It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.

The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.

There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.

The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do. 

For all of the crazy arguments against health care reform, a few of them are entirely sensible--and worth taking seriously. As I write in my latest Kaiser Health News column, which appeared on TNR’s home page yesterday, one of those is the worry that Congress won’t follow through with promises to raise the revenue--or find the savings--necessary to finance expansions of health insurance.

In other words, Congress may pass a law calling for reductions in Medicare expenditures or raising an assortment of new taxes. But the people affected by those changes--be they health care businesses that would lose reimbursements or everyday Americans facing the prospect of higher taxes--will complain. Once they do, Congress is likely to have second thoughts and repeal those measures.

I wrote the article thinking primarily about conservatives and libertarians who have made this case. But, to be clear, you don't have to be a conservative to have these concerns. Just a few days ago, for example, the New Yorker's John Cassidy warned about the likely high costs of health care reform:

Something wonderful, or terrible, is taking place in Philadelphia. The city's sports fans, whose only consistent love has been for an inanimate object--the statue of Rocky--are becoming warm and fuzzy.

The Clinton Tapes:
Wrestling History with
the President

By Taylor Branch

(Simon & Schuster, 707 pp., $35)

In her infamous first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm swings for the fences and proclaims that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She means that journalists use their human subjects and then dispose of them; that we con them in person by "preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness"--it occurs to me to note that however bleak print's future seems, journalism will at least never run out of material--before gutting them in print. This was a provocative thought in 1990, in those years of innocence before the Internet turned the guttings into a spectator sport.

It is a sign of our weird political moment that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama will probably hurt him among some of his fellow citizens.

His opponents are describing the award as premature. The deeper problem is that the Nobel will underscore the extent to which Obama is a cosmopolitan figure, much loved in European capitals because he is the change they have been looking for.

The Information Master:
Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System

By Jacob Soll

(University of Michigan Press,
277 pp., $65)

That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship.

Maurice Bowra: A Life

By Leslie Mitchell

(Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $50)

As warden of Wadham College in Oxford, president of the British Academy, the author of well-known books on ancient Greek literature, and a conversationalist of legendary brilliance, Maurice Bowra seemed, in the middle of the last century, the very embodiment of Oxford life. Enjoying a huge international reputation as a scholar, a wit, and an administrator, he was duly elected into prestigious academies and awarded honorary degrees in both Europe and America. George VI knighted him in 1951. Yet few who were not alive at that time know his name today. For those of the younger generation who are aware of him at all, his career conjures up the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, and it has been said that he was the model for Mr. Samgrass. A few of his bright remarks linger on among the chattering classes: "Buggers can’t be choosers," or "Where there’s death there’s hope," or "He is a man who has no public virtues and no private parts." But for the most part Bowra has sunk into oblivion, to emerge from time to time in an obituary or in the voluminous correspondence of Isaiah Berlin.

When I took over The New Republic in 1974 one of the first people I recruited--on a trip to Rome, as I recall--was Michael Ledeen, a scholar of Italian fascism. I think it was his doctoral supervisor and my friend, the great German Jewish historian, George Mosse, who suggested that we meet. But it actually was Claire Sterling, the brave journalist of uncomfortable truths, who introduced us. Michael was then working on a book about Gabriele d'Annunzio, the futurist poet, artist, fighter pilot, political theorist and neo-fascist adventurer who led a march on Fiume to keep it in Italian hands. The book was called D'Annunzio at Fiume.  (D'Annunzio was also legendary romantic and lover, having had among his affairs a especially tempestuous one with Eleanora Duse, perhaps the most renowned actress of the turn-of-the-century and Jewish besides. She was the model for Rodin's mournful bronze Teté de la doleur. Oh, how I wander.)

Michael is now widely thought of as a reactionary. This is the fate of many people who turn out to be uncannily correct early on about the cruel deceits of left-wing and anti-American movements. When we met for our first coffee at the Piazza Navona the good and the over-happy were beyond themselves with satisfaction that euro-communism was about to triumph all over western Europe. Ledeen dourly and correctly said "no." 

Landscape and Memory

by Simon Schama

(Knopf, 652 pp., $40)

We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images--from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so--teaches the same lesson: nature is the realm of purity and beauty, and man imports violence to this separate world from his own corrupt and frightening habitat, the city.

Edward Jay Epstein has become the de facto historian of the Madoff scandal. Every time he and I speak, he has found another key to the master Ponzi schemer's evil genius.

There was a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission trusted Madoff absolutely. So he was able to clear two other stock markets by saying that the documents they used in their defense were kosher. Ah, but the rub was that those documents were actually treyf (not kosher) and they had been cooked up by Madoff himself.

So read here. 

I entered politics in 1962 along with Ted Kennedy. Well, not exactly. Actually, I entered politics against Ted Kennedy. No, I was not for Edward McCormack, who was Speaker McCormack's nephew and was running against Teddy in the Democratic primary. And I was also not for George Cabot Lodge, Ted's G.O.P. opponent and descendant of many Massachusetts Cabots and Lodges going back to George Cabot, who served as the Bay State's United States Senator from 1791 to 1796. (The family still lives but not the party of its ancestors.) I actually supported H. Stuart Hughes, an intellectual historian at Harvard and the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes--Chief Justice of the United States and the 1916 Republican nominee for president against Woodrow Wilson. So there were four eminent scions in the race.

Hughes was one of the first post-war peace candidates and ended up with 2.4% of the vote. The issue was not Vietnam. There were two issues then: nuclear disarmament and "fair play for Cuba." Hughes and Dr. Benjamin Spock, on whom many of you were raised, were co-chairmen of the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. The dyad attracted high-borns who disdained Teddy's father Joe and brothers Jack (by then president of the United States) and Robert (attorney general on the New Frontier); ideological sandal wearers; Quakers plus other pacifists; Communists and ex-Communists (yes, Virginia, there were Communists) and fellow-travelers who somehow decided they'd go politically underground during the Red Scare. It was folks like these who dominated the adult "peace movement" for several years until Gene McCarthy and masses of dissident Democrats came along. The child peace movement was, well, childish and destructive. Plus Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer and some professors. Actually wicked.

The Cuban missile crisis intruded on the senatorial campaign and made Ted's victory inevitable. It was a time of high danger, but in America no one wanted to capitulate to what nearly everyone saw as Khrushchev's blackmail--and fraudulent blackmail, at that. I have to confess that Teddy, who was 30 at the time, seemed exactly 30 ... and more than a bit overwhelmed.

Jeffrey Herf is one of the pre-eminent intellectual historians of totalitarianism. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic. See, for example, his last few contributions here, here, and here. You can also find a TNR review of one of his books, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, here.

In the current issue of The American Interest, Herf makes a highly convincing argument that radical Islam today is in fact a totalitarian movement with totalitarian ideology and totalitarian methods. No, it is not Nazism or Communism. And, though its ideas are rather more primitive (my word, not his) than either of the reigning doctrines of the twentieth century and though its weapons are also more primitive, it partakes of contemporary methods--and, increasingly, technological methods--in the mobilization of masses of people.

Please read this essay and read it carefully...

Click here to read responses by  Henry Louis Gates, Jr., John Stauffer, and Fred Kaplan.

Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.

About 400,000 people, many of them children, annually tour the battlegrounds of Ypres, near the French border in Western Belgium, the scene of some of history's most savage combat. Millions of troops fought here during World War I; more than 600,000 of them died.

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev

(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)

I.

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 464 pp., $26.95)

Herbert Hoover By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 208 pp., $22)

Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America By Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pp., $29.95)

It's been more than a month since the auto industry came to Washington, begging for a rescue. And, since that time, it's become clear just how dry Detroit's reservoir of goodwill has run. For conservative opponents of bailout legislation, like Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the U.S. auto industry is an object of scorn--"dinosaurs," he has called them. For the liberals who support a rescue, like Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, Detroit remains an embarrassment.

We are living in an extraordinary time.

The world has been badly shaken.

In the space of a few days a system that we thought was as secure and assured as the air we breathe lost all its landmarks, its clarity, and was seemingly swallowed up by a black hole.

Money--essential to the spirit of peace--congealed, like blood in veins.

Credit--this fine word is also expressive of people's faith in others--like a machine that jammed, and then stopped.

Convention season is upon us. There will be clichés, giant flags, funny hats--and much, much whining about how these party-themed infomercials aren’t worth our time. But are there ways in which we could genuinely improve the content of the conventions? We asked a few friends of the magazine to offer their suggestions.

While Cass Sunstein is right to caution against groupthink in the President's inner circle, I'd warn against holding up the Reagan administration as an ideal alternative.

There is one book that says it all.

An old book, nearly a classic. Oddly, it is rarely mentioned in France.

This book, published in 1957, is titled The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.

Its author is Ernst H. Kantorowicz, a Jewish historian and medievalist from Germany who immigrated to the United States in 1939.