Hegemony (WOF)

Chua's chapter on Russia and its (sometimes Jewish) oligarchs is perhaps her most convoluted yet. Beyond her initial point that class and ethnicity interact and sometimes become indistinguishable for certain actors, she seems determined to characterize individuals differently, depending on their race and class. We saw this written large in her previous chapter on Latin America - where white elites were largely excused from their classist and racist behavior and the poor, predominantly ex-slaves of African descent and highly marginalized indigenous peoples, became a faceless mass which Chua chided for challenging (quite calmly in most examples) ethnic and class bigotry.

That simplistic division doesn't work as well for Chua in the case of Russia, it seems. When a historically alienated ethnic group - Jews - become the elite over a white population, Chua seems more willing to explain their behavior and appearance in terms of their ethnicity, and other wise reduce them to that. Because of that, she contrasted the gentile Russian oligarch's furniture with those of his Jewish counterparts - and called the Jews tacky. As the chapter progresses, she moves from typifying the Jewish experience into discussion of the individual oligarchs, but continues to cast Jews in a negative light. She unquestioningly quotes a description of one of the businessmen, which calls him "the apotheosis of sleaziness" and "Slight and balding, with lovingly manicured hands and a fondness for larding his conversation with Latin phrases" (Chua, 87). The common antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as corrupt (sleazy), unattractive (slight, balding), unmanly (manicured hands), and soft intellectuals (fondness for Latin phrases) apparently never occurred to her as a reason to disregard that source.

In spite of this, Chua seems unable to view the oligarchs as dangerous individuals. Although willing to cast Jews as an ethnicity in a poor light, she views the oligarchs as having rightfully won a monopolistic control over Russian industry. She writes "They may have been ruthless, but they were plainly smart, unsurpassed entrepreneurs who built their empires from scratch" (90). She seems to excuse or at least tolerate the violation of consumers' trust (and in some cases Chua notes, murders necessary to avoid government regulation or taxation), viewing that as an unfortunate, but acceptable means to the end of wealth.

Likewise, concerns from the poor (gentile and Jewish alike) that approach the oligarchs as ruthless elites rather than ruthless Jews are completely lacking in Chua's analysis - a fact she doesn't seem to notice, as she doesn't comment on it. Instead, Chua focuses on the rise of neo-Nazis and other antisemitic groups using the oligarchs as a rhetorical point. She thus paints the Russian people of being incapable of separating the fact that the oligarchs are Jewish from the fact that the oligarchs are ruining many Russians lives. One has to wonder, however, if her failure to frame the argument in such a way suggests that even she can't explain the hatred of the oligarchs without thinking of them as Jews.

The result is intriguing. Attacking class inequalities is treated as synonymous with overt racism, and therefore unacceptable. More subtle racism, such as thinking of Jews in highly stereotyped ways, however, apparently flies under the radar, and escapes notice. The desire, as it seems, is to prevent Russians (or any people) from attacking the class structure in exchange for limiting the excesses of racism. This seems to be a brilliant hegemonic narrative - that we can solve classism or racism, but not both.

(Next week, we start chapter 4, "The 'Ibo of Cameroon'").

The Ruthlessness of Jews (WOF)

Between the historical analysis of Jews throughout Eastern Europe and an examination of the actual "oligarchs" in question, Chua has a brief section titled "The Rise of the Oligarchs" which emphasizes how some Jews prospered during later Soviet shortages and eventually leveraged black market positions into membership among the post-Communist economic elite. She gets into the details with one anecdote from a Ukrainian Jew:

My uncle, for example, had one of those underground firms. He manufactured shoes on his own. Later he sold the shoes either at the weekend flea market or through an 'off-the-books' arrangement with a state-owned shoe store. What my uncle did was considered illegal. Yet everyone liked him and depended on him. There would have been no shoes on the shelves without people like my uncle (Chua, 83).

Conspicuously missing from this account (and from Chua's analysis of this account) is the role of black markets in exploiting consumers by demanding high prices for basic necessities (say, shoes) and establishing a bribery-based economy. Those impacts are far-reaching, with the former draining average consumers funds and the latter establishing an inefficient and unresponsive economic climate. This is one of the few cases were Chua curiously doesn't present Jews as (always) profiteers from economic instability. As soon as Chua takes over narration a more negative tone seems to return, as Chua explains that one of the Jewish "oligarchs"

started a ticket scalping agency while a student in the economically stagnant early eighties. Friedman [the "oligarch"] paid Moscow university students to wait in line to buy theater tickets, which could then be bartered on the black market. Although ticket scalping existed long before Friedman came on the scene, he was the first to organize it into a well-disciplined business, employing 150 scholars - on full salary if they waited overnight, or half salary if they queued up in the early morning - and 'managers' from every university department. Friedman, as a kind of controlling shareholder, would meet once a week with his managers to review their business plans (Chua, 84)

While clearly imply a coercive relationship with young employees during a time of economic hardship, the negativity is muted, strangely. This seems to play odds with Chua's politics. Her writing repeatedly suggests a thinking that Jews can't do anything but be oddly successful, but even she can't rationalize the excesses of the economic elite in post-communist Russia. She seems enamored with the idea of the black market - something raw but contained, where the Jews (and others) could reach their full potential without having it spill over into the larger society.

With that, she laments over the intrusiveness and corruption that has become a part of working for the new elite, one of which she notes "installed surveillance cameras in every office to monitor his new employees [...] one third of them weren't working hard enough, so he fired them" (Chua, 87). Where in Latin America inequalities were treated as either historical or passive (and above all, social rather than economic), in her analysis of Russia she writes of Jews that do monstrous things, but still seems enthralled by their capacity to do such things.

Innate Jewishness (WOF)

One of the most disgusting aspects of racism is how it strips its targets of agency - making them into animals, automatons, or some other mindless subhuman. Amy Chua dances uncomfortably close to that type of argument during this weeks installment of World on Fire.

This becomes apparent when she moves past a brief analysis of Jewish history into direct study of the situation in Russia using a conversation with a New York financial analyst and Jewish Russian emigrée, Sonia. Chua recounts, "But wasn't it strange, we persisted, that so many of the oligarchs should be Jewish? 'You know Jews!' Sonia laughed. 'They gravitate towards business!'" (Chua, 83). A Jewish predilection is treated as something almost biological in the conversation and throughout this section. Sonia previously explained, in contrast to her later statement, "'These oligarchs - they are 95 percent Russian and only 5 percent Jewish. They are fully assimilated, products of the Russian environment [...]'" (Chua, 83). It doesn't matter, goes this claim that Chua repeats, what degree of socialization is shared between the Jewish population and the gentile Russians - they're still driven towards business at unequal levels. Their existence as Jews somehow overrides everything else, rendering them nothing but a stereotype of a Jewish financier.

Subtler variations on this appeared throughout the proceeding section on the history of Jews (focusing almost exclusively on European Jews). It begins by noting "Jews do not appear to have been particularly economically successful during antiquity - but that's about the last time in their history that they weren't, at least when left alone to pursue their livelihoods" (Chua, 79). The effect of this is that all economic successes of Jews are cast as due to their Jewishness, while all failures are treated as the result of restrictions placed by other actors. The effect is strange, since it reduces Jews to a narrow stereotype but also excuses any economically hostile behavior on the part of the "Jewish oligarchs" since their behavior is only part of their nature.

Behind all of this is a strange lack of curiosity as to why Jews became economically successful but only in certain times and places. As Chua notes,

During the Middle Ages, despite recurrent anti-Jewish restrictions and persecutions, Jews prospered visibly and disproportionately as merchants and middlemen and eventually as international traders, particularly between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands (Chua, 79).

She does not go on to even remotely explore why Jews were well suited, or at least better suited than most Christians or Muslims, for trade. I'm not an expert on this, but I would theorize that the social networks created by the diaspora would be useful, not to mention that capacity to live as a clear ethnic minority. The lack of even a cursory analysis, however, makes the Jews into an innate force - destined for economic dominance if unfettered by restrictions. Instead of fully addressing that issue, Chua goes on to examine how the less restrictive environments of Eastern Europe allowed Jews to briefly become quite economically successful, with the notable exception of czarist Russia. On that outlier, Chua concludes,

[...] restricted to the Pale [areas of permitted Jewish settlement], subjected to economic discrimination, and victimized by recurrent anti-Jewish plundering and violence, most Russian Jews at the turn of the twentieth century lived in cruel poverty (Chua, 81).

Likewise, in the more recent Soviet era, Chua similarly states, "[...] no one (outside the Politburo) got billionaire-rich in the former Soviet Union, and Jews were no exception" (Chua, 82). In both cases, the economic power of the Jewish population is purely related by Chua to restrictions or liberties placed on the Jews by the gentile governments, making the Jewish experience essentially an expression of gentile tolerance or hostility.

If you accept this argument, its hard not to fall into the trap Chua has set for herself. She mentions, at the end of the historical analysis,

During the 1990s, seven cutthroat entrepreneurs, six of them Jewish, came to control the overwhelming part of Russia's newly privatized economy [...] they became billionaires by playing the game more ruthlessly and effectively than anybody else during Russia's free-for-all transition to capitalism (Chua, 82).

If you accept that Jews are innately ruthless, then you accept that they must be constrained. Chua's established another self-defeating argument on faulty premises - namely that Jews have one nature: brutality.

Acceptable Targets (WOF)

Looking back, Chua's argument concerning Latin Americans was muddled and prone to several problems. She would write descriptions of the victimization of some groups only to mid-sentence suggest that an entirely different dynamic was going on with no introduction-

[T]he uneducated, disease-ridden, desperately poor but numerically vast Indian- or African-blooded majorities of Latin America experience little or no economic benefit from privatization and global markets while finding themselves suddenly filled with contradictory new materialistic and consumerist desires (Chua, 75).

This entirely new element to the situation - feelings of manipulation by the market and to some extent even psychological conditioning by it - wasn't previously even hinted at. It wasn't explored in detail like the violent themes Chua perceived in various populists. But at least it was mentioned, just this once.

This is also a great example of how Chua hedges the causes of communal poverty. She repeatedly writes of privatization and cruel treatment often without mentioning who is privatizing Latin American infrastructure or treating various ethnic groups with cruelty. She refers to the privileged actors as corrupt, but rarely accuses them of specific crimes (especially contemporaries).

In spite of all these problems, this chapter roughly seems to strike a workable, if biased, balance. The following chapter, "The Seventh Oligarch," on the other hand, begins with a paragraph describing Russian privatization, which contains the sentence:

Instead of dispersing ownership and creating functioning markets, these reforms had allowed a small group of greedy industrialists and bankers to plunder Russia, turning themselves overnight into the billionaire-owners of Russia's crown jewels while the country spiraled into chaos and lawlessness (Chua, 77).

A little bit further down the page, Chua discusses these tycoons with a colleague who is preparing a report on them:

Something about the ruthless, looting, self-dealing kleptocrats-turned-oligarchs described in his article had struck me, and I wanted to run it by him. It seemed to me, I said to Jerry, that most of the key players in the privatization and eventual economic takeover of Russia were Jewish. Was it possible?

"Oh, no" Jerry replied instantly, with a frown. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure?" I pressed him. "If you look at their names-"

"You can't tell anything from names," Jerry snapped impatiently, clearly not wanted to discuss the topic any further. [...] As it turns out, six-out-of-seven of Russia's wealthiest and (at least until recently) powerful oligarchs are Jewish [...] Yet Jerry, who was there in Russia, himself Jewish, and moreover writing an article meant to be provocative, wasn't willing to touch the Jewish question (Chua, 77-78).

It seems like gentiles across the South American continent who lock entire communities in poverty are merely corrupt, while a small group of Russian Jews are not only "oligarchs" but also "greedy," "ruthless," and "kleptocrats" for doing essentially the same thing. The sudden shift in tone is remarkable and disturbing, especially considering the veiled implication that other Jews, even those like her colleague who wrote an expose on the immoral opportunism, are somehow contributing to this.