Like Western civilization, international law would be a very good idea (apologies to M Gandhi)

The most fascinating book I read in 2025 was Phillipe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity". By way of his gripping, intimate story of some of the human flotsam thrown about in the violent chaos of Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Sands interrogates the development of our contemporary understandings of international law.

For my generation of Americans which came of age when Central Europe -- Ukraine, Hungary, what was then Czechoslovakia, what was then Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, much of Germany -- were barely visible behind the Iron Curtain erected by Soviet Russia, it is not obvious that this region was once the heart of European civilization. But it was. And then, what we call World War I, (functionally 1914 through 1920 or so) tore up and rearranged the state entities that had ruled and organized this part of Europe. After that war, violence and chaos continued. The Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated into unstable nationalist successor states; in Russia, the Soviets overthrew the tsar and fought a wide-ranging civil war that leached westward. Individuals were tossed about between city and country, between morphing national states and nationalities, and among competing intellectual and political influences. 

Much of this human upheaval Sands traces by chasing down evidence about the lives of four individuals whose ideas and fates continue to shape international law today. All lived in or passed through what is known today as Ukrainian Lviv, but which in this period was named Lemberg, Lvov, and then Lwow before the contemporary Ukrainian state took its current form. (Yes, Vladimir Putin is still seeking undo Ukraine's claim to national status which emerged in this period. )

Sands' characters are: 

• Hersch Lauterpacht, professor of international law, born in August 1897 in the small town of Zolkiew, a few miles from Lemberg, to which the family moved in 1911. ... In 1923, he married Rachel Steinberg in Vienna, and they had one son, Elihu, who was born in Cricklewood, London. 

• Hans Frank, a lawyer and [German Nazi] government minister, was born in Karlsruhe [Germany], in May 1900. ... In August 1942, he spent two days in Lemberg, where he delivered several speeches. [He was executed 1946 after being tried at Nuremberg for presiding over the Eastern European death camps.] 

• Rafael Lemkin, a prosecutor and lawyer, was born in Ozerisko near Bialystok, in June 1900. ... In 1921, he moved to Lwow. He never married and had no children.

• Leon Buchholz [grandfather of the author] was born in Lemberg in May 1904. ... He married Regine "Rita" Landes in Vienna in 1937, and a year later their daughter, Ruth, who is [Sands'] mother, was born there.

Sands knew little of the lives of these four when he began the project that became this book. All contributed through actions and their intellectual contributions to his professional career as one of the most distinguished international lawyers of our day.The book is the story of his investigations into their lives, of finding survivors from their families and associates who knew the men, and unraveling who lived and who died as the Nazis tore apart European civilization.

The book is a compendium of fascinating, very contingent stories. Luck played a huge role in who made it through war and tyranny and who was murdered amid the turbulent chaos.

• • • 

And, in the midst of Sands' tale of these main characters, he takes a charming detour to recount the exploits of one person otherwise lost to history: "Miss Tilney of Norwich."

Who was Miss Tilney?" I asked my mother. 

... she said, "I think she was the woman who brought me [as an infant] from Vienna to Paris in the summer of 1939," insisting there was no more information. ...

Sands was not content to leave the question of Miss Tilney there. He chased around Europe and beyond, finding additional stories of the mysterious English woman who somehow managed to hide or facilitate the escape of a few Jewish people and others at risk from the Germans in turbulent wartime Europe. He never completely uncovered her motivation for this dangerous project which could have easily cost her her life. Perhaps she adhered to a warped Christian theology about bringing on the apocalypse; perhaps she just knew it was the right thing to do. She died in 1974, still unrecognized publicly, in a Florida retirement community. Yet Sands owes his own life to her rescue of his infant Jewish mother.

• • •

Ultimately this book consists of Sands, one of the worlds' current most eminent human rights lawyers, trying to sort out the conflict between the legal "crimes against humanity" edifice that Hersch Lauterpacht brought to the British delegation at Nuremberg and the novel notion of "genocide' invented and advocated by Rafael Lemkin to the American legal delegation at that tribunal.

The most succinct description of this conflict between adjacent legal frameworks that I've seen comes, in our own moment, from M. Gessen, written in the context of reporting on the attempts by legal NGOs, humanitarian organizations and some nations to discern how Israel's murderous campaign against the people of Gaza should understood. She describes the competing legal notions like this:

... International law makes two key distinctions between genocide and the broader category of crimes against humanity. One difference involves intent: Crimes against humanity are crimes of disregard for human life, while genocide is a crime of hatred against a specific group. The other difference involves the way the world is obligated to respond: Under existing law, other countries need not prevent crimes against humanity from occurring, but the Genocide Convention does require other countries to prevent genocide. ...  

• • •

Sands affirms the value of both legal frames and describes a history of human rights advocates leaning in one direction or the other. 

 

At the Nuremberg trials which led to the execution of Hans Frank and other leading Nazis, "crimes against humanity" took center stage. But later Rafael Lemkin's coinage, "genocide," gained adherents, led by the founders of the United Nations, including especially Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Sand ponders deeply about the two ways of looking at the horrors people and nations inflict on each other. As a practitioner of international law, he tries to come to terms with their implications.

... An informal hierarchy has developed. In the years after the Nuremberg judgment, the word genocide gained traction in political circles and in public discussion as the "crime of crimes," elevating the protection of groups above that of individuals. Perhaps it was the power of Lemkin's word, but as Lauterpacht feared, there emerged a race between victims, one in which a crime against humanity came to be seen as a lesser evil. That was not the only unintended consequence of the parallel efforts of Lauterpacht and Lemkin. 

Proving the crime of genocide is difficult, and in litigating cases I have seen for myself how the need to prove the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as the Geneva Convention requires, can have unhappy psychological consequences. It reinforces the sense of solidarity among the members of the victim group while reinforcing negative feelings toward the perpetrator group. The term "genocide" with its focus on the group, tends to heighten a sense of "them" and "us," burnishes feeling of group identity, and may unwittingly give rise to the very conditions that it seeks to address: by pitting one group against another it makes reconciliation less likely. 

I fear that the crime of genocide has distorted the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, because the desire to be labeled a victim of genocide brings pressure on prosecutors to indict for the crime. For some, to be labeled a victim of genocide becomes "an essential component of national identity' without contributing to the resolution of historical disputes or making mass killings less frequent. It is no surprise that an editorial in a leading newspaper, on the occasion of the centenary of Turkish crimes against Armenians, suggested that the word "genocide" may be unhelpful, because it "stirs up [defensive] national outrage rather than the sort of ruthless examination of the record the country needs."

Yet against these arguments. I am bound to accept the sense of group identity is a fact. ... "Our bloody nature," the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote ... "is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are." It seems that a basic element of human nature is that "people feel compelled to belong to groups and, having joined, consider them superior to competing groups." 

This poses a serious challenge for our system of international law confronted by a tangible tension: on the one hand, people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other hand the recognition of that fact by the law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups, by reinforcing the sense of group identity. ...

Sands could not and does not resolve the tension in his own mind. He sought to understand the two men who represented the two approaches. That quest led him into his own history and how he understands his own career as a human rights litigator. But he arrived at no clean conclusion:

... I [have] wondered ... whether I was closer to the ideas of Lauterpacht or Lemkin, or stood equidistant between them or sat with them both. Lemkin would probably have been the more entertaining dinner companion, and Lauterpacht the more intellectually rigorous conversationalist. The two men shared an optimistic belief in the power of law to do good and protect people and the need to change the law to achieve that objective. Both agreed on the value of a single human life and on the importance of being part of a community. They disagreed fundamentally, however, on the most effective way to achieve the protection of those values, whether by focusing on the individual or the group.

Lauterpacht never embraced the idea of genocide. To the end of his life, he was dismissive, both of the subject and, perhaps more politely, of the man who concocted it, even as he recognized the aspirational quality. Lemkin feared the separate projects of protecting individual human rights, on the one hand, and protecting groups and preventing genocide, on the other, were in contradiction. It might be said the two men cancelled each other out. 

... I saw the merits of both arguments, oscillating between the two poles, caught in an intellectual limbo.

Nothing is easy about trying to envision an international legal order based in justice. Today we watch the Trump regime tear up American fealty to the long standing law of the sea by killing men already drowning, a legal dictate that predates both human rights and genocide law .

 

Bob Dylan sang: "to live outside the law you must be honest." This is not an honest time.

Hate is not healthy for living beings ...

The particular anguish felt and expressed by people who come from the Right and have left those precincts out of disgust with Donald Trump sometimes moves me deeply. Maybe I'm a sucker. But there is something wrenching about observing people who feel the need to repudiate much of their own history. I could weep.

Peter Wehner, speech writer to several Republican presidents past and a serious evangelical Christian, has that effect on me. The current loathsome sentiments with which the Orange Baby Man has responded to the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, by their own son inspired Wehner to speak out again on Trump's effect on many in his own tribe. 

Trump’s Inferno of Hate Is Intensifying

... When a man with Trump’s personality feels caged in, when he feels besieged and abandoned and begins to lose control of events, he becomes more desperate and more dangerous. 

...Trump sets the pace, and his apparatchiks follow. Many of them have gained power and made money dumping toxic sewage into our civic water supply. But their devotion comes at a personal cost. Those who relish cruelty, who take special delight in dehumanizing others, are engaging in self-harm of a certain kind. “When we desecrate the divinity of others,” the author Brené Brown wrote, “we desecrate our own, and we betray our humanity.”

“Those who are kind benefit themselves,” the author of Proverbs put it, “but the cruel bring ruin on themselves.”

At No Kings march in San Francisco.

... Trump is president mainly because of the early and undying support he has received from white evangelical Christians and fundamentalists, not all of them but most of them. They stand with him to this very day, to this very hour, to this very second—not on his every utterance but on the moral arc of his presidency.

Many of the people who claim to follow Jesus are instruments of a merciless leader and a merciless movement. They have chosen their political loyalties over their faith, even while using the latter to validate the former. There is something morally twisted and discrediting in this.

In the season of the Donald, we're all at risk for allowing ourselves to be morally twisted. Ain't worth it.

How soon will the rats start to jump?

Are we getting to the stage of the Trump regime when we might begin seeing preparation for a rat exodus? The vermin that jump off a sinking ship, that is. It seems early, but there's evidence.

Trump's White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, gave a series of tell-all interviews to a reporter for Vanity Fair, Chris Whipple. Peter Baker at the New York Times (gift) provided a summary of these with some additions of his own.

Wiles here comes off as either ignorant, or stupid, or afraid of the consequences to herself of the bad company she's keeping. I doubt she's either of the first two -- but her behavior here carries a strong whiff of the last. Above all, she insists the crimes of the administration come from her boss, not from her.

Ms. Wiles described her own reservations about certain policies in real time to Mr. Whipple, author of a well-regarded book on White House chiefs of staff, even as debates raged inside the administration. She said she urged Mr. Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters from Jan. 6, 2021, which he did anyway. She unsuccessfully tried to get him to delay his major tariffs because of a “huge disagreement” among his advisers. And she said the administration needed to “look harder” at deportations to prevent mistakes. 

But she did not complain about being overruled and at various points said she “got on board” with the eventual decisions. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.” 

... Ms. Wiles does not view her role as constraining Mr. Trump. Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far.

This is someone who knows she is part of a crew that seems to be thieving and murdering for fun and profit. Wiles has some regrets, but mostly she hangs back and criticizes cautiously.

Mr. Musk’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development including its lifesaving aid to impoverished people around the globe upset Ms. Wiles. “I was initially aghast,” she told Mr. Whipple. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to U.S.A.I.D. believed, as I did, that they do very good work.” 

Mr. Musk’s approach was “not the way I would do it.” She said she called Mr. Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalled telling him. She said that Mr. Musk was a disrupter. “But no rational person could think the U.S.A.I.D. process was a good one. Nobody.” 

She offered no objection to Mr. Trump’s saber rattling against Venezuela and bombing of boats carrying alleged drug traffickers, suggesting that regime change against President Nicolás Maduro was Mr. Trump’s real goal. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

Oh yeah, and then there are those pesky migrants under assault by the Department of Homeland Security's new posse of masked thugs. Wiles has misgivings ...

Ms. Wiles expressed misgivings about how the roundup of immigrants has been carried out at times. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she said. Criminals should be deported, she added. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” When two mothers were arrested and deported with their children after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings, she said, “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

Josh Marshall sees successful guile in what Wiles chose to get spread around by Vanity Faire and Baker: 

If I’m not mistaken, Wiles seems to have tried to warn Trump off of his wildest and most malevolent actions. She tried. And she wants us to know she tried.

Well maybe. Maybe she's just trying to look less complicit. But I will not be surprised if she and other smarter Trump enablers are getting an inkling that one of these days there may be a personal cost from enabling Trump's criminal initiatives.

Just as the Wiles story took over the news, at the New Yorker, editor Michael Luo published History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along. He writes about several lawyers who've left the Justice Department, refusing to violate professional standards. 

He recounts the story of the internment of Japanese-ancestry residents of the West Coast at the outbreak of World War II and how history has judged the high government officials who did that dirty deed -- and mostly privately knew better. 

... Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly. ...

Luo believes that people choosing to carry out the Trump Administration's crimes may learn they've lost themselves in pursuit of not much more than permanent infamy.

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her.  

Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” 

For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now.

On Bondi Beach: in the land of “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.”

Human rights defender Jay Kuo managed to write something sensible and even a little useful about this latest demonstration of the power of hate, of antisemitism, combined with firearms.

The urge to collectively blame and punish
Nowadays when we learn about a mass shooting, every minority community makes the same silent prayer: “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.” We’ve grown used to this because we understand what typically happens in the wake of a violent act committed by any brown or black skinned, immigrant, trans or Muslim individual: condemnation of every other member of that community. ...

Been there, done that ... was the latest culprit somebody queer? Or left leaning? Or perhaps Black or Brown? Will some authoritative "they" make this an excuse to come after me or my friends? 

So many of us have to carry that instinctive reaction. I bet a majority of Americans had that thought in the summer of 2024 when some white kid took a potshot at Donald Trump, nicking his ear.

Kuo goes on, dissecting how we frame mass violence by individual perps:

... In the case of the Bondi Beach killings, it was another Muslim man, Ahmed al-Ahmed who, out of sheer bravery and thanks to his training and background in law enforcement, disarmed one of the killers, saving untold lives. Al-Ahmed is the son of refugees and a father of two; to counter the rank Islamophobia surrounding the attack, many are understandably uplifting his story and heroism as a counterexample.

While it’s important to recognize that there are also heroes within a targeted community, too, it is a strange and likely fruitless point to argue with the haters. As one commentator aptly noted, “You’d think that a Muslim man on Bondi Beach committing one of the most heroic acts ever caught on camera might dispel some of the otherwise inevitable racist rhetoric. But it won’t.”

That’s because such examples are up against systemically ingrained beliefs. When a white mass shooter is taken down by a white officer or bystander, we never focus on their race or religion. This only happens with ethnic, religious or sexual minorities—because our brains are wired to accept that minority communities are somehow responsible for the acts of any one of them, while whites are always absolved of any guilt by association.

This requires a bit of unpacking. What it means is that society still views, and tacitly accepts, that minorities are “all the same” and capable of whatever any one of them has done, while whites in the majority are deserving of individualized consideration and justice and are innocent until proven guilty.

... We must remain vigilant over and vocal about opposing calls for collective punishment that are steeped in animus and prejudice. 

Most people still don’t even realize what it is when [that's] happening. That needs to change, or we will forever be in the land of “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.”

I'd love to live in a country where, when someone murders someone, most of us don't have wonder -- “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.” We'll have to carry that fear as long as we make weapons of war so readily available to people, still mostly men, who, for whatever reasons, lack inner constraints on violence. And as long as we unconsciously assume that "they" -- those people who are different -- are an undifferentiated mass which can be collectively blamed and despised.

Sudan and us

Erudite Partner has attempted something nearly impossible in her latest article for the aggregation site, TomDispatch: she's tried to alert us to the ongoing agony of the civil war in Sudan where massacre and atrocity are the seemingly unending reality. 

This horror is not in front of us every day. Our media have pretty much given up on making it salient. This conflict is complicated; the warring parties include both local combatants and meddling foreign powers. There's a racial element, Arabs fighting Black Africans. For once, our own country is not the most significant international interloper. Yet as a result of Elon Musk's chainsaw to USAID, Donald Trump killed off our country's contributions to relief efforts. Millions of Sudanese are displaced; millions are without homes or livelihood. Millions are starving and hundred of thousands of women and children are dying in refugee camps.

And the trajectory in Sudan (and Algeria and Egypt) where militaries with their own agendas fight it out to the detriment of the civilian society should point to a warning to us all. This is what happens when a social order breaks down and the men with guns take what they can grab.

Displaced people take rest on the road from Darfur to Chad, where hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees have fled since the onset of the war. | 2025 © Jérôme Tubiana/MSF

When I looked for photos of Sudanese refugees to illustrate a post about the E.P.'s article, Surprising Lessons for the U.S. Resistance to Trump In Sudan’s Recent History, I looked for pictures from international aid agencies. Those are the westerners who are there alongside the Sudanese; the agencies want us to see what the world is ignoring. Seeing the pictures left me weepy -- but not because the horrors were so awful or novel. I've seen all too many pictures of maimed and starving children. But because images from Sudan, images of Sudanese women and children, seem so terribly beautiful. I've included one here.

The rich world has turned away from all this suffering. Does our willing ignorance bode well for the endurance of all our own societies? Modernity means we can see if we choose; how numb have we become?

Where are we now? A precipice of violence or a better season?

As we approach the end of 2025, I think we can begin to believe that the Trump regime has lost most of its democratic (small "d") legitimacy. And also, some of its momentum. Sure, the Big Baby Man won the election in 2024, barely. But as for leading a government "deriving ... just powers from the consent of the governed" by way of that victory, his time seems to be running out. His polls are falling; Trump's approval is dropping into the low 40-high 30 percent range. In 2025, voters have elected Democrats, of multiple stripes, just about anywhere they can, from a mayor of New York, to governors in New Jersey and Virginia, to flipping 21 percent of all the GOP-held state legislative seats that were on the ballot this off-year. 

Americans don't like what the Republicans and MAGA are offering. Prices did not magically drop when Trump took office. In fact, prices for food, housing and electricity are rising; for many, health insurance in also way up. Very few people voted for masked thugs kidnapping their neighbors; the more people see of Stephen Miller's mass deportation agenda, the less they like it. And then we have to ask, why is the regime drowning small boats and their crews at sea and threatening to attack Venezuela?

Citizens all over the country are finding their resistance legs. For awhile last spring, many of us felt swept off our feet by Trumpism triumphant. No longer. Resistance is real.

In addition to the big marches, weekly vigils, and day-in, day-out support for neighbors under threat, a couple of biggish nodes of resistance are active online and making, if not yet a difference, at least one hell of an impeding fuss.

I want to highlight two, accessible to us all wherever we live:

• At Hopium Chronicles, Simon Rosenberg leads national weekly online gatherings of people he calls "proud, plucky patriots" who work, most remotely, on winnable Democratic campaigns, who keep their Congresscritters of both parties on notice with calls and meetings, and who are advancing local resolutions from local elected authorities denouncing the Trump regime's corrupt anti-democratic aberrations. The vibe is FDR-WWII-era popular activism; these people believe in the possibility of this country and don't quit.

• Indivisible has been around since the first Trump era. The organization claims over 2800 (!!) local chapters and holds a huge weekly online organizing meeting in which the founders,  Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, discuss real projects like how to assemble and participate in mass protests, what boycotts might work, how activists with different priorities might work with each other, and how to navigate the inevitable Democratic primary contests of 2026. This is a fully modern attempt to build an effective school of participatory democracy which seems to be meeting the moment.  

And that's not all that has sprung up in response to Trump, just a couple of big ones! Labor unions, churches, professional associations, even some non-profits, have bestirred themselves under threat of extinction. It's not everyone, and it's certainly not so many of our formal leaders in business and politics as should be resisting, but it's a lot of people. So many are doing so much in their own ways!

Students of resistance (yes, there are people who study this sort of thing; it's probably fair to consider me a practitioner) offer what seem several useful frames for the moment:

* M Gessen derives this chilling admonition from her interviews with Israelis resisting their own genocidal Israeli government: "To be a good citizen of a bad state, one has to do scary things." What specifically that might imply here and now we don't know yet, beyond popular resistance to the ICE thugs. But having implanted Trump as the government, we have no reason to expect it will not be applicable. This is very likely to get worse before it gets better as the Trump regime feels its grip slipping. More violence is likely. Courage is required.

 

* Scot Nakagawa is another longtime practitioner and student of activism who offers what seems practical advice for this moment;   

The strategic imperative is staying in the fight. Not just continuing to exist, but actively contesting power through every available channel: courts, elections, mass mobilization, economic pressure, and international solidarity. Competitive authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to sustained, strategic opposition precisely because they maintain democratic forms. Those forms can be exploited by movements that understand the terrain. ...

* But what do we want? What's all this for? Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence has some prescriptions:

 ... we need to find our offensive footing. “No Kings” is the “no” message. We need to find the “positive” articulation of our demands.

I suspect we’ll land close to a message that’s like “freedom for all.” We need to assure each other that we are not leaving each other behind — that it’s all of us, or none. We’ll likely find mass action around issues that impact everyone: health care for all, housing for all, security for all, affordability for all. 

Finding unified demands organically will help us move towards mass collective action. Developing new skills will also be critical. We need strike schools, jury nullification trainings, election protection operations and mutual aid.  

And organizing is critical too. A mass action doesn’t start on social media alone. It happens when relationships are strengthened and even built with people we haven’t organized with yet. Trust must grow and people need to be ready to improvise. Major strikes don’t happen because they are planned, per se — they respond to unanticipated moments.  

Last, we must stay ready and not assume that because Democrats won the elections this [fall], we’re safe. Trump has made clear his plan to tilt elections until Republican control is inevitable. We have to stay on our game. 

So let’s look out for each other. Let’s care for each other. Let’s fight with everything we’ve got. We can get through this — and we can build something better.

All in all, as good a foundation for resistance as we might hope at the turn of this year! 

A violent season of "self-terrorism" ahead?

It's easy to dismiss Timothy Snyder as some kind of windy crank. But if you go beyond reading his Substack and attend to his enormous body of legitimate academic work (in particular Thinking the Twentieth Century with the late lamented Tony Judt; Bloodlands, a survey of the fraught tale of Central Europe; Black Earth, a survey of the Holocaust across European lands; his Yale University introductory course on Ukraine which he made publicly available) you are encountering someone who knows whereof he speaks.

In this time of Trump's attempted consolidation of power over these United States, Snyder uses his understanding of history to assess our possible trajectories. He sees rising MAGA violence as Trump's power is thwarted by its own stupidity and is visibly reduced by his infirmities. He is worth listening to: 

... If we follow the logic of 1938 to 1939, Trump needs a victorious land war to complete authoritarian regime change at home. But if he tried to fight such a war he would very likely experience a series of humiliations. If he talked about why he was fighting such a war he would get lost in a tangle: supporting democracy in Venezuela by force while opposing it in America by force is not a position that makes sense or would generate popularity. It is certainly possible that American pressure will serve as an element of a campaign that will cause Maduro to leave. But that outcome, desirable in itself, will have zero political effect in the United States.
 
In short, whatever actually happens in Venezuela, it will not bring Trump the political magic of a quick land war, like Hitler’s in Poland in 1939 or France in 1940. So as we hover amidst the striking similarities to autumn 1938, we might see a difference. The Trump people might be stuck. The Nazis saw the limitations of violence within their own country, and advanced their atrocities by fighting a foreign war.

Without that option, this administration will likely fall back into a cycle of needing (and therefore generating) violence at home. The autumn of 1938, or the autumn of 2025, must be conjured up over and over again. The sequence of weakness, provocation and violence must continue until it works.

Snyder insists we need a novel label for what we are likely to experience:

Its way forward to regime change is what we might call self-terrorism. By this I have in mind a new path to authoritarian regime change, one in which incompetence and dysfunctionality are retooled as a weird and bloody political opportunity. In other words, some of the factors that make a successful foreign war unlikely push towards the strategy of inviting turmoil into the United States and then seeking to use it.

Self-terrorism means dropping one’s guard, provoking others inside and outside one’s own country, waiting for the act of terror, and then exploiting it. The Trump administration has indeed removed barriers to terrorism, thereby creating the conditions for attacks on and within the United States. The resulting violence against one’s own people, can then be used as a pretext to further oppress them. The FBI is gutted and demoralised, its agents away on irrelevant border missions, its counterterrorism capacity diminished. Homeland Security no longer keeps up its database on domestic terrorism. The Department of Defense has disbanded its relevant digital service. Cyber defense as such has essentially been abandoned. The US has been made vulnerable.

If the idea of self-terrorism seems far-fetched, consider some simple tests.

How does the Trump administration react to political killings and domestic terrorism? Does it revive the agencies meant to stop it? No, it does not. Does it speak of fictional conspiracies and blame whole groups, thereby provoking further turmoil and creating a pretext for oppressing Americans? Yes, it does. Does it invite violent responses by escalating the militarization of cities --deploying more troops to DC and also deploying new troops to another city, New Orleans? Yes, it does. 

As the Trump administration uses the horrible attack on troops in Washington to accelerate creeping authoritarianism, we have a terrible confirmation as to why those men and women were deployed in the first place.

Trump and his ghoulish acolytes -- Miller, Vought, Noem, Gabbard, JFK Jr. -- want violence against Americans to justify their seizure of unconstitutional power.

Self-terrorism need not work. We can be alert to the use of the undocumented as an emotional key to a politics of us and them. We can be aware that special forces initially tasked with deportation can evolve into a racial police organization on a national scale. We can see that the opportunistic exploitation of violence is a predictable part of this brand of politics.

The past never repeats, but it does instruct -- and it instructs everyone. The people who want authoritarianism in America know that seizing on the emotions around political belonging can lead to turmoil and regime change. And the people who want democracy in America can see the pattern and halt. Simply being aware of all this is a big part of success. ...

Aspiring American authoritarians will only win if they are allowed to do so. None of this has to happen. Both of these terrible possibilities, land war and self-terrorism, are signs of weakness rather than strength. They can be prevented, but only if we name them, and use their horror as the first step to describe something much better. 

Snyder is attempting to name the assault the Trumpians are mounting on our country. He prescribes mass, non-violent resistance which asserts our rejection of bloody fantasies. For most of us, this is still a country which is capable of being good.

We don't have to go where they want us to go.. 

Friday dog blogging: meet Brody

 

Brody came to visit over Thanksgiving. He has no idea that he's a bit disproportional: tiny legs, big paws, sausage body, huge head, alert and soft furry ears. He pads along after his humans eagerly, though he wasn't made for long walks. He makes the most of his appealing looks, standing by for any stray human food scraps that might be available. Good Brody!

MAGA sells a fiction of unearned ease and familiarity to its people

I genuinely don't understand why liberals/progressives/Democrats run away from defending what's called D.E.I. Diversity, equity and inclusion make this a more livable and interesting country. There are a lot of us; we're not all the same historically and culturally. We have different habits and customs. Lots of these are probably not to your taste or mine. 

But, as Rodney King asked after the L.A. riots touched off in 1992 by the police beating him to a pulp: "Can't we all get along?"

Okay, so I get it that bureaucracies can be stupid and ham-handed in the creation and implementation of policies thought to encourage D.E.I. I get that a society affirming diversity asks adjustments from all of us to accommodate our neighbors. But come on, we're grown ups -- mostly. And ALL our ethical and religious traditions say, at least more often than not, just get over yourself!

When we're taught to act stupidly and against our interests in getting along with neighbors, it's worth asking "who benefits?" Yes, I do see an entire MAGA party encouraging white people, especially men, to get all hot about other people getting the inclusion that they want too. Of course that distracts from real problems. But come on ...

The feminist journalist Jill Filipovic takes a swing at all this which I find convincing: 

... The Trump administration and his MAGA supporters want to do away with the very thing that has made our country exceptional that because they feel uncomfortable around people who aren’t like them. That’s it. They just don’t like people who are different. They don’t like the feeling of being cognitively or emotionally stretched. They don’t want the kind of friction that comes from having to share space with people who don’t think, speak, and live like them.

Conservatives have long mocked liberals for being snowflakes. But being unable to emotionally cope because your neighbors speak a different language is about as fragile as it gets.

“Life should be hard” is not a very good rallying cry. And to be clear, I don’t think that life should be hard. But I think life should be interesting. I don’t think an interesting life is built by engineering the world around you to feel easy and familiar and always in immediate service of your desires.

I think a good life requires trying at things, learning things, taking risks, facing fear, pushing through discomfort, getting hurt, feeling really fucking frustrated. It requires caring for other people even when they make themselves hard to care for, and accepting care even when it doesn’t come in its ideal form. 

As a culture, we are running away from the discomfort friction causes, which means we are running away from deep connection, from cognitive expansion, from the discipline that builds devotion, from creative spark, and from the invisible and painful work of effort and failure and abrasion and confrontation that all make room for that spark to light. 

I'm not ready to give up on trying for her idea of a "good life" because too many people are insecure. We can do better. 

• • •

And some folks are doing better. USA Today reports: 

Costco’s board of directors voted unanimously to recommend shareholders reject an anti-DEI measure, arguing that diverse employees and suppliers fuel innovation in the merchandise it stocks and the services it offers.

More than 98% of Costco shareholders voted down the investor proposal that called for management to investigate the business risks of its diversity initiatives. 

That wasn't so hard, was it? 

 

Tough people around here ...

 

Along the Egdartown-Vineyard Haven Road here on Martha's Vineyard Island, it's hard to miss this opinionated household.

 

Whoever lives here is not taking it.

And they have specific ideas about what to do about it. 

 

Busy today, but I thought the blog could do with some of the local color. 

On governing from an alternative reality

For many years, Harry Litman contributed legal commentary to the Los Angeles Times. He had the biography for the job, as a federal prosecutor, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General during the Clinton administration, and a career in significant litigation thereafter. 

When LAT owner Patrick Soon-Shiong indicated he was bending the knee to Donald Trump, Litman was part of the exodus of respected journalists from the paper, taking his column to a well read Substack. 

Recently, he believes he is seeing the Trump administration retreating to cloud cuckoo land. Think Hegseth, Noem, RFK Jr. and the Orange Daddy himsel. A regime of lies now operates outside consensus reality -- as if a bunch of self-satisfied, out of touch, criminal addicts of power were running the show. I guess they are.

Says Litman: 

This isn’t lying in the usual political sense. It is governing from an alternate reality—one in which legal authority, factual accuracy, and empirical verification are dispensable trifles.

And that is what provokes the shift in reaction among commentators. They are no longer challenging claims as much as expressing bewilderment at the absence of any shared factual universe.

The problem, of course, is that a democracy requires such a universe. Trump has always strained against that baseline, but now he and his Administration increasingly operate in a space where the laws of logic bend and the lines never cross. The rest of us—courts, Congress, journalists, citizens—are left trying to stitch reality back together in a world where the government no longer recognizes it.

How might those of us living in the reality-based community respond:  

The only workable response begins with declining to play by the rules of their distant planet. First, call out the move—not just the mistake. These are not ordinary falsehoods. They are claims wholly untethered from evidence, law, or logic, and the point is to overwhelm, not persuade. Institutions should say plainly when a statement has no factual substrate at all.

Second, refuse to litigate the fabricated premise. Wormhole politics depends on forcing opponents to disprove fantasies—“prove Halligan isn’t authorized,” “prove the survivors weren’t traffickers,” “prove the bomber isn’t morally distinct.” The proper move is to reject the burden-shift and insist that the Administration supply actual evidence before the claim enters serious discourse. 

Holding a government to account is work enough without having to chase its claims across the universe to an entirely different planet. 

The Trump regime uses every power it has seized to prevent us from being able to escape from their lies and their fantasy world. Resistance is refusing to go there, even if seeing the truth is brutal.