Syria, Obama and Putin

Thomas L. Friedman NY TIMES

Your Honor, I rise again in defense of President Barack Obama’s policy on Syria.

Obama has been right in his ambivalence about getting deeply involved in Syria. But he’s never had the courage of his own ambivalence to spell out his reasoning to the American people. He keeps letting himself get pummeled into doing and saying things that his gut tells him won’t work, so he gets the worst of all worlds: His rhetoric exceeds the policy, and the policy doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, Obama’s Republican critics totally lack the wisdom of our own experience. They blithely advocate “fire, ready, aim” in Syria without any reason to believe their approach will work there any better than it did for us in Iraq or Libya. People who don’t know how to fix inner-city Baltimore think they know how to rescue downtown Aleppo — from the air!

Personally, I’ll take the leader who lacks the courage of his own ambivalence over the critics who lack the wisdom of their own experience. But ambivalence is not a license to do nothing. We can do things that make a difference, but only if we look at our enemies and allies in Syria with clear eyes.

For instance, today’s reigning cliché is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart.

Really? Well think about this: Let’s say the U.S. did nothing right now, and just let Putin start bombing ISIS and bolstering Assad. How long before every Sunni Muslim in the Middle East, not to mention every jihadist, has Putin’s picture in a bull’s eye on his cellphone?

The Sunni Muslims are the vast majority in Syria. They are the dominant sect in the Arab world. Putin and Russia would be seen as going all-in to protect Assad, a pro-Iranian, Alawite/Shiite genocidal war criminal. Putin would alienate the entire Sunni Muslim world, including Russian Muslims.

Moreover, let’s say by some miracle the Russians defeat ISIS. The only way to keep them defeated is by replacing them with moderate Sunnis. Which moderate Sunnis are going to align with Russia while Putin is seen as the prime defender of the barrel-bombing murderer of more Sunnis than anyone on the planet, Bashar al-Assad?

Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power. Well, now he’s up a tree. Obama and John Kerry should just leave him up there for a month — him and Assad, fighting ISIS alone — and watch him become public enemy No. 1 in the Sunni Muslim world. “Yo, Vladimir, how’s that working for you?”

The only way Putin can get down from that tree is with our help in forging a political solution in Syria. And that only happens if the Russians and the Iranians force Assad — after a transition — to step down and leave the country, in return for the opposition agreeing to protect the basic safety and interests of Assad’s Alawite community, and both sides welcoming an international force on the ground to guarantee the deal.

But to get there we need to size our rhetoric with our interests in Syria as well. Our interests right now are to eliminate or contain the two biggest metastasizing threats: ISIS — whose growth can threaten the islands of decency in the region like Lebanon, the Kurds and Jordan — and the tragedy of Syrian refugees, whose numbers are growing so large they are swamping Lebanon and Jordan and, if they continue, could destabilize the European Union, our vital partner in the world.

If we want something better — multisectarian democracy in Syria soon — we would have to go in and build it ourselves. The notion that it would only take arming more Syrian moderates is insane.

During the weekend The Times reported that “nearly 30,000 foreign fighters have traveled to Iraq and Syria from more than 100 countries since 2011.” So 30,000 people have gone to Syria to join ISIS to promote jihad and a caliphate. How many Arabs and Muslims have walked to Syria to promote multisectarian democracy? Apparently zero.

Why do we have to search for moderates like a man with a dowsing rod looking for water, and then train them, while no one has to train the jihadists, who flock there? It’s because the jihadists are in the grip of ideals, albeit warped ones. There is no critical mass of Syrian moderates in the grip of ideals; they will fight for their own homes and families, but not for an abstract ideal like democracy. We try to make up for that with military “training,” but it never works.

Are there real democrats among the Syrian opposition? You bet, but not enough, not with the organization, motivation and ruthlessness of their opponents.

Everyone wants an immaculate intervention in Syria, one where you look like you’re doing something, but without the political cost of putting troops on the ground or having to make unpleasant compromises with unsavory people. There is no such option.

I think Putin’s rash rush into Syria may in the end make him more in need of a deal, or at least a lasting cease-fire, that stops the refugee flows. If we can do that, for now, we will have done a lot.

What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?

The quintessentially American urge “to boldly go,” regardless of consequence, has gotten humanity into a heap of trouble.

By John Feffer The Nation

They were the “best and the brightest,” but on a spaceship, not planet Earth, and they exemplified the liberal optimism of their era. The original Star Trek, whose three-year TV run began in 1966, featured a talented, multiethnic crew. The indomitable Captain Kirk had the can-do sex appeal of a Kennedy; his chief adviser, the half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, offered the cool rationality of that “IBM machine with legs,” then–Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And the USS Enterprise, on a mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” pursued a seemingly benign anthropological interest in seeking out, engaging with, and trying to understand the native populations of a fascinating variety of distant worlds.

The “prime directive,” designed to govern the conduct of Kirk and his crew on their episodic journey, required non-interference in the workings of alien civilizations. This approach mirrored the evolving anti-war sympathies of series creator Gene Roddenberry and many of the show’s scriptwriters. The Vietnam War, which raged through the years of its initial run, was then demonstrating to more and more Americans the folly of trying to reengineer a society distant both geographically and culturally. The best and the brightest, on Earth as on the Enterprise, began to have second thoughts in the mid-1960s about such hubris.

Even as they deliberately linked violent terrestrial interventions with celestial ones, however, the makers of Star Trek never questioned the most basic premise of a series that would delight fans for decades, spawning endless TV and movie sequels. Might it not have been better for the universe as a whole if the Enterprise had never left Earth in the first place and if Earth hadn’t meddled in matters beyond its own solar system?

As our country contemplates future military interventions, as well as ambitious efforts to someday colonize other planets, Americans would be smart to address this fundamental question. Might our inexhaustible capacity for interfering in far-flung places be a sign not of a dynamic civilization, but of a fatal flaw—for the country, the international community, and the species as a whole?

THE ORANGE ZONE

The United States has never had much use for a precautionary prime directive. It has interfered with “alien” societies at a remarkable clip ever since the late 19th century. Indeed, such interference is inscribed in the genetic code of the country, for America is the product of the massive disruption and eradication of an already existing native population. Columbus also boldly went where no (European) man had gone before, and we recapitulate his voyage every time we send the Marines to a foreign shore or our drones into foreign air space. Native Americans didn’t need “discovering” or new infectious diseases any more than Iraqis needed lectures about democracy from neoconservatives.

Despite considerable evidence of just how malign our recent interventions have proven to be—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere—the US government continues to contemplate military missions. Iran is, for the moment, off the hook, and so is Cuba. Washington has also repeatedly emphasized that North Korea is not in the crosshairs, though our aggressive military posture in East Asia might suggest otherwise, particularly to the paranoid leadership in Pyongyang.

But even the diplomacy-friendly Obama administration is still wedded to the use of drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen, not to mention a new secret program in Syria. It has dispatched Special Forces to 150 countries. And it has conducted, along with its coalition allies, more than 5,000 airstrikes against the Islamic State. US troops remain in significant numbers in Afghanistan (9,800) and Iraq (3,500). Hundreds of US military bases, with around 150,000 service personnel deployed on them, gird the globe.

These military actions have remapped the world—and not in a good way. America’s post-9/11 invasions, attacks, and occupations have created a crescent of crisis that stretches from Afghanistan across the Middle East and into Africa. Fragile states, like Somalia and Yemen, have been thrown into desperate chaos. Syria and Iraq have become incubators for the most virulent strains of extremism. And authoritarian leaders in Egypt and the Gulf states are using this turmoil to justify their own iron-fist policies.

Even the recent refugee crisis, the most significant since the end of World War II, can be traced back to the Bush administration’s military responses to September 11. For many years, Afghanistan was the leading exporter of refugees to the world, with Iraq a close second. Today, the leading source of refugees is Syria. Although the United States hasn’t invaded that country, it has meddled there nonetheless, initially to depose Bashar al-Assad and then to “degrade” the Islamic State and its affiliates. In the 21st century, America’s efforts to reengineer societies across the planet are ending up just as badly as its 20th-century fiasco in Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, the impulse to “boldly go” is no longer restricted to neocolonial interventionism or military adventurism. There is now growing enthusiasm for sending an expeditionary force beyond Earth. Several competing initiatives aim to begin the colonization of Mars, in part to provide humanity with an alternative should global warming make planet Earth inhospitable to human life. These extraterrestrial efforts reflect a growing anxiety that the end is nigh, at least for the home team.

Indeed, many writers (not to speak of scientists) have postulated that Earth is reaching a tipping point. Whether as a function of nuclear weapons, carbon emissions, or sheer reproductive fervor, humans seem to be approaching an important threshold in our life on the planet.

Let’s call it the Orange Zone, in honor of the erstwhile terrorism color index. For the last half-century or so, humans have had the capacity to blow up the planet with our nuclear toys. We have also been burning up fossil fuels at a remarkable and increasing rate in a burst of economic activity that has brought us to the brink of irreparably destroying the ecosystem. And we have reproduced so successfully that, like voracious locusts, we threaten to outstripthe planet’s capacity to feed us.

If we can figure out how to lower the threat alert and leave the Orange Zone, we will have passed the civilizational test. Once we put away our childish things—our nuclear weapons, our coal-fired power plants, our religious prohibitions against contraception—we can graduate to the next level of planetary consciousness. Otherwise, we flunk out. And there won’t be any make-up summer school credits available.

There may, in fact, be an even more fundamental test than the nuclear, carbon, or demographic challenges. And that’s the human propensity for intervention—across borders, over seas, and potentially even in outer space. That Star Trek urge “to boldly go,” obeying the prime directive or not, has gotten humanity into a heap of trouble. Establishing outposts in far-off lands is often considered the ultimate American insurance policy, but it’s precisely our predilection for getting mixed up in other people’s messes that has distracted us from fixing our own. The focus on setting up a colony on Mars, instead of getting serious about climate change on Earth, is the functional equivalent of devoting close to a trillion dollars a year to the US military instead of using that money to fix all that is broken at home. Talk about an advanced case of attention-deficit disorder.

THE CHINESE WAY

In the 15th century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He took a fleet on seven voyages throughout Asia, to the Middle East, and as far as Africa. He defeated marauding pirates in the vicinity of China and intervened militarily in far-off Ceylon. His huge treasure ships, each one six times larger than Columbus’s Santa Maria, brought back rare items, including a giraffe, for the Chinese emperor. As a diplomat, he established tributary relations with dozens of foreign lands, though not Europe, which was still too backward to attract Chinese interest. Zheng’s last journey, in the early 1430s, took place two decades before Christopher Columbus was even born.

Zheng He’s maritime explorations might have served as the basis for China’s colonial domination of significant parts of the world. But it was not to be. “Shortly after the last voyage of the treasure fleet, the Chinese emperor forbade overseas travel and stopped all building and repair of oceangoing junks,” Louise Levathes has written in When China Ruled the Seas. “Disobedient merchants and seamen were killed, and within a hundred years the greatest navy the world had ever known willed itself into extinction.”

China didn’t entirely turn its back on colonialism. It maintained a tributary system in its Asian backyard. Nor did the Middle Kingdom immediately lose out to a rising Europe, for the Chinese would remain a dominant force for several more centuries. Still, the emperor’s decision to renounce Zheng He and his accomplishments is often identified as a key pivot point in modern history. China effectively decided not to go the way of the Enterprise. It would not “boldly go” into unexplored lands or establish a far-flung colonial empire. Nor did it develop the military means to police such domains.

By the 19th century, it would instead find itself subject to the predations of European colonial powers, which divided up the coastal areas of China as if they were a treasure chest for the taking. More than 100 years of humiliation ensued, followed by a succession of Chinese efforts to regain the wealth and power of dynasties past.

China today is not a military weakling. But it also doesn’t possess the kind of expeditionary power of the United States or even Russia. It has vast commercial interests around the world. But it does not style itself the world’s policeman. During its “soft rise,” China has focused largely on cultivating its own garden—transforming its enormous economy into a global powerhouse. Although it has certainly increased military spending over the last several decades, it does not want to get into the kind of arms race with the United States that doomed the Soviet Union. It has not generally shown itself interested in establishing neocolonial relationships—it has extracted resources from Asia, Africa, and Latin America without installing client states, building military bases, or sending in the equivalent of the special forces—and even its semi-tributary relationship with North Korea generates considerable skepticism in Beijing.

As its economic growth declines from the stratospheric to the merely impressive, however, China may be facing another Zheng He moment. Dramatic economic growth has allowed for double-digit increases in military spending. China is currently modernizing its nuclear arsenal, acquiring more significant air and sea power, and flexing its muscles in territorial disputes with its neighbors. Can Beijing refocus on its economic project, ensuring environmentally sustainable growth at the expense of global ambitions? In other words, will China follow the self-destructive path of other superpowers or will it help lead the planet out of the dreaded Orange Zone?

China could go either way. Chinese hawks worry that if Beijing repeats the emperor’s rejection of Zheng He, foreign powers will again humiliate the Middle Kingdom. And indeed, Beijing certainly might feel the need to acquire even greater force projection capabilities if Washington doesn’t engage it in serious arms-reduction efforts.

THE ESCAPE CLAUSE

The multi-billionaire Elon Musk is not one to rest on his laurels. He’s a product of the dot.com age—he made his first millions with PayPal—and has transformed the electric car into a real contender in the marketplace. He is also betting big on solar energy through his SolarCity venture.

But he has even grander ambitions. Writes Sue Halpern in The New York Review of Books:

While Musk is working to move people away from fossil fuels, betting that the transition to electric vehicles and solar energy will contain the worst effects of global climate change, he is hedging that bet with one that is even more wishful and quixotic. In the event that those terrestrial solutions don’t pan out and civilization is imperiled, Musk is positioning SpaceX to establish a human colony on Mars.

SpaceX  is Musk’s escape clause for the planet. At the moment, SpaceX rockets perform a glorified FedEx function by sending supplies to the International Space Station that NASA and four other international space agencies have been maintaining since 1998. But Musk wants to put people on Mars by 2026, approximately a decade ahead of NASA’s best-case scenario.

Meanwhile, the outfit Mars One, started by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, is winnowing down 100 potential Mars colonists to a final group of 24. These intrepid proto-astronauts plan to shove off for Mars in 2026 as well—on a one-way journey to lay the groundwork for a human colony on the planet. Blue Origin, another private space exploration firm started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, also aspires to “extend humankind beyond our planet.” The space race once pitted the Cold War superpowers against each other in an effort to prove their technological superiority. Today, the space race is not so much between countries as between the planet’s richest alpha males.

In his influential 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the American character had been shaped by endlessly “available” lands in the West and the desire to colonize the entire continent. The closing of that frontier at the end of the 19th century coincided with the onset of the American empire and the spread of “American civilization” to purportedly less enlightened corners of the globe. The pent-up energy to “boldly go” had to go somewhere.

We are now witnessing another closing-of-the-frontier moment. There are no longer any unexplored pockets of the world. And the frontier ideology of spreading civilization—or is it mayhem?—has come up hard against the realities of present-day Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the post-Arab Spring political disappointments of Egypt and Libya. It is no surprise, then, that restless spirits like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have identified space as their “final frontier.”

Mars is not inhabited. We won’t be displacing any native populations, nor will we have to debate the finer points of the prime directive in the absence of foreign cultures to interfere with. But don’t be fooled by that. Our intervention on Mars will nonetheless share some of the defects of our terrestrial follies.

“Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us,” environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The New Yorker about the various developing plans to colonize Mars. “Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not. Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those that survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens.”

Perhaps the truly intelligent ones followed in the footsteps of the Chinese emperor: They stopped building ships.

THE SEARCH FOR TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

In tandem with the push to colonize Mars, scientists are putting renewed efforts into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). A new project, Breakthrough Listen, just established with a $100 million budget, will rely on two large radio telescopes to target the nearest one million stars and the 100 galaxies closest to the Milky Way. In a reflection of the growing importance of crowdsourcing, three million people are using their combined computer resources to help analyze all the radio telescope data that is flowing in.

Chances are good—according to the Drake equation’s calculations of habitable planets in the universe—that somebody or something intelligent is indeed out there. But if we can hear them, they can probably hear us, too. And what extraterrestrial intelligence in its right mind would want to contact a species that seemingly worships Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Kardashian?

Whether there’s anything out there or not, trapped as we are in the Orange Zone, we are still heavily involved in the quixotic search for terrestrial intelligence. Scientists continue to await definitive evidence—Stephen Hawking, Toni Morrison, and Yo-Yo Ma aside—that human intelligence is not an oxymoron. After all, what we have traditionally defined as intelligence—a relentless pushing at borders both conceptual and territorial—has led us into the cul-de-sac of impending self-annihilation.

Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr once argued that human intelligence is itself a lethal mutation that has put the species on a collision course with its own and possibly even the planet’s extinction. We and the planet were, it seems, better off when we were just hunters and gatherers, before someone had the bright idea to rip up the earth, plant seeds, and build cities.

To go boldly forward, humanity will have to redefine intelligent life. That doesn’t mean returning to a nomad’s existence of venison and berries. But it does require a different kind of intelligence to turn one’s back on the treasures that the modern-day equivalent of Zheng He’s ships promise to bring from all corners of the universe. It requires a different kind of intelligence to close one’s ears to the siren song of democracy promotion, terrorism suppression, and market-access preservation. And it requires a different kind of intelligence to focus one’s energies on conserving this planet instead of putting so much time and money into plans to befoul another one.

With each nuclear weapon, jet engine, and space rocket we deploy, we venture further into the Orange Zone, heading blindly, if not boldly, toward the point of no return. Like those would-be Mars explorers, whether we know it or not, we are all on a one-way trip into the unknown, except that our rocket ship is our planet, which we’re about to destroy in a suicide mission before it can ever arrive at a safe and secure place.

MISSING WORDS

What Do You Say to a Roanoke Truther?

Ben Collins The Daily Beast

Trolls told Chris Hurst that his grief over losing his girlfriend in the Roanoke murders was a lie. But I’ve known him for years. Maybe, I thought, I could get them to listen.

Chris Hurst spent the last two weeks trying not to cry on television while telling the world how beautiful his life with his girlfriend was before she was murdered for no reason.

Chris was the boyfriend of Alison Parker, who was shot and killed on live television in August by a mentally ill man who had an invented grudge and easy access to firearms.

Chris is a friend from college. Chris and I hosted a radio show together.

Or, according to millions of conspiracy theorists online, Chris Hurst is a part of my imagination.

In the minds—and YouTube videos—of some conspiracy theorists, Chris is not a news anchor at WDBJ in Virginia. Chris, the videos say, is a “crisis actor" invented less than a month ago by the United States government as part of a false flag operation that will eventually allow the New World Order to take away every American citizen’s guns and force them into a life of subjugation and tyranny.

Every day now, Chris wakes up to find strangers’ hate on his Facebook wall that he has to personally delete. Or he’ll Google Alison to find the people he has to thank for donating to her scholarships and he’ll see, instead, another conspiracy theory YouTube video, viewed 800,000 times over, that says Alison was in on it all along, and that she’s been given a new life and maybe plastic surgery by the government.

“It happened again about an hour ago,” Chris says. “It’s hard for me to manage that because I hit land mines when I do. They have all these details I don’t want to know.”

The most recent one says Alison was dating someone else and that she and Chris were never together at all. That person is really Alison’s ex-boyfriend, who conspiracists found by looking through her old Facebook photos.

Two weeks after he lost the love of his life in the most gruesome and devastating way imaginable, this is what he has to sit through when he turns on his computer each morning.

“The hoax theories have taken a toll for sure,” he says. “I’ve definitely felt it more than anyone. I’m the one with the Facebook and Twitter page.”

It is simply easier for some people to believe that the United States government has concocted a vast conspiracy to take away all of our guns than it is to believe that it is too easy for a mentally ill person to acquire one and shoot anyone they want.

And now those same people are taking it out on the families of the victims of gun violence after a tragedy.

The last decade has seen a boon for “crisis actor” conspiracies on the Web and—along with them—a new set of psychologists and philosophers are trying to understand how people get dragged so far away from reality. Many of these thinkers have settled on a basic premise—and it’s one that could help explain the mass-shooting-per-day epidemic in America, too.

“Conspiracy theorists are, I submit, some of the last believers in an ordered universe,” Pitzer College philosophy professor Brian Keeley wrote in Of Conspiracy Theories. “By supposing that current events are under the control of nefarious agents, conspiracy theories entail that such events are capable of being controlled.”

It is simply easier for some people to believe the United States has concocted a vast conspiracy to take away all of our guns than it is to believe that it is too easy for a mentally ill person to acquire one and shoot anyone they want.

In other words, if nothing’s an accident and there are no lone wolf attacks or gunfights over petty grievances, then there is no gun problem. There is no mental health problem, either. For those who believe in crisis class theory, there are just big, theatrical attacks put on by the real problem: whoever is in charge.

All you have to do is forget about the 2,567 people left dead by gun accidents, lone wolf attacks, and gunfights over petty grievances that weren't caught on camera between June’s mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the live-on-TV execution two weeks ago.

All you have to do is refuse to admit, as Keeley’s same academic paper notes in its introduction, that "shit happens.”

Instead, every death—workplace death by gun, school death by gun, hunting accident death by gun—is part of a diabolical plan to control the United States, no matter what. For what purpose? The answer is unclear.

But when I talk to “Thom,” a conspiracy theorist who has racked up millions of views on YouTube by telling people that Chris and Alison are crisis actors for the U.S. government, he has a much different explanation for all of it:

“You’re being duped.”

***

I saw the worst video by mistake. A newsroom coworker muttered, “Oh my God, is he Tweeting?” Then there was Vester Lee Flanagan’s shoddy GoPro footage autoplaying on a computer behind me, a monster walking towards Adam Ward and Alison Parker with a handgun.

I couldn’t turn it off fast enough. I saw the whole thing.

I wretched. I went outside to cry, like a child, like an idiot.

This is the opposite of how Thom reacted.

“The underground footage from the shooter’s perspective—that’s what really sparked my interest into the event,” says Thom, who refused to give his last name to The Daily Beast. “It seems odd to me that the shooter walked right up.” 

Thom says he was one of the first people on YouTube to bring up what he considers to be inconsistencies between Flanagan’s video of the shooting and the one that aired on WDBJ. He says that the shooter points his gun at Parker’s face for over 20 seconds. (This, by the way, is not true.)

“You can count the 23 seconds he stands there with a gun in Alison Parker’s face. That sparked my interest from the get-go. You had that going on,” he says.

Then Thom saw Chris mourn on television and he was convinced: These people are put up to it by the same actors who did the Sandy Hook shooting.

“The reactions didn’t seem genuine to me. The lines seemed scripted. For instance, Chris Hurst would come out and say ‘We’re the cutest, newsiest, prettiest couple ever.’ Of course, he was reading from a photo diary or whatever,” he says. “You look at Chris Hurst, specifically, he would give the same answers to different reporters, word-for-word.”

Thom believes it would be impossible to keep it together after the death of a loved one.

It’s a reaction that Chris finds monstrous. He feels as if he’s being punished for his strength.

“I cried for days, but tried to be strong on TV for her,” he says. “But because I [went on TV] and didn’t break down, now I’m all of a sudden an actor.”

Still, that sentiment was enough to get 792,000 people to watch Thom’s video on YouTube under one of his channels, “PressResetUltimate.” When you Google Chris’s name, the video—“Crisis Actor REVEALED! Victim’s BF Chris Hurst”—appears on the first page of results.

“I think, in the end, a lot of these groups are behind the scenes perpetrating these false-flag hoaxes in an effort to install a totalitarian government—not only in America but all over the globe," he says.

Brian Keeley has heard Thom’s entire spiel before. In fact, he’s heard it for decades.

In 1999, he wrote the book on it—well, the academic journal entry on it—that has grown prescient in the age of the crisis actor. At their core, he says, people like Thom fail to grasp a simple idea: Sometimes things just happen, often for no discernible reason whatsoever.

“Just as with the physical world, where hurricanes, tornadoes, and other ‘acts of God’ just happen, the same is true of the social world,” he wrote. “Some people just do things. They assassinate world leaders, act on poorly thought out ideologies, and leave clues at the scene of the crime. Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists.”

He says conspiracy theorists rely on what he calls “errant data,” or random minutiae within a terror attack or major event that can—and maybe should—go unexplained in reality. Those pushing conspiracies, however, seize on that unexplained info and attempt to explain it in full.

It is an effort to connect every dot on the map—every blade of grass on the Grassy Knoll—even if some dots have nothing to with the larger event at all.

“The crisis actor thing is interesting. These are people who are trying to be rational and they're presented with these grieving people. They need to make sense of that data, so their only rational explanation is, ‘Those people are lying. Those people are paid actors,’” Keeley tells The Daily Beast. “That’s the only way you can make sense of it with your own two eyes.”

In other words, there's no real logic that can prove crisis-actor conspiracies wrong to people who really want them to be right.

“‘Crisis’ class theory is first and foremost a phenomenon of the Internet Age, and is perfectly suited to the enormous amount of documentary evidence surrounding recent events,” writes Michael Wood. “While a false-flag scenario might have trouble explaining a particular apparent anomaly, a staged-hoax theory would have no trouble doing so.”

Wood is a psychologist and lecturer at the University of Winchester and wrote extensively about crisis actors in 2013. He calls it the “future of Internet conspiracism.” 

And Wood’s thesis gets to the heart of why people like Thom likely believe what he does: Crisis class theory is a weirdly hopeful, terribly reductionist coping mechanism, a way to explain a world that can be unjust and needlessly cruel—but wouldn’t be if the “bad guys” controlling it all were vanquished.

“There is surely some psychological comfort in believing that a horrific event like a mass murder of schoolchildren never really happened at all—that it was all fake,” he writes.

Instead conspiracy theories often work to dispel bad press affecting the theorist’s own social groups. Gun owners, for example, work to implicate every other trait about mass shooters except their one common bond: access to a gun for long enough to kill several people.

“We call it ‘social threat’ in psychology, and a lot of psychology is how we deal with these sorts of threats. It’s a tribal thing,” says Wood. “We see these sorts of mass shootings. If you’re a gun owner, you have a lot invested in this, yourself. You have a motivation to take this out of your wheelhouse. If all you know about somebody is that they own a gun, you’re automatically motivated to discount it.”

Sure enough, Thom believes “one of the reasons why the American people have so much freedom and so much power is because of our right to bear arms that acts as a firewall or insurance policy against a tyrannical government.”

Thom is nowhere near alone in this. He’s one of countless thousands who’ve descended in recent years into the weeds of false flags and crisis actors. It’s a “kind of explosion” of conspiracy theories that began popping up around 2009, according to professor Joe Uscinski.

“This happens for every president. It’s not just birthers, with President Obama. In 2001, a building blows up, and some people think George W. Bush did it,” says Uscinski. “In fact, there are the same number of [9/11] truthers as there are birthers.”

Uscinski wrote “Conspiracy Theories Are for Losers,” which posits that conspiracy theories pervade amongst members of parties who are out of power and feel helpless in a political tide moving in the opposite direction. 

Barack Obama’s election spurred countless new conspiracy theories around the 2008 election, and Thom fell into a lot of them. That year, he says he started reading up on conspiracies about the financial crisis as a freshman in college, while studying for his BA in business.

“You see this scapegoating as a social phenomenon against some gun owners who stake a lot of their social identity on that,” says Wood.

So they fight back. On the Internet, everything’s a false flag if you look hard enough. Now, semi-educated anonymous people believe they’re “telling the truth in a society of lies,” like Thom says. 

“If I am indeed wrong, then I feel bad for the guy. It’s a terrible tragedy. But that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna have my opinion. That’s just what I see.”

And if that’s all it was—if Thom and his co-conspirators were just spinning a comforting story for themselves—it might not be so bad. But Thom has been spending the last two weeks ruining my friend’s already broken life. 

Thom is crushing a victim for a second time, and he doesn’t know or care that the victim can see it.

***

So then I come out with it. I tell Thom that I know Chris. 

I decide to make an appeal. I decide to try to stop Thom from doing all of this to my friend.

I decide to tell Thom a story. Nervous, it comes out inelegantly, in pieces.

It goes like this. One day, Chris and I forgot to bring headphones to our college radio show. I’ll repeat that: We didn’t bring headphones—the only thing a person truly needs to make sure he or she is on the air—to a radio show.

By the end, we thought we’d pulled it off. We’d done an hour of radio without the second-most important piece of equipment! A genuine miracle!

Of course, we didn’t pull it off. Since we didn’t have headphones, we didn’t realize that we hadn’t aired a thing. What we really did was turn off the whole radio station for an entire night. We pressed the wrong buttons at the wrong time. We left the studio, oblivious. 

The programming director brought us in a few days later to scream the words “literal radio silence!" to us over and over again. The incompetence was staggering, and we were ashamed before it became a very funny memory.

I bring up the radio show to Thom to say this: If Chris Hurst is a fake, he’s terrible at it. If Chris Hurst is a crisis actor working for the United States government in a long-term plot to strip U.S. citizens of their guns and freedom, he is the worst one in the world.

I ask Thom, How would you respond to that?

Then, silence. Seconds of strained, shifty quiet.

“My response to that is either he’s being duped or you’re being duped. This woman, Alison, I don’t know where she is. It’s my suspicion that you’re being duped, if that’s the case. It looks like the guy is acting. It doesn’t seem like he’s being genuine,” says Thom.

But what if you’re wrong? Have you considered that? Have you considered what it would be like to be Chris? 

I have been so respectful. I have been too respectful. I am trying, for some reason, to convince Thom that I’m not in on it, that I’m fallible enough but still professional. I’m trying not to appear to him to be part of a problem he is wholly dreaming up. I am trying not to yell. 

I’m trying to be the one person who says, You’re wrong, but I hear you.

This way is supposed to work, the academics tell me. Listen to the lost people, and sometimes they will hear you out in return. 

I am being nice, still. I am trying to get him to see the life he is destroying again every morning.

I’m trying not to say, How could you?

I say, What if you’re wrong?

“If I am indeed wrong then I feel bad for the guy. It’s a terrible tragedy. But that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna have my opinion. That’s just what I see,” he says. “If that happened to me—and it really did happen—and people were calling it a false flag or a hoax, I would disagree with them. But I would have to respect their freedom of speech.”

But really, Thom, really, this is the worst thing that could happen to anyone. He watched his to-be fiancée die in an unrepeatable way. He almost evaded seeing a picture of her death until the morning after it happened, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He saw it on the cover of the New York Daily News. He saw his soulmate shot in three frames, one alive, one bracing for a bullet, and one as she was dying, and he writes to me and he says, “I broke when I saw the Daily News.” And then he goes onto his Facebook wall one morning and someone says that she was an actor all along, or that she’s alive on an island somewhere, or that he was part of her death, or that he and the love of his life were never in love all along and this was you, Thom, and now this happens every morning, and this was you who started it, Thom, I mean, really, Thom, really.

What if you’re wrong?

“If I’m wrong, my heart goes out to Alison’s family and Chris Hurst, but it’s my opinion that it’s not obviously wrong.”

Thom. That’s not enough.

Holy Orders

A determined Pope Francis moves to reform a recalcitrant Curia.

BY ALEXANDER STILLE The  New Yorker

When you walk in the back entrance to Vatican City, you quickly realize what a small world the center of the Catholic Church is. The hundred-and-nine-acre complex, built largely during the Renaissance, is the spiritual and administrative headquarters of a global institution with 1.2 billion followers. The first building you see is the Santa Marta guesthouse, where Pope Francis lives and works, in a three-room space of some seven hundred square feet, rather than in the traditional, and grander, papal apartments, in the Apostolic Palace.

As you turn a corner, there is a yellow building that houses several cardinals. On one floor is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was Secretary of State under Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Paolo Sardi, considered to be one of Bertone’s political adversaries within the Curia, occupies the floor just below. A short stroll through the Vatican gardens takes you to the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where Benedict XVI now lives. When he resigned, in 2013, he flew off in a helicopter to begin a life of retreat and prayer, and many might have thought that he had retired to a monastery somewhere in his native Germany. But he is right here. Just outside the Vatican walls, in Piazza della Città Leonina, there is another apartment building filled with cardinals. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Benedict’s successor as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, lives in the apartment occupied by Benedict when he was merely Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and above him is Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri.

The neighbors have been feuding: Müller is a defender of doctrinal orthodoxy, while the reform-minded Baldisseri has presided over the Synod on the Family, a council meeting initiated by Francis last year, at which Church progressives have advocated greater flexibility on such matters as the treatment of divorced couples and homosexuals. There has been an ongoing dispute—now, apparently, resolved—over the noise level in the building: Baldisseri, an accomplished pianist, likes to practice after lunch, when Müller takes a nap.

In this compacted world, close friendships, intense rivalries, clashing ambitions, and personal enmities all flourish. Perhaps because members of the Church rarely criticize the Pope publicly, personal differences often take the form of backbiting, corridor gossip, and behind-the-scenes intrigue. It is in this peculiar setting that Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, finds himself attempting to “shake up” the Catholic Church, as he likes to say. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had spent little time in Rome before his election, on March 13, 2013.

The first Jesuit Pope in history, Bergoglio spent virtually his entire career in Latin America. At thirty-six, he became head of the Jesuit order in Argentina. During the Dirty War carried out by the country’s right-wing junta, he was accused of handing over to the military two priests, but the evidence is ambiguous, and he has argued that he worked to free the priests and other victims of the regime. (Some political dissidents have testified that Bergoglio helped hide them during the persecutions.) After he was named Archbishop of Buenos Aires, in 1998, Bergoglio began to dedicate himself to the poor, travelling by bus through Buenos Aires and spending time in the city’s shantytowns.

When Cardinal Bergoglio came to Rome in 2013, for the gathering that would choose Benedict’s successor, he addressed a group of cardinals before the conclave got under way. He briskly criticized the Rome-centered Church’s “self-referential” tendency toward “theological narcissism” when it should be reaching out to the periphery of the world, and to the most marginal members of society. Just before Christmas last year, Francis surprised an audience of cardinals and monsignors by denouncing the various “diseases” of the Curia—its “pathology of power,” its “rivalry and vainglory,” its “gossiping, grumbling, and backbiting,” its “idolizing of superiors,” its “careerism and opportunism.” Although he has introduced some new people into the Vatican government to carry out his vision for the Church, for the most part he must work with the singular community that he inherited.

I got a glimpse of how difficult that might be when I attended a gathering of high-level Vatican officials in Rome earlier this year and overheard a cardinal talking about how L’Espresso, an Italian news magazine, would soon be publishing a damaging exposé of the free-spending ways of Cardinal George Pell, the Australian whom Francis brought in to clean up the Vatican’s finances. The article was based on leaked documents, and the cardinal was clearly pleased with its imminent publication. “When Francis came in, the attitude was that everything that the Italians did was bad and corrupt—now it is a little more complicated,” he said. He felt that it was important to settle accounts with those he viewed as “pseudo-reformers.”

Toward late afternoon, the Swiss Guards who stand sentinel at the Vatican clear out any straggling visitors in the gardens for the moment when the Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, takes his daily stroll. Benedict uses a walker to move around but by all accounts is in good mental health. Now that he can no longer be blamed for everything that goes wrong in the Catholic world, his papacy is undergoing something of a reassessment.

Benedict does not give press interviews; most news about his life is filtered through his personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, a German theologian who began working with him in 1996 and became his secretary in 2003. Gänswein also lives at the Mater Ecclesiae. He is frequently referred to as Gorgeous George, or as the George Clooney of the Vatican. A dashing man of fifty-nine, he has graying blond hair, chiselled features, and penetrating blue eyes. He has been an avid tennis player and skier. Dressed in an elegant black cassock, he received me in a frescoed room in the Apostolic Palace. Shortly before Benedict resigned, he elevated Gänswein to the rank of archbishop and made him Prefect of the Papal Household, a position that he has retained under Francis.

Some of Francis’s first moves—his decision not to live in the Apostolic Palace, and not to wear some of the regal papal vestments—were viewed in certain quarters as subtle rebukes of Benedict, a scrupulous observer of papal traditions and dress. In a slightly irritated tone, Monsignor Gänswein explained to the German newspaper Die Zeit that Pope Benedict did not live in the Apostolic Palace out of egotism, and that he had very modest, sober habits. Gänswein seemed to bristle at the wave of Francis-mania that swept the world after his election. The Pope, he said, cannot be “everybody’s darling,” and the media infatuation with him would fade. He told me that the Pope was like a finger pointing to the moon, the moon being God. “Sometimes this gets turned upside down, and all people see is the finger—they don’t see the moon,” he said. “Not that this is what the Pope wants—the Pope is not a pop star—and not that Francis is trying to draw attention to himself, but the mass media have their own dynamic.”

Benedict’s relations with the media were less charmed. At first, many reporters explored his life during the Second World War and his reputation for theological rigidity and conservatism. He never quite shook the reputation that he acquired as John Paul II’s enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy, a reputation that had earned him the nicknames the Pope’s Rottweiler and the Panzer Cardinal (after the tank used by the Wehrmacht). Some who worked with him closely describe a man of great courtesy and personal tenderness, shy and reserved but kind, of high moral rectitude and exceptional intelligence.

No other Pope has resigned and continued to live at the Vatican. The most famous earlier Pope to have freely abdicated was Celestine V, a monk and a hermit, who stepped down in 1294, in the hope of returning to his previous life. Instead, he was imprisoned by his successor, Boniface VIII, whom Dante placed in one of the lower circles of Hell. (Dante was not particularly kind to Celestine, either, referring to him as “he who out of cowardice made the great refusal.”)

Benedict and Francis certainly get along better than Celestine and Boniface did. Father Federico Lombardi, who has been a press spokesman for both Popes, told me, “I am not at all surprised, knowing Benedict, that he would handle himself with unimpeachable tact, discretion, and delicacy.” He added, “His public appearances have not been frequent, but they are always welcome and generally occur at the invitation of Pope Francis.” Francis has gone out of his way to treat Benedict with consideration, waiting to make his initial public appearance as Pope until he could reach Benedict by phone. When he gave an extended interview to the Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica, he asked Benedict to review the text and share any comments. Benedict responded with four pages of notes. Francis likens the presence of Benedict to that of a respected and beloved grandfather at home who can be relied on for wise counsel.

Many of those close to Benedict insist that he and Francis have far more in common than is generally supposed. One of the chief exponents of this view is Cardinal Bertone, who worked as Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and then served as his Secretary of State, in effect the Prime Minister of the Vatican, during most of Benedict’s eight-year pontificate.

I met Bertone several times at his apartment in the Palazzo San Carlo, across the street from Francis’s guesthouse residence. He is a tall and imposing man, with a large rectangular head on a thin but substantial frame. He dresses in a simple black cassock, the same clothes he wore at the beginning of his career, as a Salesian father. Only a red skullcap indicates his rank of cardinal. He wears glasses that appear to be slightly tinted, and they make his dark eyes look like deep black pits. One person I met described him as “impenetrable.” He is generally very guarded, but is friendly and congenial when he begins to relax. He asked me to submit a series of questions by e-mail before our interview, and when I arrived he presented me with thirty-three pages of answers, with dates, numbers, and citations. It was as if Bertone didn’t trust himself in a freewheeling discussion, and it seemed to symbolize the troubles Benedict’s papacy had in communicating with the press.

Bertone has been blamed for much of what went wrong during Benedict’s papacy, and he comes across as a proud but wounded man. In the press, he was often depicted as a Vatican bureaucrat intent on blocking reform and covering up corruption. One headline from 2012 stated, “THE VATICAN BANK AND BERTONE PROVE THAT SATAN EXISTS.” Even after Francis replaced him, Bertone continued to be the target of criticism. Stories and TV news segments described the huge apartment he moved into upon retiring. When he celebrated his eightieth birthday, stories appeared about the extravagant party and the fine food and wines that were served. His habits were frequently compared unflatteringly to the spartan comportment of the new Pope. In response, Bertone has decided to write (with an Italian journalist) his own account of his time at the Vatican, to be called “Il Camerlengo” (“The Chamberlain”), one of the many titles that came with his former job.

Bertone’s apartment seems more fitting for a former head of state than for a priest. He told me that he had the apartment renovated at his own expense and that he shares the space with his personal secretary and three nuns. “Bertone is un uomo di potere”—a man of power—“but he is honest,” a member of his entourage told me confidingly. He is certainly a devout man, whose calendar and mental landscape are filled with religious feast days and ceremonies. In August, he travelled to Guatemala to participate in various celebrations honoring the founder of the Salesian order. But proximity to power is also clearly important to him. At the time we spoke, he was about to head off for a week of spiritual exercises. When I asked him about this, he was careful to add, “Col papa, col papa”—“with the Pope, with the Pope.” Sure enough, I saw a photograph in an Italian magazine of Bertone sharing a seat with Pope Francis at the front of a bus.

Benedict, Bertone insists, is far from a “rigid conservative” or a dry theologian lacking a human touch. “I recall many times walking through St. Peter’s Square when he was a cardinal and his engaging in conversation with young German visitors,” he told me. “He enjoyed eating out at certain trattorias in Rome.” He was beloved of the people in Borgo, the neighborhood right outside the Vatican walls, where both of them lived while working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Shopkeepers, barbers, waitresses would come out and greet him,” Bertone said. He would feed the neighborhood cats, speaking to them in his own language—“some variation of Bavarian German, which they seemed to understand.”

Benedict’s supporters argue that his resignation enabled the Francis era of papal reforms.

The longtime Vatican correspondent John Thavis tells a revealing story about Benedict in his recent book, “Vatican Diaries”: During a trip to Jordan, Benedict was taken to the spot along the Jordan River where Christ is supposed to have asked to be baptized by John the Baptist. Cameramen moved into place, expecting a wonderful photo op. Might the Pope baptize someone? Or at least go down near the river and scoop up a cupful of water? But Benedict remained in his car and the motorcade drove off.

The scandal of sexual abuse in the clergy, which had built up over decades under Benedict’s predecessors, reached its full force under his pontificate, creating the overwhelming impression of a Pope who had lost control of the machinery of government. The year 2010, remembered as the annus horribilis, was dominated by ghastly revelations of molestation and rape. And although Benedict had done far more than previous Popes to discipline priestly abuse, he nevertheless took most of the blame. Then, in 2012, the scandal known as VatiLeaks unfolded: reams of personal documents—letters to the Pope and other high officials at the Vatican—began appearing in the Italian press, revealing a world of financial corruption and vicious infighting. The leaker turned out to be the Pope’s personal attendant, Paolo Gabriele, who claimed that he wanted to sound an alarm and make the Pope aware of the festering problems around him.

As the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict had dealt with the sexual-abuse scandal by doing away with the system of piecemeal responses by individual bishops. In 2004, he pushed for an investigation of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, the charismatic Mexican who headed the religious order Legionaries of Christ. There is incontrovertible evidence that Maciel abused numerous young seminarians in the course of several decades and fathered several children by women he maintained relationships with. According to an in-depth investigation by Jason Berry, in the National Catholic Reporter, Maciel was a wizard at raising money and recruiting seminarians; he was a favorite of John Paul II and of Angelo Sodano, his Secretary of State. Sodano allegedly deflected Ratzinger from completion of the Maciel investigation, and when the Legion was building a university campus in Rome one of Sodano’s nephews, an engineer, was hired to work on the project.

Benedict, early in his papacy, removed Maciel from the Legion and imposed on him “a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry.” Although people at the Vatican are reluctant to criticize John Paul II, whose name was often followed by cries of Santo subito (“Sainthood now”), they quietly point out that during the final years of his papacy, when, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he was severely incapacitated, many things went wrong. Thus, some of the scandals that came to light during Benedict’s papacy were inherited from the previous administration.

Bertone and others close to Benedict argue that he should be seen as a transitional figure, who started many of the reforms that Francis is currently promoting: financial transparency, intolerance of priestly sexual abuse, the diplomatic opening between Cuba and the United States, reform of the Curia.

Breaking with a pattern of quietly transferring predator priests, the Vatican under Benedict and Bertone began removing significant numbers of them from the priesthood—defrocking some three hundred and eighty-four priests in 2011 and 2012, the last years of Benedict’s papacy. But the statistics were not publicized by the Vatican press office; the Associated Press compiled them by picking through annual Vatican statistics. In none of his conversations with me did Bertone mention the defrockings, which seemed another sign of his lack of public-relations skill.

In 2010, Benedict set up a financial regulatory agency, the Financial Intelligence Authority, within the Vatican and brought under control the Vatican bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or Institute for the Works of Religion. Because of its murky financial transactions, the I.O.R., which is outside Italian jurisdiction, has long been a source of embarrassment for the Vatican. In the early two-thousands, the Vatican was ranked among the top ten nations in the world that were considered “offshore” financial havens for tax evasion and money laundering.

In September, 2010, Italian authorities refused to allow some twenty-three million euros (about thirty million dollars) to be transferred by the I.O.R. after it refused to explain to whom the funds belonged or why they were being moved. In order to resolve the crisis, Benedict signed an anti-money-laundering law; among other things, it established the Financial Intelligence Authority, whose purpose is to flag suspicious transactions and exchange information with foreign banking authorities. In early 2011, Bertone applied for the Vatican to join Moneyval, an oversight agency set up by the Council of Europe to standardize banking-transparency norms among European countries, which included on-site visits.

A ferocious internal battle soon broke out over the speed and the nature of compliance. In the view of some people involved, including Francesco De Pasquale, who was appointed director of the F.I.A., the Vatican was creating merely an appearance of transparency. Before one meeting with the people from Moneyval, De Pasquale recalls, his Vatican counterpart, Monsignor Ettore Balestrero, asked him, “Do we really need to tell them the truth?” (Balestrero denied this, saying, “I have always coöperated completely and with absolute transparency in my dealings with the regulators from the Council of Europe.”)

The I.O.R. had more than thirty thousand accounts, and thousands of them were dormant or “irregular”: they belonged to nonreligious people or entities that may have engaged in tax evasion or money laundering. Neither the I.O.R.’s president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, nor De Pasquale, the nominal head of the regulatory agency, had any idea what these accounts contained.

At another meeting, De Pasquale recalls, Gotti Tedeschi asked, “ ‘Why shouldn’t we share our records?’ As if to say, ‘We have nothing to hide, right?’ ” The managers of the I.O.R. and the representatives of the Secretariat of State responded, De Pasquale said, with “glacial silence.” In March of 2012, the Milan branch of JP Morgan closed the account that it held for the I.O.R., because of the institution’s failure to comply with transparency rules. Some of the documents flying back and forth found their way into the press.

After months of damaging revelations came VatiLeaks. An entire book of documents—“Sua Santità” (“His Holiness”)—was published by the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi in May of 2012. Gotti Tedeschi was removed as president of the I.O.R. that week, and Paolo Gabriele was arrested. Although it was Gabriele who leaked almost all the documents, practically no one I spoke with at the Vatican thinks that he acted on his own.

VatiLeaks was partly the result of widespread dissatisfaction with Bertone’s management of the Vatican. Both he and the Vatican insist that there were sound legal reasons for not granting regulators access to the I.O.R.’s records—not least, the defense of Vatican sovereignty. It took two years for the I.O.R. to reach substantial compliance with international standards of transparency, and it has quietly closed around forty-six hundred accounts.

On more than one occasion, various cardinals urged Benedict to dismiss Bertone as Secretary of State, but he refused. Bertone was criticized for his widespread involvement in Italy’s affairs. He placed protégés on the boards of Church hospitals and Italian banks; one of his uomini di fiducia (“trusted men”) was given a key position at the Italian state broadcasting system. He pushed to have the Vatican bank invest in an Italian movie-production company that made religious films and TV series. He got involved in efforts to shore up Italian Catholic hospitals that were threatened by fraud and bankruptcy. He attended a dinner at the home of the Italian TV personality Bruno Vespa (in a building owned by the Vatican), with Silvio Berlusconi and others, to discuss the future of the Italian government. When I asked Bertone whether he regretted attending the dinner, he replied, “Of course, if I’d known what a fuss people would make of it, I wouldn’t have gone.” None of these actions were illegal or uncommon at the Vatican, but they suggest a conception of the Church that is more Italian than global.

Benedict appears to have decided to step down in the spring of 2012, as the VatiLeaks scandal was building. He was eighty-five, and during a trip to Mexico he fell and hit his head against a washbasin while getting up in the night. When he awoke the next morning, his head and pillow were covered with blood. He decided that he could not continue to make such long trips. He had already committed himself to a trip to Brazil in the summer of 2013 and evidently had that in mind as a kind of deadline. He began discussing the matter of his resignation with Gänswein and Bertone.

“I tried to talk him out of it, arguing that we could scale back his schedule, reduce or eliminate travel, but he was firm,” Gänswein told me. Although all parties deny that VatiLeaks was the catalyst, it was surely a factor.

Inevitably, Benedict will be remembered mainly for his decision to resign. That act made Francis’s papacy possible, and Benedict’s supporters argue that it helped to redefine the papacy for modern times, in ways that abetted Francis’s program of reforms. “It was a revolutionary act,” Gänswein said.

At the conclave to elect Benedict’s successor, there was a powerfully anti-Italian mood. The U.S. cardinals—fourteen of them—and the Latin Americans were adamant in their wish for a clear change of direction. The U.S. cardinals threw their weight behind the strongest South American candidate, the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII, the successor to the unfortunate Celestine, issued a papal bull that stated, “We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” In 1870, Pius IX, with his declaration of papal infallibility, followed in this tradition, as did John Paul II, a century later, with his doctrinal orthodoxy and demands of strict obedience to the Pope. But there is an alternative tradition of Vatican governance. In the first centuries of Christianity, the Church was governed by a series of synods, or councils, attended by all the bishops who were able to travel to them. The new Pope Francis has gone out of his way to refer to himself as the Bishop of Rome, one of the Pope’s many titles, intending to hark back to a synodal tradition, in which the Church was run in a more democratic fashion and the Pope was the first bishop among equals. To combat the built-in insularity of a Rome-centered Church, Francis appointed nine cardinals to his advisory committee—one from every continent, plus his new Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. They function as a kind of global cabinet. He has an economic-oversight committee of fifteen people, including eight cardinals and seven laypeople, who possess equal voting rights. He has appointed an auditor general, who has the power to audit any Vatican entity, and who reports directly to the Pope.

If Francis seems to the general public a kindly avuncular figure, within the walls of the Vatican he has a reputation for toughness. In the interview with Civiltà Cattolica, he described himself as both “a little naïve” and “a little furbo”—shrewd, clever, even tricky. While he has distinguished himself for public gestures that point to a life of humility and selfless charity—paying his own hotel bill after his election as Pope, washing the feet of recovering drug addicts, and advocating a Church of the poor, for the poor—he has moved with equal assertiveness in his insistence on shaking up traditional forms of Vatican governance.

To get an idea of how this revolution is being carried out in practical terms, I arranged to visit the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, headed by the Australian Cardinal Pell. In the past, the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the arbiter of doctrinal orthodoxy—was the most influential of the Vatican prefectures. Pell and the Secretariat for the Economy have been placed on the same level—or, arguably, a higher level. Pell is also part of Francis’s global cabinet.

To reach the offices, you walk through the enormous Belvedere Court, a Renaissance courtyard built by Michelangelo’s patron, Julius II. Julius II occasionally had the courtyard flooded, using it for mock naval battles and other papal entertainments. Somewhere under its cobblestones are the remains of an elephant, a pet of Pope Leo X. And so it is a bit of a surprise to take the elevator up to the third floor and come upon a group of M.B.A. types speaking English. Until now, Italian has been the language of the Vatican, even among its foreign officeholders. Pope Francis approved making the Secretariat for the Economy officially bilingual in Italian and English—the first department of the Vatican to be so—and English is decidedly favored. Danny Casey, a fellow-Australian and financial manager whom Cardinal Pell chose to handle the day-to-day operations of the secretariat, told me, “English is the international language of business, so we can hire people from all over the world.”

Pell and Casey, who worked together in Sydney, collaborated with major international consultants to get a grip on the Vatican’s tangled finances—standardizing accounting practices, identifying valuable assets, and bringing a number of small Vatican properties and institutions under direct management of the Holy See, the legal entity that controls the Vatican and certain institutions in and around Rome. Earlier this year, the new secretariat announced that it had identified some $1.2 billion in financial assets that were not previously on the Vatican balance sheet. No one asserted that they were hidden for any improper purposes. “When we started our work, we were told that the Holy See comprises some sixty-five different institutions,” Casey said. “We have determined that the correct number is a hundred and thirty-six.”

How would one discover ownership of $1.2 billion and seventy-one institutions? Casey explained that the management of Vatican properties has been extremely fragmented. The Catholic church is estimated to own twenty per cent of all real estate in Italy, and a quarter of all real estate in Rome. The hills of Rome hold scores of curious religious institutions, monasteries, convents, seminaries, foundations, confraternities, institutes: hidden treasures with beautiful gardens, frescoed palaces, gurgling fountains, and breathtaking views, many of them family properties—each with its own complex history—donated by some rich Roman to the Church centuries ago.

All the Vatican entities are now being asked to comply with international accounting standards and oversight, and the administrators of these institutions—priests and nuns, in many cases—are being trained in basic accounting practices. Each institution is required to fill out a form stating its objectives for the next year and how much money will be required to accomplish them. Casey and his team are working hard to distinguish between Vatican assets that are performing religious missions—caring for the elderly, say, or teaching the young—and assets that are “not within the mission.” Properties outside the mission should be considered commercial assets, from which the Vatican should try to gain the best possible monetary return.

Propaganda Fide, the Vatican entity that sponsors religious missions abroad, owns an estimated ten billion dollars in real estate, concentrated mainly in Rome, and including some of the city’s most beautiful historic palaces. About five years ago, news broke that Fide was allegedly offering deals on rentals to Italian politicians, journalists, and businessmen. Bertone told me that the designer Valentino was paying well below market rent for his flagship store, on the fashionable Via del Babuino, in one of Rome’s most expensive neighborhoods. (A Valentino spokesperson said that the store paid market-rate rent, and had never received any favors.)

In an article in the English-language Catholic Herald, Cardinal Pell recalled that a British acquaintance had asked him how the Vatican could have carried on for so long with such informal accounting. “I began by remarking that his question was one of the first that would come to our minds as English-speakers,” he said. But it would be “much lower on the list for people in another culture, such as the Italians.”

The observation did not sit well with many in the Vatican. Not long after Pell’s article appeared, L’Espresso published its exposé of his expenses. The article was based on a number of internal documents and receipts that had obviously been given to the magazine by Vatican officials eager to take Pell down.

The article reported that Pell and Casey had spent more than five hundred thousand euros on office expenses in a few months. Casey is paid a salary of fifteen thousand euros a month (tax-free), a colossal sum for a Vatican employee. Pell charged religious vestments—a few thousand euros—as an expense. Pell and Casey frequently flew business class and treated their business-adviser guests to champagne. All this would be normal in the business world but was out of tune with the modesty and simplicity practiced by Francis.

Although Francis has inveighed against the more savage forms of unfettered capitalism, in the management of Vatican finances he has relied on major companies from the capitalist world: McKinsey, Deloitte Consulting, EY (formerly Ernst & Young). He has given a much greater role to lay professionals and reduced the administrative duties of cardinals, who have little preparation for them. The new team has tried to institute the so-called “four eyes” principle, in which all important financial decisions must be carefully reviewed by two people, in order to cut back on the kind of internal fiefdoms that were until recently the norm at the Vatican—one cardinal in charge of billions of dollars of real estate, another in charge of a multibillion-dollar hospital system.

There is evidence that Francis and his team have had some impact. In the last two years of Benedict’s pontificate, the F.I.A. reported only seven instances of “suspicious activity.” In 2013, Francis’s first year, it made two hundred and two such reports; in 2014, it made a hundred and forty-seven. Italian police investigating corruption in Milan wiretapped a prominent politician (subsequently convicted of taking bribes) complaining of the new atmosphere at the Vatican. “There is no protection in the Vatican, because the new Pope . . . couldn’t give a crap about the Italian world, and then among the cardinals there is no one who can offer protection anymore.”

The abiding hope of the Secretariat of the Economy is, not surprisingly, to generate more income. “Make more money from our assets so that we do more good,” Casey says. The I.O.R., one of the main revenue sources, has only some six billion dollars in deposits and assets; the real-estate assets of the Catholic Church worldwide have been estimated at two trillion dollars, a sum comparable to the G.D.P. of Russia, India, or Brazil.

Some financial reformers are urging the creation of an umbrella organization, to be called Vatican Asset Management, which would assume management of the financial assets held by the Vatican City State and its various entities and, eventually, all its real-estate assets as well. The Vatican bank also proposed creating an investment fund, to be registered in Luxembourg, that would offer an attractive investment vehicle to I.O.R. account holders. Francis has rejected the Luxembourg proposal.

According to Piero Schiavazzi, a journalist who has written extensively about the Vatican, “There is a struggle going on within the Vatican, between the more capitalist-minded people, like Cardinal Pell, and those who want something different. The first group is for working within the capitalist system and making as much money as possible in order to do good works. The other group, which Francis may favor, thinks the Vatican should use its money to actually change the system, to invest in poor countries directly in order to change their structure.” In July, the Pope called for a new economic order, focussed on the poor, declaring, “Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” and decrying a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.” This critique of unfettered capitalism is also at the heart of his recent encyclical “Laudato Si’,” which promotes a worldwide effort to reduce global warming: “I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. . . . Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods.”

The coalition that elected Francis, with its strong support from conservative American cardinals, may begin to fray this fall. He will visit the United States this month, ending up in Philadelphia, for the World Meeting of Families, a precursor of the Synod on the Family, whose next session will take place in October. At last year’s meeting, progressives among the attending bishops and cardinals and (nonvoting) lay people attempted to introduce changes that would make the Church more tolerant of cohabiting unmarried couples, divorced Catholics who have remarried, and gays. This year, the Pope will be expected to confront these matters in all their doctrinal complexity.

In his first two years, Francis, through the deployment of his modest personality and inclusive rhetoric, has skillfully created the impression of a much more open and tolerant Church without actually changing Church doctrine. Just last week, he announced that Catholics who had abortions could be forgiven their sin if they confessed sincerely during this special Jubilee year. In the past, abortion was a sin that provoked immediate excommunication. But Francis was building on a precedent: the Vatican had already allowed bishops to offer absolution under special circumstances.

Sometimes Francis sidesteps divisive issues by simply changing the subject, pointing out that the central missions of Christianity are love, charity, mercy, and caring for the poor. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he said in the interview in Civiltà Cattolica. Even with the decision to hold a synod on the family, he was careful not to move without firm Church precedents: John Paul II held a synod on the family in 1980, but in a different spirit. “Most bishops spent an inordinate amount of time in their speeches quoting Pope John Paul II to himself,” Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and Vatican analyst, wrote recently. The one notable exception was the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop John R. Quinn, of San Francisco, who suggested opening a dialogue on possible exceptions to the contraception ban. “The negative reaction from the Vatican was fierce,” Reese went on. “Many felt that Quinn’s influence in the Church declined speedily after the synod.”

John Paul II, troubled that so many American Catholics disagreed with the Church on matters of sexual morality, took pains to appoint bishops who adhered to the orthodox line on moral and sexual issues. And so although American Catholics are among the world’s most liberal, some of the bishops who represent them will very likely oppose most reforms. Francis has carefully avoided taking sides in the debate but has appeared to tip his hand by, for example, referring to Communion as “not a reward for the perfect but a medicine for the sick.”

Before last year’s Synod on the Family session, Francis circulated a questionnaire to community parishes on topics that included contraception and divorce. The chasm between Church doctrine and the beliefs and the behavior of actual practicing Catholics has become dangerously wide. In America in recent decades, the Church has been losing ground. Some thirty-two million people who were brought up Catholic have left the Church—in part because they have found its hierarchy tone-deaf to the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people.

During discussions at the synod about divorce, cohabitation, and homosexuality, progressives brought up the concept of “graduality”—that sinners might be moving toward the truth without having arrived at it. Thus, unmarried couples should be encouraged to marry, not be condemned. “All these situations require a constructive response, seeking to transform them into opportunities that can lead to an actual marriage and family in conformity with the Gospel,” a preliminary draft noted, and it included language about homosexuals having “gifts and qualities” that need to be recognized. As the German cardinal Reinhard Marx, one of the leading progressives, explained at the synod, “Take the case of two homosexuals who have been living together for thirty-five years and taking care of each other, even in the last phases of their lives. How can I say that this has no value?” As for divorced Catholics who have remarried and wish to take Communion, the gradualists maintain that such Catholics have sinned, repented, and are trying in a second marriage to fulfill their family obligations.

At the synod, Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis, and then head of the Vatican’s highest court, vehemently denounced the reform effort. Burke had once declared that he would deny Communion to the Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry, because of Kerry’s pro-choice position. After the synod, he implicitly criticized Francis, saying that the Pope was sowing “confusion,” and that the Church had become “a ship without a rudder.” Francis had him transferred to a less powerful post.

Conservative Catholic Web sites warn about “Catholicism lite.” Indeed, when the organizers of the synod published a midterm report that included many of the positions of the progressive camp, there was a minor uprising, with traditionalists feeling that those preparing the provisional draft had carried out a kind of coup d’état that did not reflect the consensus of the bishops. In a subsequent draft, approved by the bishops, some of the more controversial passages were modified or eliminated. The passage about the “gifts and qualities” of homosexuals was gone. When the Vatican’s final report was published, it revealed the votes in favor of and against each paragraph. The contested passages (about gay people and divorced Catholics who have remarried) were the only ones that failed to achieve the two-thirds majority that constitutes a consensus.

Whatever the outcome of the debate, it is ultimately the Pope who decides on the content of the synod’s final document. “The Church is a communion, not a democracy,” Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, the head of the Pontifical Council on the Family, said. Yet the Church prefers achieving large majorities, to avoid factions and ruptures. Francis has been working very hard to change the consensus within the Church rather than impose change.

“He is very Jesuitical in saying or doing something that seems to push discussion much further down the road than he actually intends to go,” Andrea Gagliarducci, a Catholic journalist and traditionalist who often writes pieces that are highly critical of Francis, said. “But that pushes everyone further down the road than they intended to go.”

For example, in the case of homosexual believers, even Cardinal Bertone agrees that the Church must do better in creating a welcoming and accepting atmosphere. He points out that Pope Benedict, as a cardinal in the eighties, made it clear that the Church opposed any efforts to denigrate homosexuals or discriminate against them. Bertone glides over the difference between Cardinal Ratzinger’s description of homosexuality as an “intrinsic moral evil” and Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” Even so, Bertone’s softening on the issue is evidence that Francis has changed the debate within the Church. It is the particular genius of Catholicism that it continues to change while insisting that it has never changed. In 1845, Cardinal Newman (who subsequently opposed the declaration of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council) wrote that, although there was no change in Heaven, “here below, to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

I thought of this ever-changing, never-changing Church as I visited an elderly cardinal in his palatial apartment near the Vatican. When I rang the doorbell, I was greeted by an unprepossessing man in his early eighties. In the entryway, there was a life-size, full-length portrait of him. Then I noticed another large painted portrait of him a few feet away.

He led me into the living room, where there were at least seven other portraits of him, a few of them large, life-size paintings. The main corridor was lined with photographs of the many world leaders the cardinal had met, some including him, others signed and dedicated to him. He did not display any awareness that a ferocious tongue-lashing that Francis gave the cardinals last Christmas about the narcissistic and vain nature of the Roman Curia might apply to him. He took the Vatican party line—that Francis’s papacy was not a revolution but a further elaboration of the legacy of his predecessors. The differences, he said, were of personality and of emphasis, and were attributable to Francis’s origins in South America. “Every Pope is different,” he said. “Every Pope reflects his own time and is the right Pope for that particular time. And so the Church adapts. This is the secret to its survival over two thousand years, with the help of the Holy Spirit.” ♦