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arcticdementor · 2 months

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In the demonology of the West, for nearly a hundred years the rise to power of Adolf Hitler has played a leading part. Nearly everyone knows, or thinks he knows, though he is wrong, that “the Germans elected Hitler,” with the apparent lesson that a people can go bad and democracy must never be allowed to repeat such an error. Few, however, actually know the nuts and bolts of how Hitler came to power. This fascinating book fills that gap, by offering a day-by-day account of the national politics of the Weimar Republic from November, 1932 until the end of January, 1933. And it is certainly true that lessons are strewn everywhere in this story, though they have nothing to with reinforcing our own fake democracy. The authors, two German journalists, Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs, write a present-tense narrative covering each day, based on daily newspapers, as well as on other in-the-moment documents such as diaries and letters, along with secondary sources. Each day’s entry is headed by excerpts from the mainstream papers of the time, usually with wildly divergent presentations and calls to action (a phenomenon strange to us, of which more later). The authors do a good job of sketching the personalities of everyone involved, and of making clear what can be known and what must be surmised from the evidence. It sounds like such a narrative would be choppy, but the result is actually quite compelling, if not analytically deep.

…

A fundamental procedural problem was that Parliament for some time had had a “negative majority”—there were enough votes to obtain a vote of no confidence against any Chancellor, as enemies cooperated for that limited purpose, but not enough votes to form a majority that could stand behind a Chancellor. The most recent elections for the Reichstag (the main, lower house) had been held on November 6, 1932. A third of the seats were obtained by the National Socialists (NSDAP). Twenty percent and sixteen percent were held by the Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD) respectively—both parties of the extreme Left, but violent enemies, because the Moscow-directed KPD had been instructed that the slightly-more-centrist SPD was just as much the enemy as the NSDAP. The only other two parties of note were the centrist Centre Party, a Catholic (largely Bavarian) party, at twelve percent, and the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), led by the powerful media baron Alfred Hugenberg. Americans are used not only to an allegedly two-party system, but also to much more monolithic political activity. They are not accustomed to anything like the fractured atmosphere of late Weimar Germany, where many interests aggressively competed—not just political parties, but also powerful independent forces such as trade unions and the National Rural League (representing landowners), which were not aligned with a specific party. For decades in America, the Left has acted in unison, cooperatively crafting and rolling out a program which is then broadcast by Regime media to create the Narrative, then implemented and enforced by every powerful “independent” group in the country. In and through this process, every element of the Left coalition is rewarded and continually supports the collective line (though the recent wars in Israel have caused some cracks in this cozy setup, for the first time). The pretend opposition of the Republican Party cooperates with the Left’s program in exchange for social and material rewards. As a result, today the American system is close to a one-party state. We therefore find it hard to grasp the chaos that a system like Weimar embodied.

…

We begin on November 17, the day Papen resigned as Chancellor, when it became clear his cabinet refused to continue to support him. Papen was a protégé of the Defense Minister, Kurt von Schleicher, who had also turned against him, in part hoping to become Chancellor himself. The past six months had been uneasy months; among other crises, Hindenburg had dissolved the government of Prussia, the largest and most important state, and effectively administered Prussia by decree, the legality of which was winding its way through the courts. The question of the hour was how a new government could be formed that had any strong degree of support. A government of the Left was out of the question—not only because the Left parties did not cooperate with each other, and even collectively did not have anything approaching a majority, but because such a thing was unthinkable to Hindenburg and pretty much everyone else in the ruling classes. The obvious play was some combination of the National Socialists, the DNVP, and the Centre Party, who agreed on quite a bit. But the National Socialists were not playing nice with the government. They had no cabinet seats, as a result, and no direct access to federal power. Hitler had already rejected a proposal to make him Vice-Chancellor or give the NSDAP some minor cabinet posts. He regarded any attempt to bring the NSDAP into the government that did not include him as Chancellor as a non-starter, a mere attempt to coopt the National Socialists into working for a government that opposed their interests. His analysis was correct, of course—nobody in power actually wanted the NSDAP to have any real say in government. None of the men in charge liked the National Socialists, whom they regarded as vulgar upstarts, prone to gutter street fighting and openly contemptuous of the very existence of the Republic. The NSDAP, however, was behind the eight ball—they needed money (men of the SA, the Sturmabteilung, the National Socialist paramilitary force, with collection boxes, begging on behalf of the Party, were ubiquitous in the streets), and votes for the NSDAP had dropped significantly in the November election. Moreover, they were wracked by internal struggles, notably between Hitler and Gregor Strasser, who wanted more focus on socialist/distributive economics and other “third position” policies. Papen’s resignation meant that Hindenburg had to form a new government—but he wanted one that still excluded the NSDAP, and he certainly wasn’t going to include the Communists, or the Social Democrats, so forming any government was a challenge. The only way to pass something in Parliament was for either the Communists or National Socialists to vote for it, usually not because they favored a proposal, but because it harmed their opponents. (The Communists expected if the NSDAP came to power that they would gain, not lose, power themselves. Conversely, and a fact buried nowadays, most observers expected, if the NSDAP collapsed, that many of its members would move to the Communists.) Hindenburg met with all the key political players, including Hitler, as well as non-political players, such as leading industrialists and landowners. In fact, much of this book is the description of meetings between men of power—some private, some not, some meant to be private and made public by one mechanism or another. He tried repeatedly to get some powerful politician, any powerful politician other than Hitler or someone on the Left, to try to form a coalition government. All refused, or quickly failed in their attempts.

…

The Ministry of Defense spent much time wargaming whether the military could put down an alliance between the Communists and the NSDAP to permanently overthrow the Republic through a general strike. That may seem like an odd fear, but the two parties had cooperated in smaller-scale actions of this type before. Moreover, in the European context, this kind of general strike is more-or-less a euphemism for civil war, given that the aims of a general strike are massive and permanent governmental change, and that the instigators assume that violence will accompany a general strike. How likely any of this was is anyone’s guess, but the focus on it (and Schleicher’s involvement in it) show the pressure on Hindenburg to form a stable government that could avert this kind of outcome.

…

Reading all this, you get the feeling of watching a whirring hamster wheel, all these men running in place and getting nowhere. That they were smart and serious men did not prevent them from ending up in a situation that they all (except Hitler and his allies) were trying to avoid. It is not surprising; history offers many examples of disasters not avoided, despite the best efforts of competent, educated, far-seeing men. As always, there was no grand plan by some group behind the scenes; there never is, as much as many like to believe in such fantasies. Everything that happened emerged from the obvious, mostly public, efforts of many men both to advantage themselves and to do what they thought right for the Germans. That is just as true for 2024 America, omitting the part about doing right for the country. But what history does not offer is any example of a society such as ours, where the ruling classes are utterly dominated by the exact opposite of those in the Germany of 1932—rather we have incompetent, uneducated, stupid men and women, dominated by the latter, with the former being feminized, in thought and manner, in a way that would boggle the mind of any decisionmaker in Weimar. Thus, we don’t have the cushion that existed in Weimar, which still fell into disaster. Therefore, we can be sure that when crisis arrives here, the ground will come up even faster to meet us as we fall, not because there is nobody at the helm, but because of something worse—those at the helm are incapable, from a combination of malice and ineptitude, on every level.

…

So what? This was all long ago. But it matters, because we pretend desperation is not also our reality. True, at this moment, it is perhaps not our reality to the same extent as Weimar, where unemployment was thirty percent, and many did not know where their next meal was coming from. But at least Germany was a high-trust, homogenous society with an economy based on producing actual value, whereas we are—not. Certainly, huge swathes of our country are suffering quietly, unable to have any part of what used to be the standard American life. They are instead pumped full of, and killed with government approval by, Chinese and Mexican fentanyl, while they survive on handouts and gig jobs. They are sedated and kept quiet by government checks, weed, and the internet, games and porn, combined with threats and punishments for anyone who dares fight back or act like a man should. Without these suppressants, America would long since have exploded, and rightly so.

…

We often hear that our times are a pale imitation of the past, a variation on Nietzsche’s Last Man. Where are the crowds in the street, baying for their preferred political solution? Where are the brawls between competing factions? Where are the political assassinations? No doubt every time is different, and we seem a desiccated society. But I suspect, for both good and bad, we are not desiccated at all—merely asleep, artificially tranquilized. When that spell is broken, something new will emerge. Let’s hope it’s something good.

#charles haywood #book review #the gravediggers #weimar germany #rüdiger barth #hauke friederichs

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semiotexte · 4 years

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As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life. There are dreams that, because of their sensory intensity, their realism or precisely their lack of realism, deserve to be introduced into autobiography, just as much as events that were actually lived through. Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams. No existence can be completely rendered in its happiness or its madness without taking into account oneiric experiences. It’s Calderón de la Barca’s maxim reversed: it’s not a matter of thinking that life is a dream, but rather of realizing that dreams are also a form of life. It is just as strange to think, like the Egyptians, that dreams are cosmic channels through which the souls of ancestors pass in order to communicate with us, as to claim, as some of the neurosciences do, that dreams are a “cut-and-paste” of elements experienced by the brain during waking life, elements that return in the dream’s REM phase, while our eyes move beneath our eyelids, as if they were watching. Closed and sleeping, eyes continue to see. Therefore, it is more appropriate to say that the human psyche never stops creating and dealing with reality, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking life.

Whereas over the course of the past few months my waking life has been, to use the euphemistic Catalan expression, “good, so long as we don’t go into details,” my oneiric life has had the power of a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. During one of my recent dreams, I was talking with the artist Dominique González-Foerster about my problem of geographic dislocation: after years of a nomadic life, it is hard for me to decide on a place to live in the world. While we were having this conversation, we were watching the planets spin slowly in their orbits, as if we were two giant children and the solar system were a Calder mobile. I was explaining to her that, for now, in order to avoid the conflict that the decision entailed, I had rented an apartment on each planet, but that I didn’t spend more than a month on any one of them, and that this situation was economically and physically unsustainable. Probably because she is the creator of the Exotourisme project, Dominique in this dream was an expert on extraterrestrial real-estate management. “If I were you, I’d have an apartment on Mars and I’d keep a pied-à-terre on Saturn,” she was saying, showing a great deal of pragmatism, “but I’d get rid of the Uranus apartment. It’s much too far away.”

Awake, I don’t know much about astronomy; I don’t have the slightest idea of the positions or distances of the different planets in the solar system. But I consulted the Wikipedia page on Uranus: it is in fact one of the most distant planets from Earth. Only Neptune, Pluto, and the dwarf planets Haumea, Makemake, and Eris are farther away. I read that Uranus was the first planet discovered with the help of a telescope, eight years before the French Revolution. With the help of a lens he himself had made, the astronomer and musician William Herschel observed it one night in March in a clear sky, from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street, in the city of Bath. Since he didn’t yet know if it was a huge star or a tailless comet, they say that Herschel called it “Georgium Sidus,” the Georgian Star, to console King George III for the loss of the British colonies in America: England had lost a continent, but the King had gained a planet. Thanks to Uranus, Herschel was able to live on a generous royal pension of two hundred pounds a year. Because of Uranus, he abandoned both music and the city of Bath, where he was a chapel organist and director of public concerts, and settled in Windsor so that the King could be sure of his new conquest by observing it through a telescope. Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel went mad, and spent the rest of his life building the largest telescope of the eighteenth century, which the English called “the monster.” Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel never played the oboe again. He died at the age of eighty-four: the number of years it takes for Uranus to go around the sun. They say that the tube of his telescope was so wide that the family used it as a dining hall at his funeral.

Uranus is what astrophysicists call a “gas giant.” Made up of ice, methane, and ammonia, it is the coldest planet in the solar system, with winds that can exceed nine hundred kilometers per hour. In short, the living conditions are not especially suitable. So Dominique was right: I should leave the Uranus apartment.

But dream functions like a virus. From that night forward, while I’m awake, the sensation of having an apartment on Uranus increases, and I am more and more convinced that the place I should live is over there.

For the Greeks, as for me in this dream, Uranus was the solid roof of the world, the limit of the celestial vault. Uranus was regarded as the house of the gods in many Greek invocation rituals. In mythology, Uranus is the son that Gaia, the Earth, conceived alone, without insemination or coition. Greek mythology is at once a kind of retro sci-fi story anticipating in a do-it-yourself way the technologies of reproduction and bodily transformation that will appear throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and at the same time a kitschy TV series in which the characters give themselves over to an unimaginable number of relationships outside the law. Thus Gaia married her son Uranus, a Titan often represented in the middle of a cloud of stars, like a sort of Tom of Finland dancing with other muscle-bound guys in a techno club on Mount Olympus. From the incestuous and ultimately not very heterosexual relationships between heaven and earth, the first generation of Titans were born, including Oceanus (Water), Chronos (Time), and Mnemosyne (Memory) … Uranus was both the son of the Earth and the father of all the others. We don’t quite know what Uranus’s problem was, but the truth is that he was not a good father: either he forced his children to remain in Gaia’s womb, or he threw them into Tartarus as soon as they were born. So Gaia convinced one of her children to carry out a contraceptive operation. You can see in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence the representation that Giorgio Vasari made in the sixteenth century of Chronos castrating his father Uranus with a scythe. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, emerged from Uranus’s amputated genital organs … which could imply that love comes from the disjunction of the body’s genital organs, from the displacement and externalization of genital force.

This form of nonheterosexual conception, cited in Plato’s Symposium, was the inspiration for the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to come up with the word Uranian [Urning] in 1864 to designate what he called relations of the “third sex.” In order to explain men’s attraction to other men, Ulrichs, after Plato, cut subjectivity in half, separated the soul from the body, and imagined a combination of souls and bodies that authorized him to reclaim dignity for those who loved against the law. The segmentation of soul and body reproduces in the domain of experience the binary epistemology of sexual difference: there are only two options. Uranians are not, Ulrich writes, sick or criminal, but feminine souls enclosed in masculine bodies attracted to masculine souls.

This is not a bad idea to legitimize a form of love that, at the time, could get you hanged in England or in Prussia, and that, today, remains illegal in seventy-four countries and is subject to the death penalty in thirteen, including Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, and Qatar; a form of love that constitutes a common motive for violence in family, society, and police in most Western democracies.

Ulrichs does not make this statement as a lawyer or scientist: he is speaking in the first person. He does not say “there are Uranians,” but “I am a Uranian.” He asserts this, in Latin, on August 18, 1867, after having been condemned to prison and after his books have been banned by an assembly of five hundred jurists, members of the German Parliament, and a Bavarian prince—an ideal audience for such confessions. Until then, Ulrichs had hidden behind the pseudonym “Numa Numantius.” But from that day on, he speaks in his own name, he dares to taint the name of his father. In his diary, Ulrichs confesses he was terrified, and that, just before walking onto the stage of the Grand Hall of the Odeon Theater in Munich, he had been thinking about running away, never to return. But he says he suddenly remembered the words of the Swiss writer Heinrich Hössli, who a few years before had defended sodomites (though not, however, speaking in his own name): “Two ways lie before me,” Hössli wrote, “to write this book and expose myself to persecution, or not to write it and be full of guilt until the day I am buried. Of course I have encountered the temptation to stop writing … But before my eyes appeared the images of the persecuted and the wretched prospect of such children who have not yet been born, and I thought of the unhappy mothers at their cradles, rocking their cursed yet innocent children! And then I saw our judges with their eyes blindfolded. Finally, I imagined my gravedigger slipping the cover of my coffin over my cold face. Then, before I submitted, the imperious desire to stand up and defend the oppressed truth possessed me … And so I continued to write with my eyes resolutely averted from those who have worked for my destruction. I do not have to choose between remaining silent or speaking. I say to myself: speak or be judged!”

Ulrichs writes in his journal that the judges and Parliamentarians seated in Munich’s Odeon Hall cried out, as they listened to his speech, like an angry crowd: End the meeting! End the meeting! But he also notes that one or two voices were raised to say: Let him continue! In the midst of a chaotic tumult, the President left the theater, but some Parliamentarians remained. Ulrichs’s voice trembled. They listened.

But what does it mean to speak for those who have been refused access to reason and knowledge, for us who have been regarded as mentally ill? With what voice can we speak? Can the jaguar or the cyborg lend us their voices? To speak is to invent the language of the crossing, to project one’s voice into an interstellar expedition: to translate our difference into the language of the norm; while we continue, in secret, to practice a strange lingo that the law does not understand.

So Ulrichs was the first European citizen to declare publicly that he wanted to have an apartment on Uranus. He was the first mentally ill person, the first sexual criminal to stand up and denounce the categories that labeled him as sexually and criminally diseased.

He did not say, “I am not a sodomite.” On the contrary, he defended the right to practice sodomy between men, calling for a reorganization of the systems of signs, for a change of the political rituals that defined the social recognition of a body as healthy or sick, legal or illegal. He invented a new language and a new scene of enunciation. In each of Ulrichs’s words addressed from Uranus to the Munich jurists resounds the violence generated by the dualist epistemology of the West. The entire universe cut in half and solely in half. Everything is heads or tails in this system of knowledge. We are human or animal. Man or woman. Living or dead. We are the colonizer or the colonized. Living organism or machine. We have been divided by the norm. Cut in half and forced to remain on one side or the other of the rift. What we call “subjectivity” is only the scar that, over the multiplicity of all that we could have been, covers the wound of this fracture. It is over this scar that property, family, and inheritance were founded. Over this scar, names are written and sexual identities asserted.

On May 6, 1868, Karl Maria Kertbeny, an activist and defender of the rights of sexual minorities, sent a handwritten letter to Ulrichs in which for the first time he used the word homosexual to refer to what his friend called “Uranians.” Against the antisodomy law promulgated in Prussia, Kertbeny defended the idea that sexual practices between people of the same sex were as “natural” as the practices of those he calls—also for the first time—“heterosexuals.” For Kertbeny, homosexuality and heterosexuality were just two natural ways of loving. For medical jurisprudence at the end of the nineteenth century, however, homosexuality would be reclassified as a disease, a deviation, and a crime.

I am not speaking of history here. I am speaking to you of your lives, of mine, of today. While the notion of Uranianism has gone somewhat astray in the archives of literature, Kertbeny’s concepts would become authentic biopolitical techniques of dealing with sexuality and reproduction over the course of the twentieth century, to such an extent that most of you continue to use them to refer to your own identity, as if they were descriptive categories. Homosexuality would remain listed until 1975 in Western psychiatric manuals as a sexual disease. This remains a central notion, not only in the discourse of clinical psychology, but also in the political languages of Western democracies.

When the notion of homosexuality disappeared from psychiatric manuals, the notions of intersexuality and transsexuality appear as new pathologies for which medicine, pharmacology, and law suggest remedies. Each body born in a hospital in the West is examined and subjected to the protocols of evaluation of gender normality invented in the fifties in the United States by the doctors John Money and John and Joan Hampson: if the baby’s body does not comply with the visual criteria of sexual difference, it will be submitted to a battery of operations of “sexual reassignment.” In the same way, with a few minor exceptions, neither scientific discourse nor the law in most Western democracies recognizes the possibility of inscribing a body as a member of human society unless it is assigned either masculine or feminine gender. Transsexuality and intersexuality are described as psychosomatic pathologies, and not as the symptoms of the inadequacy of the politico-visual system of sexual differentiation when faced with the complexity of life.

How can you, how can we, organize an entire system of visibility, representation, right of self-determination, and political recognition if we follow such categories? Do you really believe you are male or female, that we are homosexual or heterosexual, intersexed or transsexual? Do these distinctions worry you? Do you trust them? Does the very meaning of your human identity depend on them? If you feel your throat constricting when you hear one of these words, do not silence it. It’s the multiplicity of the cosmos that is trying to pierce through your chest, as if it were the tube of a Herschel telescope.

Let me tell you that homosexuality and heterosexuality do not exist outside of a dualistic, hierarchical epistemology that aims at preserving the domination of the paterfamilias over the reproduction of life. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality do not exist outside of a colonial, capitalist epistemology, which privileges the sexual practices of reproduction as a strategy for managing the population and the reproduction of labor, but also the reproduction of the population of consumers. It is capital, not life, that is being reproduced. These categories are the map imposed by authority, not the territory of life. But if homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality, do not exist, then who are we? How do we love? Imagine it.

Then, I remember my dream and I understand that my trans condition is a new form of Uranism. I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not homosexual I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a Uranian confined inside the limits of techno-scientific capitalism.

Like Ulrichs, I am bringing no news from the margins; instead, I bring you a piece of horizon. I come with news of Uranus, which is neither the realm of God nor the sewer. Quite the contrary. I was assigned a female sex at birth. They said I was lesbian. I decided to self-administer regular doses of testosterone. I never thought I was a man. I never thought I was a woman. I was several. I didn’t think of myself as transsexual. I wanted to experiment with testosterone. I love its viscosity, the unpredictability of the changes it causes, the intensity of the emotions it provokes forty-eight hours after taking it. And, if the injections are regular, its ability to undo your identity, to make organic layers of the body emerge that otherwise would have remained invisible. Here as everywhere, what matters is the measure: the dosage, the rhythm of injections, the order of them, the cadence. I wanted to become unrecognizable. I wasn’t asking medical institutions for testosterone as hormone therapy to cure “gender dysphoria.” I wanted to function with testosterone, to experience the intensity of my desire through it, to multiply my faces by metamorphosing my subjectivity, creating a body that was a revolutionary machine. I undid the mask of femininity that society had plastered onto my face until my identity documents became ridiculous, obsolete. Then, with no way out, I agreed to identify myself as a transsexual, as a “mentally ill person,” so that the medico-legal system would acknowledge me as a living human body. I paid with my body for the name I bear.

By making the decision to construct my subjectivity with testosterone, the way the shaman constructs his with plants, I take on the negativity of my time, a negativity I am forced to represent and against which I can fight only from this paradoxical incarnation, which is to be a trans man in the twenty-first century, a feminist bearing the name of a man in the #MeToo movement, an atheist of the hetero-patriarchal system turned into a consumer of the pharmacopornographic industry. My existence as a trans man constitutes at once the acme of the sexual ancien régime and the beginning of its collapse, the climax of its normative progression and the signal of a proliferation still to come.

I have come to talk to you—to you and to the dead, or rather, to those who live as if they were already dead—but I have come especially to talk to the cursed, innocent children who are yet to be born. Uranians are the survivors of a systematic, political attempt at infanticide: we have survived the attempt to kill in us, while we were not yet adults, and while we could not defend ourselves, the radical multiplicity of life and the desire to change the names of all things. Are you dead? Will they be born tomorrow? I congratulate you, belatedly or in advance.

I bring you news of the crossing, which is the realm of neither God nor the sewer. Quite the contrary. Do not be afraid, do not be excited, I have not come to explain anything morbid. I have not come to tell you what a transsexual is, or how to change your sex, or at what precise instant a transition is good or bad. Because none of that would be true, no truer than the ray of afternoon sun falling on a certain spot on the planet and changing according to the place from which it is seen. No truer than that the slow orbit described by Uranus as it revolves above the Earth is yellow. I cannot tell you everything that goes on when you take testosterone, or what that does in your body. Take the trouble to administer the necessary doses of knowledge to yourself, as many as your taste for risk allows you.

I have not come for that. As my indigenous Chilean mother Pedro Lemebel said, I do not know why I come, but I am here. In this Uranian apartment that overlooks the gardens of Athens. And I’ll stay a while. At the crossroads. Because intersection is the only place that exists. There are no opposite shores. We are always at the crossing of paths. And it is from this crossroad that I address you, like the monster who has learned the language of humans.

I no longer need, like Ulrichs, to assert that I am a masculine soul enclosed in a woman’s body. I have no soul and no body. I have an apartment on Uranus, which certainly places me far from most earthlings, but not so far that you can’t come see me. Even if only in dream …

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bopinion · 3 years

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2021 / 01

Aperçu of the Week:

I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse (Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppolas "The Godfather").

We just watched the trilogy these last days - what a classic!

Bad News of the Week:

What appeasement we haven't heard in the four years of the Trump era. The office is stronger than the person, checks and balances work, the world's oldest democracy survives anything, Trump is just an episode in the long history of the GOP, blah blah blah....

When Biden successfully crossed the finish line, all political observers hoped the nightmare was over. But no, the most unworthy president ever manages the impossible: he outdoes himself as the gravedigger of US democracy. In the last meters of his reign, he is not a lame duck, but a parasite running amok, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake.

I had mentally braced myself for an exhausting week: the runoff election for the Senate majority in Georgia and the intervention announced by several Republicans against the official reading of the election results. Reality easily eclipsed my expectations. Yes, the storming of the Bastille in Washington DC must shake every staunch Democrat to the core. Yes, co-initiator Trump's moderation of the incident shows his moral bankruptcy in a heightened form that many did not think possible. Yes, Mitch McConnell is the "Dr. Frankenstein who created a monster" (Der Spiegel, leading German news magazine). Yes, the incident fits a Banana Republic. Yes, closing Trump's Twitter account will help pacify society. No, it doesn't end there.

Three examples that make us fear the spook won't be over after January 20. One: 45% of Republican voters support storming the Capitol (YouGov) - that adds up, in purely mathematical terms, to nearly 34 million U.S. citizens willingly kicking their own democracy to the curb. Two: Many Republicans like Ted Cruz apparently remain faithful to their absurd cult until (political) death. Three: The double standard in police response compared to the peaceful Black lives matter demonstrations last summer shows that systemic racism is not abating even in the wake of the 2020 lows. Way to go, America!

Good News of the Week:

The lockdown continues and is being tightened in places. Unlike in the spring, the temptation to relax on the basis of falling figures has been resisted. A yoyo effect, which has already occurred so often internationally, could thus be avoided this time. Likewise, there is a prompt and concrete reaction to a current grievance: the exuberant amount of excursionists and day-trippers on the holidays is to be thanked for an exit restriction of 15 km in hot spots - i.e., where the 7-day incidence is higher than 200 positively tested persons per 100,000 inhabitants. Although I would have been satisfied with 100 cases, as originally wanted by Chancellor Angela Merkel. This is a perfect illustration of how the unreasonableness of a few puts the well-being of all at risk. Thanks for that! Sarcastically to all those duds out there who still don't get it. And seriously to the political decision makers who act with a sense of proportion.

Sidenote: In the house of my parents in the middle of Munich also lives a neighbor who is - to put it mildly - a Corona doubter. Or more directly: a dumb conspiracy theorist. The other day he asked my mother, who of course was wearing a mask, if she was afraid of freezing on her nose. Or puts out CDs with "facts" at the bulletin board of the house, which prove that Bill Gates is reaching for world domination with Corona. My daughter has now heard this from her grandparents, who are over 80 and have lung disease, so within the highest risk populations - and is pissed off. She has now written an open letter from a "teenager with a brain" confronting him about his dangerous idiocy. And which my father is going to post on the bulletin board. I don't think it will last long there. So, to be on the safe side, I will print it out several times. You go, girl!

Personal happy Moment of the Week:

Flor from Honduras and Martin from Austria are among my oldest friends from our Canadian days over 33 years ago. Now they are married and live in Vienna with the same lockdown restrictions as we have in Bavaria. At Christmas they surprised us with a package that had premixes for drinks in it. Yesterday evening we met on FaceTime for a virtual cocktail hour, drank "Cake Cake Baby" and "Crazy for Mary", made plans for the "time after Corona" and enjoyed our company even with 350 km distance. Thank you dear ones for the beautiful evening!

As I write this...

...I am listening to piano sonatas by Franz Schubert.

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quakerjoe · 5 years

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Usually, comparisons between Donald Trump’s America and Nazi Germany come from cranks and internet trolls. But a new essay in the New York Review of Books pointing out “troubling similarities” between the 1930s and today is different: It’s written by Christopher Browning, one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust. In it, he warns that democracy here is under serious threat, in the way that German democracy was prior to Hitler’s rise — and really could topple altogether.

Browning, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, specializes in the origins and operation of Nazi genocide. His 1992 book Ordinary Men, a close examination of how an otherwise unremarkable German police battalion evolved into an instrument of mass slaughter, is widely seen as one of the defining works on how typical Germans became complicit in Nazi atrocities.

So when Browning makes comparisons between the rise of Hitler and our current historical period, this isn’t some keyboard warrior spouting off. It is one of the most knowledgeable people on Nazism alive using his expertise to sound the alarm as to what he sees as an existential threat to American democracy.

Browning’s essay covers many topics, ranging from Trump’s “America First” foreign policy — a phrase most closely associated with a group of prewar American Nazi sympathizers — to the role of Fox News as a kind of privatized state propaganda office. But the most interesting part of his argument is the comparison between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg, the German leader who ultimately handed power over to Hitler. Here’s how Browning summarizes the history:

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

McConnell, in Browning’s eyes, is doing something similar — taking whatever actions he can to attain power, including breaking the system for judicial nominations (cough cough, Merrick Garland) and empowering a dangerous demagogue under the delusion that he can be fully controlled:

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings. ...

This is the key point that people often miss when talking about Hitler’s rise. The breakdown of German democracy started well before Hitler: Hyperpolarization led Hindenburg to strip away constraints on executive power as well as conclude that his left-wing opponents were a greater threat than fascism. The result, then, was a degradation of the everyday practice of democracy, to the point where the system was vulnerable to a Hitler-style figure.

Now, as Browning points out, “Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism.” The biggest and most important difference is that Hitler was an open and ideological opponent of the idea of democracy, whereas neither Trump nor the GOP wants to abolish elections.

What Browning worries about, instead, is a slow and quiet breakdown of American democracy — something more much like what you see in modern failed democracies like Turkey. Browning worries that Republicans have grown comfortable enough manipulating the rules of the democratic game to their advantage, with things like voter ID laws and gerrymandering, that they might go even further even after Trump is gone:

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

I’ve observed this kind of modern authoritarianism firsthand in Hungary. In my dispatch after visiting there, I warned of the same thing as Browning does here: The threat to the United States isn’t so much Trump alone as it is the breakdown in the practice of American democracy, and the Republican Party’s commitment to extreme tactics in pursuit of its policy goals in particular.

We are living through a period of serious threat to American democracy. And Browning’s essay, a serious piece by a serious scholar, shows that it’s not at all alarmist to say so.

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wilwheaton · 5 years

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In late October, Christopher R. Browning, a historian who specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, noted the similarities between Trump's governance and "the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe" in The New York Review of Books. "Trump seems intent on withdrawing the U.S. from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945," and his "naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy" with the authoritarians he openly admires recalls "the hapless Neville Chamberlain." But just as Adolf Hitler came to power only with the aide of Weimar German President Paul von Hindenburg, whose conservatives believed "they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support," Trump isn't working in a vacuum, Browning writes. And "if the U.S. has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell."

Mitch McConnell is the problem

McConnell is cancer.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Sunday, February 7, 2021

Tax forms help reveal extent of unemployment fraud in US (AP) Unemployment agencies across the U.S. became lucrative targets for criminals when they were bombarded with claims last year as millions lost jobs due to coronavirus shutdowns. Now, simple tax forms being sent to people who never collected unemployment benefits are revealing that their identity was likely stolen months ago and used to claim bogus benefits that have totaled billions of dollars nationwide. Unemployment benefits are taxable, so government agencies send a 1099-G form to people who received them so they can report the income on their tax returns. States are mailing 1099-Gs in huge numbers this year after processing and paying a record number of claims. In Ohio, Bernie Irwin was shocked two weeks ago when she opened the mail and found a 1099-G form saying her husband had claimed $17,292 in unemployment benefits last year. The only problem: Jim Irwin, 83, hadn’t worked in 13 years. Bernie Irwin, 86, said her daughter-in-law and a friend also received the tax forms. So did Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, his wife, Fran, and Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, even though none of them had claimed unemployment benefits. By November, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General estimated states had paid as much as $36 billion in improper benefits, with a significant portion of that blamed on fraud. In California alone, officials say the fraud totaled at least $11 billion, with $810 million paid in the names of ineligible prisoners.

Peru’s crime worries tainting Venezuelans who want to work (AP) Adriana Marero dropped out of college in her native Venezuela in 2017 as anti-government protests turned violent amid worsening economic problems and she fled to Peru looking for a place where she could earn a decent living. She delivered food on her bike, played hostess at a casino and worked at various restaurants. Then the coronavirus pandemic came, hitting Peru particularly hard, and Marero found herself out of work as did countless other migrants. Determined to provide for herself, Marero learned to make natural skincare products and sold her wares at a crafts market with dozens of other Venezuelans who have started their own businesses. But the efforts of Marero and others like her to make honest livings have increasingly been overshadowed by what immigrant advocates describe as excessive attention by police and local media to the crimes of a few Venezuelans. That, the advocates say, is fueling xenophobia among Peruvians. Peru is hosting roughly 1 million displaced Venezuelans, an influx that began around 2014 as inflation, unemployment, crime and shortages of food and medicine soared in their homeland. The migrants, many with advanced or multiple degrees, have entered Peru’s primarily informal economy, working as taxi, bus and food delivery drivers, cooks and, during the pandemic, gravediggers. As the coronavirus continues to sicken and kill people by the hundreds every day across this country, prompting new lockdowns and sinking the economy further, Peruvians are looking ahead to local and presidential elections less than three months away. And some politicians are focusing on immigrants, accusing them of being disproportionately involved in crimes.

Tractors, trucks block India’s roads as farm protests widen (Reuters) Thousands of farmers across India blocked roads on Saturday with makeshift tents, tractors, trucks and boulders to pressure the government to roll back agricultural reforms that have triggered months-long protests. While the initial protests were started by rice and wheat growers from northern India who camped out on the outskirts of New Delhi, demonstrations have spread across the country, especially in states not ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. The federal government has offered concessions to the farmers but refuses to repeal three laws passed last year that it says are crucial to bring new investment to the sector, which accounts for nearly 15% of India’s $2.9 trillion economy and about half its workforce. Saturday’s three-hour “chakka jam”, or road blockade, started around noon across the country, except in New Delhi and a couple of neighbouring states. Avik Saha, a secretary of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee, an umbrella organisation of farmer groups, said about 10,000 places across India were blocked in the three hours.

Russia expels EU diplomats over Navalny as tensions rise (AP) Russia said Friday it was expelling diplomats from Sweden, Poland and Germany, accusing them of attending a rally in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as international tensions grew over the jailing of the Kremlin’s most prominent foe. The diplomats were declared “persona non grata” and were required to leave Russia “shortly,” a ministry statement said. The announcement came as the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the treatment of Navalny represents “a low point” in relations between Brussels and Moscow.

China granted WHO team full access in Wuhan (AP) A member of the World Health Organization expert team investigating the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan said the Chinese side granted full access to all sites and personnel they requested��a level of openness that even he hadn’t expected. Peter Daszak told The Associated Press on Friday that team members had submitted a deeply considered list of places and people to include in their investigation and that no objections were raised. “We were asked where we wanted to go. We gave our hosts a list ... and you can see from where we’ve been, we’ve been to all the key places,” Daszak said. “Every place we asked to see, everyone we wanted to meet. ... So really good,” said the British-born zoologist, who is president of the NGO EcoHealth Alliance in New York City. Daszak said the team has now concluded site visits and will spend the next few days trolling through data and consulting with Chinese experts before presenting a summary of their findings at a news briefing prior to their departure on Wednesday.

Myanmar blocks Internet amid first large street protests since coup (Washington Post) Myanmar authorities on Saturday restricted Internet connectivity and blocked more social media websites, as thousands of people protested in the first street demonstrations since the military took power from the democratically elected government in a coup. By midmorning, residents in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, were unable to access mobile Internet services, or found their connection spotty. Two foreign telcos, Norway-based Telenor and Qatar-based Ooredoo, operate there. In a statement, Telenor said that authorities had ordered a “nationwide shutdown” of the network, citing “circulation of fake news, stability of the nation and interest of the public as basis for the order.” The Internet shutdown followed the first major demonstrations since the Myanmar military seized power in a coup, returning themselves to direct rule and ending a power-sharing agreement with the elected civilian government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party. Since the coup, a steady drumbeat of resistance has been building, first with a civil disobedience campaign largely organized on social media, Facebook in particular, which is the de facto Internet in Myanmar, widely used and integral to communications there. The military-run government then blocked access to Facebook, prompting a migration to Twitter, which was blocked too along with Instagram.

ICC clears way for war crimes probe of Israeli actions (AP) The International Criminal Court said Friday that its jurisdiction extends to territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, potentially clearing the way for its chief prosecutor to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions. The decision was welcomed by the Palestinians and decried by Israel’s prime minister, who vowed to fight “this perversion of justice.” The U.S., Israel’s closest ally, said it opposed the decision. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said in 2019 that there was a “reasonable basis” to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip as well as Israeli settlement activity in the occupied West Bank. But she asked the court to determine whether she has territorial jurisdiction before proceeding. The Palestinians, who joined the court in 2015, have pushed for an investigation, asking the court to look into Israeli actions during its 2014 war against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, as well as Israel’s construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem.

Police seize $60 million of bitcoin. Now, where’s the password? (Reuters) German prosecutors have confiscated more than 50 million euros ($60 million) worth of bitcoin from a fraudster. There’s only one problem: they can’t unlock the money because he won’t give them the password. The man was sentenced to jail and has since served his term, maintaining his silence throughout while police made repeated failed efforts to crack the code to access more than 1,700 bitcoin, said a prosecutor in the Bavarian town of Kempten. Bitcoin is stored on software known as a digital wallet that is secured through encryption. A password is used as a decryption key to open the wallet and access the bitcoin. When a password is lost the user cannot open the wallet. The fraudster had been sentenced to more than two years in jail for covertly installing software on other computers to harness their power to “mine” or produce bitcoin. When he went behind bars, his bitcoin stash would have been worth a fraction of the current value. The price of bitcoin has surged over the past year, hitting a record high of $42,000 in January. It was trading at $37,577 on Friday, according to cryptocurrency and blockchain website Coindesk.

#headlines #news

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venitisblr-blog · 7 years

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URGE YOUR GERMAN FRIENDS TO VOTE FOR ALTERNATIVE FÜR DEUTSCHLAND

Both stupid Merkel and stupid Schulz worry that a low turnout could work in favor of AfD, which is expected to enter the national parliament for the first time. Stupid Schulz, the grand gravedigger of democracy, had the nerve to describe AfD as gravediggers of democracy!

Our poll suggests that support is slipping for CDU, who dropped to 32 percent, and SPD, down to 19 percent – both now joined…

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pscottm · 6 years

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As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.

In threatening trade wars with allies and adversaries alike, Trump justifies increased tariffs on our allies on the specious pretext that countries like Canada are a threat to our national security. He combines his constant disparagement of our democratic allies with open admiration of authoritarians. His naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy and his faith in a handshake with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un recall the hapless Neville Chamberlain (a man in every other regard different from Trump). Fortunately the US is so embedded in the international order it created after 1945, and the Republican Party and its business supporters are sufficiently alarmed over the threat to free trade, that Trump has not yet completed his agenda of withdrawal, though he has made astounding progress in a very short time.

A second aspect of the interwar period with all too many similarities to our current situation is the waning of the Weimar Republic. Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

One can predict that henceforth no significant judicial appointments will be made when the presidency and the Senate are not controlled by the same party. McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril.

Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph.

By 1936 the democratic forces of France and Spain had learned the painful lesson of not uniting against the fascist threat, and even Stalin reversed his ill-fated policy and instructed the Communists to join democrats in Popular Front electoral alliances. In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist. The victory of the Popular Front in 1936 temporarily saved French democracy but led to the defeat of a demoralized and divided France in 1940, followed by the Vichy regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany while enthusiastically pursuing its own authoritarian counterrevolution.

Faced with the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the US election and collusion with members of his campaign, Trump and his supporters’ first line of defense has been twofold—there was “no collusion” and the claim of Russian meddling is a “hoax.” The second line of defense is again twofold: “collusion is not a crime” and the now-proven Russian meddling had no effect. I suspect that if the Mueller report finds that the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russians does indeed meet the legal definition of “criminal conspiracy” and that the enormous extent of Russian meddling makes the claim that it had no effect totally implausible, many Republicans will retreat, either implicitly or explicitly, to the third line of defense: “Better Putin than Hillary.” There seems to be nothing for which the demonization of Hillary Clinton does not serve as sufficient justification, and the notion that a Trump presidency indebted to Putin is far preferable to the nightmare of a Clinton victory will signal the final Republican reorientation to illiberalism at home and subservience to an authoritarian abroad.

Such similarities, both actual and foreseeable, must not obscure a significant difference between the interwar democratic decline and our current situation. In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis portrayed a Nazi-style takeover in the US, in which paramilitary forces of the newly elected populist president seize power by arresting many members of Congress and setting up a dictatorship replete with all-powerful local commissars, concentration camps, summary courts, and strict censorship, as well as the incarceration of all political opponents who do not succeed in fleeing over the Canadian border. Invoking the Nazi example was understandable then, and several aspects of democratic decline in the interwar period seem eerily similar to current trends, as I have noted. But the Nazi dictatorship, war, and genocide following the collapse of Weimar democracy are not proving very useful for understanding the direction in which we are moving today. I would argue that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Trump has shown unabashed admiration for these authoritarian leaders and great affinity for the major tenets of illiberal democracy. But others have paved the way in important respects. Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics. We are approaching the point when Democrats might still win state elections in the major blue states but become increasingly irrelevant in elections for the presidency and Congress. Trump’s personal flaws and his tactic of appealing to a narrow base while energizing Democrats and alienating independents may lead to precisely that rare wave election needed to provide a congressional check on the administration as well as the capture of enough state governorships and legislatures to begin reversing current trends in gerrymandering and voter suppression. The elections of 2018 and 2020 will be vital in testing how far the electoral system has deteriorated.

Another area in which Trump has been the beneficiary of long-term trends predating his presidency is the decline of organized labor. To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway. The increasingly uneven playing field caused by the rise in corporate influence and decline in union power, along with the legions of well-funded lobbyists, is another sign of the illiberal trend.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

The very first legislation decreed by Hitler under the Enabling Act of 1933 (which suspended the legislative powers of the Reichstag) authorized the government to dismiss civil servants for suspected political unreliability and “non-Aryan” ancestry. Inequality before the law and legal discrimination were core features of the Nazi regime from the beginning. It likewise intruded into people’s private choices about sexuality and reproduction. Persecution of male homosexuality was drastically intensified, resulting in the deaths of some 10,000 gay men and the incarceration and even castration of many thousands more. Some 300,000–400,000 Germans deemed carriers of hereditary defects were forcibly sterilized; some 150,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans considered “unworthy of life” were murdered. Germans capable of bearing racially valued children were denied access to contraception and abortion and rewarded for having large families; pregnant female foreign workers were often forced to have abortions to prevent the birth of undesired children and loss of workdays.

Nothing remotely so horrific is on the illiberal agenda, but the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures.

The domestic agenda of Trump’s illiberal democracy falls considerably short of totalitarian dictatorship as exemplified by Mussolini and Hitler. But that is small comfort for those who hope and believe that the arc of history inevitably bends toward greater emancipation, equality, and freedom. Likewise, it is small comfort that in foreign policy Trump does not emulate the Hitlerian goals of wars of conquest and genocide, because the prospects for peace and stability are nevertheless seriously threatened. Escalating trade wars could easily tip the world economy into decline, and the Trump administration has set thresholds for peaceful settlements with Iran and North Korea that seem well beyond reach.

It is possible that Trump is engaged in excessive rhetorical posturing as a bargaining chip and will retreat to more moderate positions in both cases. But it is also possible that adversarial momentum will build, room for concessions will disappear, and he will plunge the country into serious economic or military conflicts as a captive of his own rhetoric. Historically, such confrontations and escalations have often escaped the control of leaders far more talented than Trump.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 1 year

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“Among present-day political parties, the Socialists, and notably the German Social Democratic Party, especially in its early years and around the end of the last century, made extensive use of symbols as a means of recruitment and of encouragement to active membership. The Red Flag, the carnation in the buttonhole, and the term ‘‘comrade” are symbols that have played an important part in the history of the Socialist movement. It is true that as time passed the Social Democratic Party, and especially its leaders, became more and more respectable; it grew ashamed of its earlier sentimental explosions, and considered symbolism a game for children; its leaders no longer let themselves go except in the accumulation of evidence and statistics and in economic theory and history and the like. If ever they returned for a moment to their old emotional propaganda, once used with such skill, they made such tame and ineffective use of it that it was robbed of its appeal.

The new style was in conformity with the new theory: it was believed that the whole mechanism of the world was simply a series of economic operations, and that men were simply the pieces in a game of chess, identical automata, furnished with digestive apparatus and not much else that mattered, and reacting only to economic agents. It was said that everything followed a natural and inevitable course: the whole world was becoming industrialized; overproduction and unemployment, the inevitable consequences of the capitalist chaos, produced a crisis; the “fuel” for the “automata” ran short; the automata “rebelled”; and every four years, when a button was pressed that sent them to the ballot-box, they voted in increasing numbers for the advanced parties. At last the end so patiently awaited, the 51 per cent, of the total vote, would be attained, the era of Socialism would begin, and then the jugglers with statistics, having completed the necessary democratic formalities, would proceed to give the automata a happy existence.

The practical conclusion to be drawn from this theory was : “Discipline! Keep cool! We shall reply to our opponents with our votes, ten days after they have slapped our faces!” This was the classic reply given by the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party in Berlin on July 20, 1932, the fatal day on which that party signed its own death sentence by tamely submitting to von Papen’s bluff. On that day von Papen, Chancellor of a "national Government” about to go to the polls, forcibly removed the Socialist Government of Prussia.

For this ignorance of modem physiological data concerning the science of life and of man, this habit of considering man as an automaton, reacting only to the agency of economic factors, this persistent failure to take account of the realities of human nature and its nervous mechanisms, this stubborn fidelity to manifestly inadequate dogmas, a bitter price has had to be paid. In spite of all the prophecies concerning the securing of the famous 51 per cent, of the votes, prophecies which were not so far from fulfillment, the Socialist parties of the whole world, in spite of the important trump cards in their hands, have suffered defeat after defeat. Their Fascist opponents, the last descendants of capitalism in its death throes, men without human ideals and without any well-defined economic programme, found means of setting the masses in motion and of administering shocks to the great democracies, frequently even wresting power from them.

How has this sort of thing become possible? The reply is plain: the opponents of the democratic governments were not wedded to mistaken dogmas; they had an intuitive comprehension of the true nature of man, and acted upon it in politics. It is true that their political aims are absurd and actually anti-human; but they met with success because the Socialists were incapable of making use of the only weapon that was of any real use at the time, that of propaganda; or, if they made any use of it, did so unwillingly and half-heartedly.”

- Serge Chakotin, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1940. p. 94-96.

#serge chakotin #fascism #anti-fascism #sozialdemokratische partei deutschlands #propaganda #political symbolism #social democracy #political science #eiserne front #nsdap #mass politics #mass mobilization #electoral politics #democracy #crisis of the weimar republic #weimarer republik #weimar germany #gravediggers of german democracy

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Browning, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, specializes in the origins and operation of Nazi genocide. His 1992 book Ordinary Men, a close examination of how an otherwise unremarkable German police battalion evolved into an instrument of mass slaughter, is widely seen as one of the defining work on how typical Germans became complicit in Nazi atrocities.

Browning’s essay covers many topics, ranging from Trump’s “America First” foreign policy — a phrase most closely associated with a group of prewar American Nazi sympathizers — to the role of Fox media as a kind of privatized state propaganda office. But the most interesting part of his argument is the comparison between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg, the German leader who ultimately handed power over to Hitler. Here’s how Browning summarizes the history:

We are living through a period of serious threat to American democracy. And Browning’s essay, a serious piece by a serious scholar, shows that it’s not at all alarmist to say so.

Original Source -> A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany

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elizabethleslie7654 · 7 years

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Orwellian Escalation and the German Election

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Germans voted for stability today. That means the continuation of a disturbing situation.

by Jay Lorenz

Today, Germans headed to the polls to choose to their new parliament. This election has the feel, not of a major event, but of a minor procedural ceremony. The policies will remain the same. The elites will remain the same. Due to an extreme left-wing politics and an authoritarian regime, Germany is evolving into a repressive security state engaged in war against its own people. The two biggest parties are Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) headed by Martin Schulz. Of these two major candidates for chancellor, one, Merkel, unilaterally made the decision to turn Germany into an Islamic country within three generations through her immigration policies. The other is a Jewish-German Israeli loyalist who has said, “For me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.” Neither cares at all for the interests of Germans, instead plotting schemes to pilfer their resources and give them to others. According to exit polls, Merkel is poised to easily win her fourth chancellorship. Regardless, Germany will continue to be controlled by a hostile elite which actively works against its national interest. The government’s anti-German attitude, mass censorship, and psychological manipulation give modern Germany a dystopian aura.

During the campaign, Germans have been bombarded with propaganda from their government. The only real alternative to the current regime, Alternative for Germany (AfD), has been ruthlessly attacked and branded as the new Nazi party. On Friday, Schulz called them the “gravediggers of democracy.” AfD is the only major party which opposes mass immigration and supports the continuation of German culture—stances which the current government does not tolerate. Promisingly, AfD looks to be the third largest party in the election, which would make it the largest opposition party after the Christian Democrats and Socialists likely form a coalition. However, all other parties in the national parliament have declared that they will refuse to work with AfD, as it enters the Bundestag for the first time.

In addition to smearing the opposition, the German government has taken a page out of the Democrats’ book by raising the specter of Russian influence in the election. Hans-Georg Maassen, president of Germany’s domestic security agency, has said that his agency has stopped phishing attacks directed at Merkel, and that “Our counterpart [in Russia] is trying to generate information that can be used for disinformation or for influence operations.” Early in the campaign, Merkel brought up the possibility that Russia could influence the election: “We are already, even now, having to deal with information out of Russia or with internet attacks that are of Russian origin or with news which sows false information. . . it may be that this could also play a role during the election campaign.”

Now that polling numbers show the election to be well in hand for Merkel, they have gradually backed off the claims. They contend that, of course, there was Russian influence, but not enough to worry about—this time. It’s hard not to think that if AfD were fifteen points higher in the polls, the Russians would have “hacked the election.” If AfD continues to rise in the polls for the next election, we may hear that it is due to Kremlin assistance.

These election tactics just scratch the surface of the German government’s operations. Germans have been attacked on a psychological level for decades through a program of brainwashing and mental abuse.

Central to the plot are the narratives of White guilt and collective guilt. This is being pushed in all White countries—our ancestors were racists guilty of history’s greatest crimes. Whites are born with the original sin of Whiteness, handed down to them from their evil ancestors. Whites must atone, it is said, by surrendering territory and resources to non-Whites whom they have historically wronged. Germany, because of its World War II past, is uniquely vulnerable to those arguments. The blood of the Nazis, the most evil people who ever lived, is pulsing through the veins of Germans. Now, they are told, they have the opportunity to redeem themselves by giving Germany to non-Whites. The erasure of German culture and people is a moral good.

Along with this, Germany is one of the most censored countries in the West. There is a ban on NSDAP symbols and questioning the government’s official narrative on World War II. A new law fines social networking sites up to $56 million if they fail to remove illegal “hate speech” content within 24 hours. By “hate speech” the German government means any posts which contain factual information about migrants or are critical of Angela Merkel. Although the German courts decided not to ban the country’s farthest right-wing party, the National Democratic Party of Germany, earlier this year, they were not allowed to assemble for a peaceful event on New Year’s Eve 2016-17 to protest the assault of over 1,000 women there the previous New Year’s Eve. The German court decided not ban NPD, not because it is constitutionally protected, but because the party is not large enough to pose a serious threat.

This is a country where simply investigating the past has been made illegal. Old women are thrown in jail for their historical opinions. Germar Rudolf was sentenced to prison for publishing a chemical analysis of the Auschwitz gas chambers.

The German government also institutes an inverse morality, where good and evil have switched spots. Nationalism is taboo, but Sharia patrols are allowed. Patriots are fined and threatened with jail for voicing concern about migrants, while those very migrants are raping German women with impunity. Germany is being invaded, and it is illegal to fight back.

The foundation is laid for a much more extreme repression of Germans. A system is in place to keep them subdued. A narrative is in place to give moral superiority to an invading population which is set to become the majority. What kinds of atrocities are in store for the future? The situation of White South Africans always comes to mind when thinking of the fate of a hated White minority. A future like theirs is bleak.

AfD’s despicable Nazi ad, which reads, “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.”

Already, a massive demographic transition is underway—40% of children under five are not German. Many more are coming. The erasure of Germans is being encouraged at the highest levels. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble called for German women to mix with male Arabs and Africans, otherwise Germany would head towards “degenerating in inbreeding.” An AfD advertisement encouraging Germans to have children has been attacked as racist—the very idea of German children existing in the future is a source of contention in the country. Jewish-German politician Grego Gysi has referred to ethnic Germans as “Nazis” and celebrated the fact that they are dying off, claiming that they must replace themselves with migrants due to the sins of the Nazi years:

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Islam is peace. Diversity is strength. Germans must be replaced.

An Orwellian state is forming in the heart of Europe.

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