine Corps published the Corps’ new plan for the future. Although I first heard about it through the podcast Net Assessment, it became a hot topic earlier this year with pieces on War on the Rocks, The Economist, and various other outlets. This new strategy for the Marines is a complete restructuring of the Corps in order to bring it more in line with the US’s strategy to compete with China in a return to “great power politics.”

According to Bryan McGrath, formerly of Net Assessment, “This is the single most consequential piece of writing about American sea power since… [the 1980s].” So what exactly does it propose? In the words of The Economist, “After decades as dirt sailors, the marines are getting back to salt water.” This new strategy will transform the Corps into the first line of defense for the US in the Pacific region.

For the last two decades roughly, the marines have functioned as a second army in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; a role much different from their function during the Pacific War during World War II. After new war games determined that US forces weren’t ready for a potential conflict in the Pacific, Commandant, General Berger, released the ten year plan that aims to reshape the Marine Corps. Personnel, artillery, and aircraft will all be slashed, including getting rid of all the force’s tanks. “In their place comes a commando-like infantry force with nimbler weapons: drone squadrons will double in number and rocket batteries will triple.”

This is an extremely important move for the military, and its importance was reflected in the media coverage it received. Interestingly, this is an example of IR realism at work. Evaluating the threat of future conflict with China in the Pacific, the US is balancing against its competitor. Alliances are useful, and the US does have allies in the region, but this is internal balancing. According to Joseph M. Parent and Sabastian Rosato,

… states place an overriding emphasis on the need for self-help. Not knowing others’ intentions and aware that there is no higher authority to protect them, great powers understand they must provide for the own security. Consequently, states rely relentlessly both on arming and on imitating the successful military practices of peer competitors and rarely resort to alliances for their security. In other words, they constantly balance through internal means and seldom through external means.

Parent and Rosato, “Balancing in Neorealism” in International Security 40, no. 2: 52.

The United States realizes that China could become a conflict point and instead of relying on alliances with other states to check China, and because the US doesn’t truly know China’s intentions, the safest bet is to balance internally — and one of the methods of internal balancing is the Marine Corps’ restructuring.

This stood out to me because we rarely see theories at work so openly. Defense strategies are played so close to the chest, we usually don’t see mechanisms like this in real-time. More often than not we learn about them through history. But this serves as a wonderful example of balancing in realism. We’ll see what happens in the near future as events unfold.

A Weird Year

What is the most obvious statement I can make? 2020 is a weird year. I’m still amazed that Kobe Bryant is dead. The world has been shut down. And I’ve also taken to Russian literature. Odd it may seem, reading these darker, more serious tales that invoke feelings of obscure, frigid, snowy days are comforting.

I started off with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. Contrary to all the descriptions, the short novella didn’t read as a dark story for me. It did have a protagonist that shares a lot of traits similar to its counterparts in other Dostoevsky stories. They all tend to be self-centered, selfish, emotionally immature, highly conflicted, and to an extent mental unstable. This holds true for Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment as well as the main characters in Notes from Underground and The Double.

Raskolnikov’s story is pretty dark. After killing an old pawnbroker and her sister in cold blood, we see how Raskolnikov deals with the stress of committing murder, going through extreme bouts of fever and delusion. We also see how his relationships are destroyed, not only as a consequence of his egregious actions, but by his extremely flawed personality and how those same traits end up allowing someone to uncover his secret.

The edition of Notes from Underground and The Double that I read were coupled together. The latter was considerably darker in my opinion. Its pretty clear that Golyadkin is suffering from severe mental illness throughout the entire novella and the reader can see him slowly succumb to it as the narrative progresses. Its not as apparent in Crime and Punishment because of the sheer dislikability of Raskolnikov, but all three main characters cannot help themselves when it comes to social faux pas. All three desperately want to be a part of the higher class, but they can never quite master the social etiquette part.

It’s also remarkable how the three are banished from society to some extent. Golyadkin is taken to an asylum after suffering a sever mental break while Raskolnikov is sentenced to 8 years in Siberia for his murder. Where Golyadkin’s story reaches its end with the confinement, Raskolnikov is able to finally redeem himself as a human and accept love and express love.

Varlam Shalamov provides no such comforting silver lining with this Kolyma Tales. In what may be the most beautiful writing (in translation of course) out of all of these works, Shalamov describes the utter hopelessness that existed in the gulags and work camps of Siberia during the Soviet epoch. The seamless prose is simple, but dense enough to convey the somber sentiments of the convicts. Poignant, simple sentences really hit home: “We all understood that we could survive only through luck,” “We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance,” and “Our spiritual calm, achieved by a dulling of the senses, was reminiscent of the ‘dungeons’s supreme freedom’ and Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil.”

His thoughts on friendship also demonstrate how time in Siberia as a convict shaped his views.

For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man — only mistrust, rage, and lies.

An Individual Assignment

Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.

Dry Rations

Quotes such as these can shed some light on the characters of Dostoevsky’s work. Raskolnikov, Golyadkin, Alexei, and others are such loners. Their tragedies simply cannot be shared with others, so they are doomed — much like the narrator in Kolyma Tales — to bear their burdens alone.

I’ve by no means delved into the entire spectrum of Russian literature yet. But the primer I’ve had is useful for understanding a general theme in literature from the country. It allows me to put these works in a context that encourages a greater understanding of the people of Russia and their culture. I’ve always believed that I learned more about other cultures through literature than scholarly work. Its probably second only to actually immersing oneself in a society. I look forward to digging further into Dostoevsky, checking out Tolstoy, Gogol, Nabokov, Victor Serge, and several others to really get a feel.

To Live and Die…

To live and die… excuse me,  the title is “To Die in Mexico,” and rightly so. John Gibler illustrates the grim, morbid reality of life, as lived by Mexicans, in Mexico. Through a series of vignettes that center around people’s experience as well as historical realities, this moribund existence is given life by Gibler.

This is a fast-paced account of the current situation in Mexico. One of the more poignant qualities of this book is its revelatory power. Through this short volume, the human interest in death, despair, and hopelessness is explored. This was a page-turner because of the bleakness of the story. Out of all of the drugland accounts that I have read to date, this is by far the darkest and most disheartening. But I would also go out on a ledge and say it is the best. 

Gibler’s style is inductive in that it tells the grand story of the Drug War in Mexico from individual stories on the ground that demonstrate the local realities of a global conflict. This is a change of pace with most stories of the Drug Wars being told from the top down, beginning with large scale ideas like the policies of the US and other countries. The death of journalism is detailed through stories Gibler follows in Culiacan and Juarez. Journalists are attempting to practice their profession within the lines established by the government and the cartels and having just as many brushes with death as any active combatant in Mexico. 

The first two chapters serve as backstory and set us up to be placed on the ground with the author and taken through some of Mexico’s roughest terrain, beginning with Sinaloa. The following chapters explore the Mexican Drug War through the recitations of journalists and other victims of the war in Juarez, Culiacan, and Monterrey, among other places.

Although this is such a brief book, it is slam packed with insight into the Drug War – that of Mexico and the United States. Using this same method of narrative, Gibler seamlessly weaves in potent critiques of the US’s domestic drug policies and their effects on minorities (especially Black Americans) within the US. One of the most important takeaways from Gibler, though, is the bifurcated nature of the Drug War itself. In Mexico there is “the War on Drugs (la Guerra del Narco), and then there is the Drug War (la Narcoguerra).” The former refers to the federal government’s attempt to “combat” drug trafficking organizations with federal police, soldiers, and marines. In the latter, “trafficking organizations – and the various local, state, and federal authorities allied with them – battle in the streets and seek to exterminate each other and establish absolute dominance in a given plaza.” The two conflicts at times overlap, but they are definitely different contests.

In this conflict, not only has the state ceased to function as a state, but in many ways it has been co-opted by the various trafficking organizations. In places like Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican state “cannot guarantee the security of its citizens,” and has lost the monopoly on violence. As was hinted in the previous paragraph, the federal government has also apparently taken a side — that of the Sinaloa Cartel, choosing to target the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas, the Juarez Cartel, the Familia Michoacana, and other enemies of the Sinaloa group. “This is the manifestation of a failed state incapable of providing security, justice, or peace where the role of the state has been taken on by a kind of parallel state where extortion and kidnapping are used instead of taxes.”

Although there is no shortage of hopelessness, there are Mexicans who refuse to capitulate. There are mothers and fathers that are still willing to combat drug barons and government officials to stop the wanton slaughter of their loved ones. They are fighting an uphill battle, but as long as there are people willing to fight, there is a sliver of hope for a better tomorrow.