Cover art for the book Savior and Seducer by Thaddeus Russell – Fair Use
Formerly a history professor at Barnard College (where I was his student), Thaddeus Russell has reinvented himself as a contrarian podcaster and founder of his online school, Unregistered Academy. While Russell describes himself as a Berkeley-raised former socialist whose aim is to unite the socialist left and libertarian right, much of his work appears designed to bait the former and pander to the latter. Russell has at times convincingly criticized the left for its puritanical self-righteousness and hypocrisies, but he has also repeatedly announced that he is a “big fan” of Nick Fuentes, described Trump’s conviction in a Manhattan court as “the greatest abrogation of the rule of law in American politics” in his lifetime, and characterized the convicted January 6 protestors as “no different from the Black Panthers and in fact maybe a bit more virtuous.” He has additionally insinuated that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election and that climate change is a sham, and he has conducted ingratiating interviews with ultra-reactionaries such as Curtis Yarvin and Aleksandr Dugin. The point is not that Russell has dubious politics, but that his analysis of the world is skewed.
It is then not terribly surprising that Russell’s Savior and Seducer: A Renegade History of the United States in the World, while entertaining at times, is tenuous and misleading. The book argues that the US’s relationship with the world has been characterized by two opposing tendencies. On one hand, elites since the colonial era have been committed to an expansionist imperial project in the name of exporting liberty and democracy to the rest of the world. This project to “save” the downtrodden has failed, Russell argues, and has instead resulted in authoritarian retrenchment and blowback. On the other hand, the US has developed a popular culture of libertine freedom that emerged from slaves whose “parties in the fields,” dancing, and music established a tradition that has led to today’s hiphop and booty popping and has profoundly influenced the rest of the world. Russell argues that this “libidinal” tradition, unwittingly and in spite of the reservations of puritanical elites, has ironically succeeded where the imperial mission has failed and has shaken authoritarian regimes to their core.
There are three fundamental problems with Russell’s thesis. The first is Russell’s assumption that US leaders genuinely oppose authoritarianism and seek to topple it. After all, the US has supported authoritarians all over the world and opposes authoritarianism only selectively. The US opposed Castro, but it supported his predecessor Batista. The US opposed the Sandinistas, but it supported Somoza. The US opposed Noriega, but not before it armed and supported him for years. And this is not mentioning US support for sundry other tyrants, from Suharto to Pinochet to the Shah. While Russell acknowledges that the US has periodically supported vicious sadists, such as Ukrainian nationalist Mykola Lebed, he identifies this support as merely an extreme manifestation of the US’s savior ideology, destroying villages in order to save them. He does not consider the more straightforward and plausible explanation that the US is not fundamentally opposed to authoritarianism and that its savior rhetoric is largely a pretext justifying what it wants to do anyway.
The second problem is Russell’s claim that the US’s second, slave-descended, tradition has in fact destabilized authoritarianism abroad. Here Russell takes us on a global tour from Asia to Nazi Germany to the Middle East to the Eastern Bloc, arguing that the US’s cultural exports of Black music and dance, Hollywood, and consumer products have encouraged bodily and sexual liberation and have thereby undermined tyrannical regimes from within. Russell, a clear and engaging writer, shows that authoritarian regimes indeed frequently banned jazz and other US cultural imports, which threatened their maintenance of social order, discipline, and efficiency. But while he shows that drinking and dancing, which can be more accurately described as license rather than freedom, can threaten governance, he does not convincingly demonstrate how such behavior existentially threatened actual governments.
Russell argues, for instance, that the jazz-loving Swing Kids posed a “mortal” threat to the Nazi regime. While the Nazis undoubtedly persecuted the Swing Kids (albeit far more gently than the regime’s racial and political enemies), Russell does not demonstrate how the Swing Kids’ cultural defiance threatened to bring down the government. The best Russell can do is provide several quotes from Nazi officials who feared that the Swing Kids would undermine National Socialism, but it is unclear why we should uncritically accept statements from pathologically paranoid ideologues who perceived all non-conformity as threatening. The Nazis, after all, also believed that the Jews were coming to destroy them, but this does not mean that the Jews, or the Swing Kids, were actually capable of doing so. Similarly, Russell describes examples of rebellious violence in Germany, where the Edelweiss Pirates fought Nazi Youth, and Japan, where “‘delinquent youth'” took over parts of Tokyo, but it is again difficult to see how gangs of youths could have toppled what were powerful and highly militarized police states.
What’s more, the connection between many of these groups and US popular culture is at times tenuous. While the Swing Kids and Cologne Navajos were explicitly inspired by US culture, the Pirates largely concerned themselves with German folk music and hiking. Similarly, Russell describes a general wartime surge in strikes, shirking, absenteeism, sabotage, draft dodging, and desertion not only in Germany but also in Japan, Britain, and the USSR. Yet he does not show how such timeless and universal subversion was inspired by US popular culture, which brings us to the third problem.
US popular culture undoubtedly has outsized reach across the globe, but Russell ignores that this cultural soft power and the state’s hard power are frequently two sides of the same imperial coin. For example, Russell criticizes the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom for promoting “strictly high-brow and non-libidinal” culture but puritanically censoring rock and roll and other forms of low-brow culture that could have, Russell argues, undermined foreign authoritarianism. However, JFK’s Peace Corps, which Russell never mentions, did just this, as it recruited young and frequently countercultural volunteers who introduced rock and roll and other “renegade” art forms to Cold War hot spots around the world. JFK, who Russell rightly criticizes as an ardent imperialist, understood what Russell apparently does not: modern imperialism needs to be “cool.”
In a similar vein, Russell laments that puritanical US planners refused to deploy popular Hollywood films abroad, arguing that if only they had the US could have more effectively advanced its putative goal of liberating the oppressed. Yet, the US’s postwar reeducation program in occupied Germany in fact screened dozens of Hollywood films (from The Best Years of Our Lives to Ninotchka) precisely because the Army’s documentaries were too heavy-handed to successfully persuade Germans of the supposed superiority of their occupiers and the American way of life. As Hollywood Quarterly complained at the time, “the State Department is in rompers as far as propaganda is concerned.” While Russell encourages the state to use cultural soft power to pursue its interests, his confusion about what those interests are prevents him from recognizing that it already does.
Russell’s discussion of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the Holocaust is the weakest and longest section of the book. Russell here echoes the argument of A.J.P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War in which WWII only started due to Allied bungling, and that if only Hitler had been given Danzig the war would have been averted. In Russell’s account, however, the focus is less on Britain and France per se than on FDR’s belligerent backing of the Allies. For Russell, Hitler did not want to invade Poland as such, as Germany instead merely asked the British “to pressure the Polish government to give the people of Danzig what they demanded, to cede what rightfully belonged to Germany, and avert a world war.” Britain, emboldened by its US backer, said no and war began.
Such revisionism, which has become more widespread since Darryl Cooper’s interview with Tucker Carlson, notably downplays the significance of the September 1938 Munich Conference, in which the Allies permitted Hitler to annex the Sudetenland in exchange for a guarantee that he would not threaten the remainder of Czechoslovakia. This promise lasted a mere six months, after which the Nazis conquered the rest of the country and Hitler’s word thenceforth became meaningless. There was no scenario in which the British or French could then agree to “give” any more of Europe to the Nazis without destroying their own credibility.
Moreover, Russell argues that Hitler only decided to carry out his decades-long and explicit aim of conquering Germany’s eastern buffer because of the increased scarcity and domestic discontent that had been produced by Germany’s shift to a wartime economy. That is, in a dizzying reversal of cause and effect, Russell argues that it was Germany’s massive military buildup that forced it to start the war.
Following historians such as Christian Gerlach and relying on Hitler’s “prophecy” speech, Russell accounts for the Holocaust by advancing the “hostage thesis,” the notion that Hitler was keeping Jews as hostages to prevent the US from entering the war. While most German Jews were indeed deported and killed only after the US had entered the war, and it is beyond doubt that the Nazis initially sought to expel the Jews from Europe (e.g., via the Madagascar Plan) and that the road to Auschwitz was “twisted,” Russell badly overstates his case. For instance, Russell claims that “In his public and private communications and in his policies, Hitler remained true to his word that if the United States allowed Jewish emigration or stayed out of the war, the Jews under the Third Reich would live.” Yet, Russell later notes, large-scale deportations of German Jews to likely death in eastern camps began in October 1941, two months before the US entered the war.
Blaming the Holocaust on the US’s entry into the war, Russell produces what is intended to be a damning timeline connecting the establishment of Chelmno (the first Nazi extermination camp) on 12/5/41, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 12/7/41, and the launching of the Final Solution with the commencement of the gassing of Jews at Chelmno on 12/8/41. Unfortunately, this timeline is misleading in the extreme. As Christopher Browning has noted, while Chelmno became operational in December, plans to build it were made in October. Why would the Nazis expend scarce resources in the middle of a war to build extermination camps in October if they did not decide until December to commit genocide? Additionally, if Germany was so horrified by the thought of the US’s entry into the war, why did it guarantee the conflict by declaring war on the US? While the US Congress wanted Japanese blood after Pearl Harbor, there is no guarantee that it would have voted for war against Germany had not Germany declared war on it first.
Finally, Russell omits an event from his chronology that was dramatically more important to the Nazis than anything happening across the Atlantic Ocean. On 12/5/41 and 12/6/41, the USSR launched a massive surprise counteroffensive during the Battle of Moscow, an enormous turning point in the war. It was within the context of the Nazis’ crusade against the USSR that, nearly all historians agree, the decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews was made. Most historians, such as Browning, argue that the decision was made during the “euphoria of victory” in the summer or fall of 1941, while others, such as Arno Mayer, argue that the Final Solution constituted the regime’s “death throes” amid the winter collapse of Operation Barbarossa. In either case, the Nazis’ titanic clash with the USSR was crucial to the decision and, with some 80 percent of the German military in the east, the war as a whole.
There is a great irony, unexamined by Russell, in placing the blame for the Holocaust on the US’s entry into the war. After all, as Russell notes, the US did not actually launch the second front until June 6, 1944, long after the USSR had for all intents and purposes won the war and most of the Nazis’ Jewish victims had already perished. That is, while Russell counterfactually argues that there would have been no Holocaust had the US not entered the war, one could just as easily argue that there would have been no Holocaust had the US entered the war far sooner.
Of course, the US never had any interest in saving Jews or anyone else, and, as Russell shows, it was hypocritically complicit in the genocide insofar as it adamantly refused to permit refugees to enter the US. Yet, this is not the critical history of William Appleman Williams or Howard Zinn, who tore apart the myths of the so-called Good War by rightly condemning the US’s brutal imperial aggression and self-serving hypocrisy. Exaggerating the US’s role in the conflict while downplaying Hitler’s own agency and imperialism, Russell’s account is less critical than parochial.
Russell’s strained analysis is not restricted to WWII and the Nazi genocide but characterizes the book’s other sections as well. In line with his thesis, Russell argues that the Civil War and Reconstruction were imperial projects designed to reconstitute Southern society and ex-slaves themselves. While Russell harnesses a great deal of evidence to develop what could be a persuasive argument, he again overstates his case. In a striking error, Russell claims that the Emancipation Proclamation “declared all slaves in Southern territories that were occupied by the Union to be free.” This is wholly backwards, as the Proclamation instead freed slaves only in territories held by Confederate forces. Concerned that the courts would overturn his attempt to free the slaves, Lincoln defended emancipation as an attack on the enemy’s labor supply, which is why it did not extend to slaves under Union control. Notwithstanding Russell’s erroneous assertion that “Liberation required conquest,” the Emancipation Proclamation was not the result of imperial expansion but wartime exigency.
Russell also unconvincingly discusses the US war on Iraq, which he describes as the continuation of the progressive cultural project that began during Reconstruction. Arguing that “cultural reconstruction was the ultimate objective” of the war, Russell downplays the war’s critical geopolitical context. As David Harvey and others have noted, the George W. Bush Administration’s war on Iraq was an attempt to contain China by controlling its access to the Middle Eastern oil spigot. While the US occupation indeed sought to remake Iraq, it did so first and foremost by privatizing the Iraqi economy and otherwise opening it to US capital accumulation. Accepting US rhetoric at face value, Russell does not consider why the US’s importation of “freedom” failed to extend to Saddam Hussein’s ban on labor unions or see that such freedom is altogether far more imagined than real.
Russell’s fixation on the primacy of culture and rhetoric also helps explain his misreading of Trump, whom he sees as a bawdy manifestation of US popular culture at odds with the American Empire. Before the 2016 election, Russell suggested that Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric “may do great service for actual peace,” and in 2023 he asserted that “Those in Washington DC who have sought to undermine Trump at every turn were principally motivated by their need, really, to defend the American Empire.” Russell concludes Savior and Seducer by writing that under the Trump Administration US imperialism has become “limited in its geographical purview and shorn of evangelism.” Since Russell wrote his conclusion, Trump (whose self-described Secretary of War is literally covered in crusader tattoos) has launched one of the most audacious imperial wars in decades by attacking Iran while declaring to Iranians that “The hour of your freedom is at hand.”
That Russell could not see that Trump was merely another imperialist president in an unending line of them is not surprising. Bending reality to support his worldview, Russell mystifies what he purports to explain.
