Expressions of and Responses to Authoritarian Populism

"The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who exploit fears of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal."
— Sasha Polakov-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy, 2017

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

— Garry Kasparov 

"Populists in power tend to undermine countervailing powers which are the courts, which are the media, which are other parties."
— Cas Mudde, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, 2017

“Every age has its own fascism.”

— Primo Levi

The Challenge of Racism in America

“We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.”
— Barack Obama speaking in Selma on March 7 2015 at the fifth anniversary of the famous march

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their pain."
— James Baldwin

“We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”

W.E.B. Du Bois

— Thomas Miller, South Carolina Congressman, 1895

“If  there was one thing that  South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro  government."

—W.E.B. Du Bois

“Yet, the harsh fact is that in many places in this country, men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right.”

— Lyndon Johnson,Voting Rights Act Address, 1965

The Unsilencing of Women

"Beard’s primary subject is female silence; she hopes to take a “long view on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment”, the better to get beyond “the simple diagnosis of misogyny that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on”. Calling out misogyny isn’t, she understands, the same thing as explaining it, and it’s only by doing the latter that we’re likely ever to find an effective means of combating it. The question is: where should we look for answers? Beard acknowledges that misogyny has multiple sources; its roots are deep and wide. But in this book, she looks mostly (she is a classicist, after all) at Greek and Roman antiquity, a realm that even now, she believes, casts a shadow over our traditions of public speaking, whether we are considering the timbre of a person’s voice, or their authority to pronounce on any given subject.

Personally, I might have found this argument a bit strained a month ago; 3,000 years lie between us and Homer’s Odyssey, which is where she begins, with Telemachus effectively telling his mother Penelope to “shut up”. But reading it in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it seems utterly, dreadfully convincing. Mute women; brutal men; shame as a mechanism for control; androgyny and avoidance as a strategy for survival. On every page, bells ring too loudly for comfort."

— Rachel Cooke, The Guardian November 5, 2017.

The Dream of Political Racial and Economic Equality in South Africa

"There's no such thing here (in South Africa). The facts may be correct but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else. Every inch of our soil is contested, every word in our histories." 
– Rian Malan, The Lion Sleeps Tonight 2012

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

– Nelson Mandela

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

“Having looked the beast in the eye having asked and received forgiveness, let us shut the door on the past and not forget it but to allow it not to imprison us.”

– Archbishop Tutu

Colson Whitehead: The Shredder of Illusions

Colson Whitehead photographed by Chris Close

Most of us do not harbour a benign view of slavery, namely the belief that the owners of slaves were reluctant masters who generally cared for the well being of their human property. There are, however egregious exceptions. In 2016 a curious children's book appeared, A Birthday Cake for George Washington, that portrayed happy slave children baking a cake for the first President, a whitewash of slavery that produced a swift and sharp backlash prompting the publisher to withdraw the book. More disturbing is that Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate for Alabama in the 2018 election and subsequently lost in one of the America's reddest states, publicly stated that America was great when slavery prevailed because black families were kept together, a grotesque misrepresentation of the historical reality when families were frequently and viciously torn apart.

The Challenge to Maintain one's Humanity during and after the Vietnam War

“The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable. But meaning can be found in the individual stories of those who lived through it, stories of courage and comradeship and perseverance, of understanding and forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation.”
 —Peter Coyote, the narrator in The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick  

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

“In terms of content, The Vietnam War, written by the historian Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote, is rich, revelatory, and scrupulously evenhanded. It succeeds in large part by not being reductive or succinct—by being, in fact, rather overstuffed, a lot to take in…. By dint of its thoroughness, its fairness, and its pedigree, The Vietnam War is as good an occasion as we’ve ever had for a levelheaded national conversation about America’s most divisive foreign war. It deserves to be, and likely will be, the rare kind of television that becomes an event.”

— David Kamp, “Why The Vietnam War Is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Most Ambitious Project Yet” Vanity Fair September, 2017.

  

John Musgrave

"There is a family of these witnesses; we never hear the voice of an interviewer. One of the most beguiling is John Musgrave, a Marine so badly wounded in Vietnam that several doctors rated him ‘expected’. He became a drop-out and an alcoholic, a would-be suicide and a protester who is still battling the melodrama of the war and the effects of his wounds. He is now a poet and a spokesman for veterans. We feel his romantic recklessness, as he tries to reconcile what happened to him with what he wished had happened. Another witness, Tim O’Brien (author of Going after Cacciato and The Things They Carried), has been a success in life, but is so anguished still that he has difficulty looking at the camera. Musgrave, on the other hand, stares into the lens as if it were his mirror. He deserves a novel or a movie, and because so many of the witnesses are just as conflicted as he is The Vietnam War acquires the density of a sprawling work of fiction....

This is the point: The Vietnam War isn’t just about the war but the consequences it had for Americans. There is a great deal from the home front here, and while the jukebox of great rock and roll on the soundtrack makes the ordeal seem exciting sometimes, it leaves little doubt that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s – Merrill McPeak’s ‘rivulets’ – were a liberation for a minority and one that left a schism in America still emphatically evident in the 2016 election."
— David Thomson, "Merely an Empire," London Review of Books, September 21, 2017 

Another insightful review can be found in The New York Review of Books  

Perhaps the best drama on Vietnam and the incident that it is based upon that is referenced in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War is the 1989 film, Casualties of War.

"Casualties of War is a film based, we are told, on an actual event. A five-man patrol of American soldiers in Vietnam kidnapped a young woman from her village, forced her to march with them, and then raped her and killed her. One of the five refused to participate in the rape and murder, and it was his testimony that eventually brought the others to a military court martial and prison sentences. The movie is not so much about the event as about the atmosphere leading up to it - the dehumanizing reality of combat, the way it justifies brute force and penalizes those who would try to live by a higher standard....

More than most films, it depends on the strength of its performances for its effect - and especially on Penn's performance. If he is not able to convince us of his power, his rage and his contempt for the life of the girl, the movie would not work. He does, in a performance of overwhelming, brutal power. Fox, as his target, plays a character most of us could probably identify with, the person to whom rape or murder is unthinkable, but who has never had to test his values in the crucible of violence. The movie's message, I think, is that in combat human values are lost and animal instincts are reinforced. We knew that already. But the movie makes it inescapable, especially when we reflect that the story is true, and the victim was real."

— Roger Ebert, August 10, 1989 

This memorial is now thought to be the most successful and beloved public work of our time. It is so simple, so elegant, that it makes its statement without even trying. The long arms of marble enclose us. We see the names of the dead. We are left with our thoughts.

The most arresting scenes in the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision are about the miracle that this memorial was even erected at all—about its opponents, who would have replaced it with something ordinary and mundane.

Today, when the memorial is universally beloved, such men as Pat Buchanan and Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) are not quick to remind you that they fought against it, in ways that do not reflect well on their judgment or taste.... Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, written and directed by Freida Lee Mock, tells the story of how Lin designed the memorial, and how it came to be built. It follows her over the next 14 years, as she matures from an insecure student to a confident professional, and designs other public works, including the Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery, Ala. " 

—Selections from a review by Roger Ebert

"Kathleen Belew’s gripping study of white power, Bring the War Home, as written before the city of Charlottesville became a hashtag, and is largely concerned with activities from the 1970s and ’80s. But it is. Her activists — for indeed, these were activists building a grass-roots movement — consolidated power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is that starting point that hints at the book’s explosive thesis: that the white power movement that reached a culmination with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing emerged as a radical reaction to the war.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is a breathtaking argument, one

 that treats foreign policy as the impetus for a movement that most people view through the lens of domestic racism. But Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, perceives something more in the white power movement than metastasized racism. She sees the malignant consequence of the war, which, she argues, “comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”

— From a review by Nicole Hemmer

"Too many people still think of these attacks as single events, rather than interconnected actions carried out by domestic terrorists. We spend too much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are also connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.

Likewise, too many people think that such shootings are the goal of fringe activism. They aren’t. They are planned to incite a much larger slaughter by 'awakening' other people to join the movement.

The El Paso manifesto, if it is verified, ties the attacker into the mainstream of the white power movement, which came together after the Vietnam War and united Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead and other activists."

—Kathleen Belew, “The Right Way to Understand White Nationalist Terrorism," The New York Times August 4, 2019. 

An Appreciation of Philip Kerr's final novel Metropolis

"Metropolis" by Otto Dix

When the Scottish-born author, Philip Kerr, died of cancer last year at the age of 62, he left behind the manuscript of Metropolis which turned out to be the 14th novel in the Bernie Gunther series. Although he wrote several standalone novels and a children's fantasy series, he will probably best be remembered for the hard-boiled, iconoclastic Berlin detective turned private investigator.

Philip Kerr

The Weimar Republic, specifically 1928 Berlin, is the locale of Metropolis. The novel is a prequel to the series that began thirty years ago with the publication of March Violets set in 1936 Nazi Germany at the time of the Olympics. Interestingly, that time-span roughly matches the aging of the novels' cynical protagonist since Kerr's penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts takes place in 1957. 

  

Metropolis has all the earmarks of  the Bernie Gunther novels: thorough historical research that illuminates rather than overwhelms the plot and characters, a sharp eye for detail, razor-sharp dialogue that will remind readers of Raymond Chandler's, Philip Marlowe, and interior acerbic monologue that is often at odds with his reassuring words that are largely driven by self-interest, at times sheer survival.

The Seduction and Horror of War

President Woodrow Wilson

Siegfried Sassoon

“You will see the effect upon  people. They will acclaim it with enthusiasm; everybody is already looking forward to the first onslaught—so dull have their lives become.

—Herman Hesse, Damian

"One of the most troubling reasons men love war is the love of destruction, the thrill of killing...all you do is move the finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof, in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust."

—William Broyles, "Why Men Love War," Esquire, November 1984, veteran of the Vietnam War

"Oh! What a Lovely War does recreate this time, in a bitter mixture of history, satire, detail, panorama and music.

Especially music. There is something paradoxical in the thought of singing about a war, and yet cheap popular songs often capture the spirit of a time better than any collection of speeches and histories. Miss (Joan) Littlewood (in the 1963 stage production), and (Richard) Attenborough after her, present the war as a British music hall review; there's a lot of smiling up front, but backstage you can see the greasepaint and smell the sweat, and the smiles become desperate, and there begins to be blood.

This sense is captured most tellingly in Maggie Smith's scene. She plays a robust, patriotic broad who lures the young men from the audience to the stage with promises of love and implications of heroic death. But death is reserved for the young, not for the old, and John Mills (as Sir Douglas Haig) stays far behind the lines, studying the front from an observation tower. Meanwhile, politicians, kings and rulers play stupid games of diplomacy and etiquette, and 'acceptable losses' are counted in the hundreds of thousands. But always everyone whistles a happy tune...."

— Roger Ebert, October 30, 1969

Redeeming the Past in Alexi Zentner's Copperhead and Eli Saslow's Rising Out of Hatred

Author Alexi Zenter. (Photo: Laurie Willick, Viking)Add caption

Alexi Zentner's, Copperhead, spins several threads that eventually knit together. Although the President's name is  mentioned only twice, in reference to the Woman's March that occurred shortly after his inauguration, the novel is firmly ensconced in the Trump era where racial and class tensions have been exacerbated. The novel's incendiary language exploits these divisions mirroring the raw rhetoric the President deploys in his rallies and almost daily tweets. There is an incisive exploration of toxic race relations and the stigma associated with being labeled as so-called "white trash." It is also an investigation about the relationship between the alt-right and the religious right in America. Throughout, a teenager navigates through these treacherous landmines, makes a serious mistake and as an adult attempts to address it.

In a gripping third-person narrative relayed in bite-size chapters that

unfolds over a few days, Zentner introduces us to Jessup, a high-school senior living in a small community in upstate New York "where history is everything." Despite being raised by a single mom on a limited income and living in a trailer-park home, Jessup maintains good grades and works at the local movie theatre when he is not hunting to supply food for his family. Perhaps most importantly, he excels at athletics. Even though some of his classmates dismiss him as "born into the wrong family," even a Nazi, he is a standout football player and has the possibility of acquiring an Ivy League football scholarship.

Humanity Challenged: A Thematic Overview

 For the next eight weeks I will be highlighting on this site an overview of talks on the topic "Humanity Challenged" that I will be presenting for Learning Unlimited. Quotations have been sometimes lightly edited and are sourced whenever possible. Most of the longer quotations are linked to the complete article. 

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"People who lack empathy see others as mere objects."
― Baron Simon-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy, 2011

"Hatred is the vice of narrow souls. They feed with all their smallness. They use it as an excuse for their vile tyrannies.”

― Balzac

“Genocide is a process. The Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers. It started with hate speech.”

― Adama Dieng, the UN’s  Special  Advisor on the prevention of Genocide

“We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”
― Michel de Montaigne

"Forgiveness allows us to actually let us go of the pain in the memory. And if we let go  of the pain in the memory we can have the memory but it doesn't control us. I think it's the fact that when memory controls us, we are then puppets of the past."

― Alexandra Asseily, psychotherapist in Lebanon

    Conditions that challenge one’s humanity:

•    A lack of integrity or moral compass, and the inability to       respect and demonstrate empathy for others

•    A desire for revenge or to get even

•    The inability to forgive

•    The willingness to inflict harm on others physically or     emotionally through exploitation, humiliation or ridicule

•    The unwillingness to accept personal responsibility

•    A disregard for the rule of law, a free press and an independent judiciary

The Seduction of Fascism and Responses to it

“So what is fascism, and how is it different from nationalism? Well, nationalism tells me that my nation is unique, and that I have special obligations towards my nation. Fascism, in contrast, tells me that my nation is supreme, and that I have exclusive obligations towards it. I don't need to care about anybody or anything other than my nation. But, well, who ever told you that life was easy? Life is complicated. Deal with it. Fascism is what happens when people try to ignore the complications and to make life too easy for themselves. Fascism denies all identities except the national identity and insists that I have obligations only towards my nation.”

― Yuval Harari, “Why Fascism is so Tempting” a Ted talk 

“The mechanisms of fascist politics all build upon and support one another. They weave a myth of distinction between “us” and “them,” based in a romanticized fictional past featuring “us” and no “them.” and supported by a resentment for a corrupt liberal elite who take our hard-earned money and threaten our traditions.”

― Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

"We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America 'an asylum for the oppressed,' are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss."

― Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 1915

“Judged by accepted canons of statecraft, the white man towered the indisputable master of the planet.”

“The negro, on the contrary, has contributed virtually nothing. Left to himself, he remained a savage…”
― T. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White-Supremacy 1920 

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"Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?...  The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…It’s up to us, who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things… We’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are…and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that.”

— F  Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby must realize that the altruistic ideals 

Isadore Greenbaum 

"His name is Isadore Greenbaum. He’s a Jew, a plumber’s helper from Brooklyn. He rushes onto the stage, beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. He tries to accost the Nazi who is denouncing the 'Jewish-controlled press' and calling for a 'white gentile-ruled' United States. Uniformed storm troopers beat him. Police officers drag him from the stage, pants ripped, arms raised in desperate entreaty. The mob howls in delight.

It’s Feb. 20, 1939. More than 20,000 Nazi sympathizers are packed into Madison Square Garden as Greenbaum attempts to silence Fritz Kuhn, Bundesführer (so-called) of the German American Bund. Greenbaum has been enraged by Kuhn’s demand that the country be delivered from Jewish clutches and “returned to the American people who founded it.” A selection from a powerful column by Roger Cohen in The New York Times