A fascist with a brain bleed

Aaron Rupar is an independent journalist, the pillar of the news site Public Notice. He also happens to live in Minneapolis. 

He writes that yesterday he had other plans for his newsletter, but, as so often is the case, our blubbering bully of a pseudo-president managed to command his attention for his antics. This brief commentary is worth reading in full but here are some summarizing tidbits. 

American embarrassment. Global pariah.

... Donald Trump sounded like a fascist dictator suffering from a brain bleed during his speech yesterday at Davos. It was a national embarrassment even by the lowly standards of modern American politics.

... Put it all together and what we have here is of an out of control wannabe autocrat who’s cognitively impaired, openly racist, and more eager than ever to use force against his perceived foes both at home and abroad. It’s complete madness that this guy has the nuke codes and yet, with the exception of people like [Canadian prime minister] Mark Carney, too few leaders are willing to grapple with it.

... At campaign rallies throughout his political career, Trump has regularly read “The Snake,” a poem about people being taken advantage of because of their credulity.

“‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin, ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,” it goes.

America knew — or should have known — that Trump was a snake before voters committed the world historical blunder of letting him into the White House for a second time. But that’s water under the bridge. Now we have to hope we’re able to survive the venom and endure the unending global humiliation.

... That Trump backed down hours after his Davos speech is a promising sign that financial markets and diplomatic pressure (not to mention the grassroots organizing that’s taking place in the occupied Twin Cities) can still provide something of a check on his desire to carve up the world between strongmen like himself, Putin, and President Xi. But make no mistake — one year in, he and his regime are getting worse.

That’s evident in the streets of Minneapolis, the oil fields of Venezuela, and yesterday on that stage in Davos, which will go down as the site of one of if not the most pathetic presidential speech in history — so far. 

• • •

A friend in the Twin Cities writes from within the occupation:

It’s really impossible to explain to people outside the Cities how dense and aggressive the ICE presence is, in comparison to the metro population. The scale of the violence.

There’s no denying that the cruelty is the point, and that how you feel about what’s happening depends utterly on how you respond to bullying and intimidation. The reason it’s not working here is because Minnesotans really REALLY fucking hate bullies. There is a cultural unity around that, and it may lay dormant most of the time but it sure as hell has been activated now.

We are resisting and obstructing, but it’s awful and scary and heartbreaking and infuriating, and they are targeting our most vulnerable people on purpose. Please make sure that everyone you know knows that.

I should add that I suspect the people of Maine are made of just as tough stuff as the Minnesotans. 

Here's what I know about how the rest of us can help occupied Minnesotans, though there are certainly many other ways. On mutual aid for the people of Minnesota 

There's no point in denying reality. And much harm.

With Donald Trump blustering about at Davos today, my thoughts return to the real international substance of our moment as described by Phillips P. O'Brien, historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The United States has changed sides in the long struggle for decency and democracy against exploitation and tyranny. We may not have been the pillar of righteousness we liked to think ourselves, but we were once not the declared enemies of humane flourishing for the peoples either.

Says O'Brien:  

The importance of the US changing sides stretches far beyond the Russo-Ukraine War. It is a challenge to the survival of liberal democracy and the rule of law itself around the world. It has left other democratic states leaderless and divided. It has emboldened Russia and China and it has made working with them far more attractive a prospect for others. It has upended the world order more than anything else since 1945, with the possible exception of the collapse of the USSR.

Of course not all is lost. Democratic forces have a chance to fight back. As I wrote in this Foreign Affairs piece published in September, the remaining democratic forces that do not want to go down the dark road that the US is now on, can act now to preserve themselves. They still have important reservoirs of strengths. However, before they can use this strength, they must acknowledge the reality of the new world. 

The US has changed sides, is not their friend and in many ways is out to subvert their futures as the US becomes an ally of authoritarians and dictators.

Acknowledging the reality of the new world is the only way to fight it. For this reason there really is only one story that defines 2025. The USA has changed sides. How the rest of the world reacts to that will define the future.  

Let the Europeans do better than we do. Greenland from the Greenlanders!

We could use some truth telling

 

It seems a waste of pixels to post this (from the Guardian UK) but I'm feeling intolerant of foolishness and will not resist. This headline is false, absurd, and based on lies. Why do otherwise semi-sane media continue to play along with the game?

 

There is NO evidence that any party to the war being fought by Ukraine against Russian aggression wants "peace."

• Putin wants to erase Ukraine from the map; it's all Russia in his fantasy.

• Trump wants Russian minerals and whatever additional payoff Putin is offering. Oh yeah -- and a peace prize.

• Ukrainians want Russia to get the hell out of their country and must wander through whatever convoluted byways are required to keep that hope alive. While suffering.

• Europeans wish the whole thing would stop impinging on them; though on alternate Tuesdays they understand Russia threatens them all.

Ukraine is the Spanish Civil War of our era, a messy contest between more-or-less democracy and fascism in which the unfortunate Ukrainians provide a plaground for big bullies.

This time as deadly farce ... 

Remembrance Day reflection

In most of the European world, this day -- November 11 -- is Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. The event commemorated is the silence after four bloody years of the guns on the Western front ending combat there in what we call the First World War. 

That First World War shaped and reshaped modern Europe, destroying empires and unleashing anti-capitalist, nationalist, and democratic forces that had been checked by old regimes. Those of us who observed the collapse of the Soviet Union have seen changes of somewhat comparable magnitude and import -- and those very changes were still part of the backwash of that First World War that is scarcely marked in the US today.

This informational plaque hangs at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, a remarkable institution which seeks to bring to life this formative history. Like the United States, Britain is a multi-racial and consequently multi-historical society where citizens with origins all over the (mostly imperial) world can strive to learn from each other's past.

Perhaps, as we live the collapse of the American world empire facilitated by our greedy madman of a President, we should pause to remember our ancestors who lived a similarly disorienting, murderous transition. It ain't easy or safe living in a collapsing empire ...

International rules against torture breaking down

Russia wants out of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Punishment which it signed onto 1996. 

According to Radio Liberty (thanks to Google translate): 

Putin submitted to the state Duma a draft on the denunciation of the Convention against torture...

After withdrawing from the convention, Russia will no longer be obliged to admit international inspectors to its prisons. Complaints from Russian prisoners to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture will no longer be considered. 

The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) has reported extensive Russian torture of captured Ukrainians.

“Almost every single one of the Ukrainian POWs we interviewed described how Russian servicepersons or officials tortured them during their captivity, using repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions and mock execution. Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence,” said Danielle Bell who heads HRMMU. “Most POWs also recounted the anguish of not being allowed to communicate with their families, and being deprived of adequate food and medical attention.” 

Although the United States has historically been allergic to international treaties which might subject acts by our citizens to international judgement, we signed the analogous United Nations Convention against torture in 1988 and ratified in 1994. 

I doubt somehow doubt that the Trump/Hegseth regime gives a damn about internationally recognized bars to torture. But one hopes most American citizens might.

Checking in on Ukraine's war

Donald Trump may blunder about, mostly just licking Vladimir Putin's ass, and pretending he's ending the war of the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- but as in most things Trump, the reality is elsewhere. And there are multiple reports that indicate that 1) Europe knows it must step up in order to defend itself from the smothering Russian offensive and 2) Ukraine is far more united and able to fight on without much US help than we've been told.

On the first point, Finnish security expert Minna Ålander explains: 

What often escapes the public’s notice – partially because so much is happening and it’s hard to keep track of all the news items – is that Ukraine’s defence industry is being swiftly integrated into the emerging European Defence Industrial and Technological Base (EDIB). Most importantly, it is not just charity but a win-win situation: Ukraine’s self-sufficiency is improved by increased own production and European defence companies get in on the latest innovations from the Ukrainian battlefield. A year ago, in May 2024, the EU hosted the first EU-Ukraine Defence Industries Forum in a series of multilateral defence industrial events that the government of Ukraine launched in 2023. In September 2024, the EU also opened a Defence Innovation Office in Kyiv.

In a proper Orwellian sense, the EU has mobilised €11.1 bn from the European Peace Facility for military support for Ukraine, and has an additional €50 bn Ukraine Facility to bolster Ukraine’s resilience, to support its EU integration process, and de-risk investment in Ukraine. The support is both grant- and loan-based, including a €35 billion loan to be repaid with revenue from the frozen Russian assets. ...

By working together with Ukraine, European companies are not only increasing Ukraine’s own production capacity but also learning directly from Ukraine’s battlefield experience – something that will help Europe not only to replace US capabilities, but to think ahead.

But what of the long suffering Ukrainians, now engaged in a war in which their longtime US backers are changing sides? Because they have no choice -- no chance of national or even personal survival if they back off -- they fight on. The Atlantic reporter Anne Applebaum has made the pilgrimage to Ukraine recently. 

... Ukrainians believe the war will continue, and the prospect no longer scares them. Partly this is because they have no other choice. Unlike the Russians, who could withdraw from the battlefield and go home at any time, the Ukrainians cannot withdraw from the battlefield. If they do, they will lose their civilization, their language, and their freedom. Under Russian occupation, the mayor of Lviv and the journalists at the Lviv Media Forum would end up in prison or dead, just like their murdered and imprisoned colleagues in Russian-occupied Ukraine today.

More to the point, Ukrainians are confident that they can continue fighting, even without the same level of American support. The Ukrainian army is not retaking territory, as it did in the autumn of 2022, nor does it have plans for a major new counteroffensive. But neither is it losing. The tanks and heavy equipment that Ukraine needed from others don’t matter as much as they did two years ago. The Ukrainians still need American intelligence and anti-missile defenses to protect civilians in their cities. They still get weapons and ammunition from Europe. But on the frontline, this conflict has become a drone war, and Ukraine both produces drones—more than 2 million last year, probably twice that many this year—and builds software and systems to run them. In February, a Ukrainian unit deployed the first of what it hopes will be several hundred fighting robots. Last month, a Ukrainian sea drone took down a Russian airplane. One brigade has designed a drone that can reliably take out a Shahed, the Iranian drones that are used to kill Ukrainian civilians.

... The results are visible on the ground. Remember, if you can, the panic that accompanied news reports from Ukraine nine months ago: The city of Pokrovsk was about to fall, a calamity that many believed might precipitate the collapse of the whole front line. But Pokrovsk did not fall. The Russians continue to attack that region: On May 15 alone, Ukrainian soldiers based on the Pokrovsk front line repelled 74 separate assaults and offensive actions. But in recent months, the front line has hardly moved. ...

This is a gift link to Applebaum's story of her visit. Well worth your time.

A vexatious, nightmare interlude

Most of time, historians who want to be taken seriously by their academic peers confine themselves monographs, studying deeply small aspects of big subjects. For example, this study of war financing by the Union during the US Civil War. These make building blocks for grand narratives of the past; it is audacious and usually quite senior practitioners who attempt to offer their readers broad sweeping stories.

This is what economic historian Adam Tooze does in The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. His narrative bridges two episodes which have grabbed most if the available attention in popular 20th century history -- the horrific conflict which was World War I in Europe and the even more horrible sequel of economic collapse, war and fascism in Europe, as well as the definitive end of European global empires.

But what happened in the 1920s? If we have any mental picture at all, it's likely of a mess of little states stumbling to failure in Europe while Prohibition of liquor and crazed dancing of the Charleston captured energies in the United States. That is, an historic void.

Tooze is certain we're missing the significance of that time. The United States, haltingly, came into the leading role in the world its economic dominance implied.

A new order emerged from the Great War that promised, above the bickering and nationalist grandstanding of the new states, fundamentally to restructure relations between the great powers -- Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia, and the United States. It took geostrategic and historical imagination to comprehend the scale and significance of this power transformation. The new order that was in the making was defined in large part by the absent presence of its main defining element-- the new power of the United States. ... The one nation that emerged apparently unscathed and vastly more powerful from the war was the United States. ... Tracing the ways in which the world came to terms with America's new centrality, through the struggle to shape a new order, will be the central preoccupation of this book.

But powerful political movements and nations sought a different path.

... We grasp movements like fascism or Soviet communism only very partially if we normalize them as familiar expressions of the racist, imperialist mainstream of modern European history, or if we tell their story backwards from the dizzying moment in 1940-42, when they rampaged victoriously through Europe and Asia and the future seemed to belong to them. ... the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order. ... This was the terrifying lesson that the insurgents derived from the story of world politics between 1916 and 1933, the story recounted in this book.

Something new had been released between states and peoples by the horrible carnage of 1914-18.

The Great War may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more morally and politically charged -- a crusading victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order. With an American president in the lead, the 'war to end all wars' was fought and won to uphold the rule of international law and to put down autocracy and militarism. As one Japanese observer remarked: "German's surrender has challenged militarism and bureaucratism from the roots. As a natural consequence, politics based on the people, reflecting the will of the people, namely democracy, has, like a race to heaven, conquered the thought of the whole world." ...

... To describe the United States as the inheritor of Britain's hegemonic mantle is to adopt the vantage point of those who in 1908 insisted on referring to Henry Ford's Model T as a 'horseless carriage." The label was not so much wrong as vainly anachronistic. This was not a succession. This was a paradigm shift. ...

Tooze documents why America was unready and unwilling to exercise the stabilizing leadership which the world created by war hoped for and demanded. 

This isn't just about "isolationism;" it is also about America's struggles to stabilize its own internal and financial polity. It required the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal for the United States in the 1930s for the country to find its way internally and then assume the world leadership that its power and money implied.

And so, in addition to the mediocrity of the corrupt Warren G. Harding and silent Calvin Coolidge presidencies, it becomes clearer why the decade of the 1920s has receded from historical memory. If I believe Tooze, and I do, the United States was coming to terms with itself on the verge of jumping atop a truly global role.

How much of history is actually these "in-between" times which subsequent events will show were necessary preparation for what came later? Obviously, this view reads history backward and it a bit loose-brained for many. Still, it is interesting, for example, to try to situate the Obama presidency as such an episode. I guess we'll have to live out more of the sequel to find out.

Info-graphic palooza

I collect these quasi-meaningful info-graphics. Sometimes they go with some topic on which I'm writing. Sometimes they just intrigue me. Busy today, so I'll just share a few:

Click to enlarge. The green areas are growing; the pink areas are losing population.

In general, population growth signals a healthy economy. With freedom of movement across borders in the European Union, including to work, many people are clearly moving west. Nevertheless, when we walked the Camino half a decade ago, we saw plenty to indicate that the westerly Spanish countryside was emptying out.

Click to enlarge. Gerrymandering has its effects.

I was surprised that Illinois (12.3 million) and New Jersey (9.2 million) were the most gerrymandered largish Democratic states. The monster ones, California and New York, have drawn congressional districts that give Republicans a chance; though Dems win most of their seats. Interesting too, that Louisiana and Alabama have been forced by the feds to give their Black population something like a chance to elect a few Congressmembers so they do not appear as rigged for Republicans as the rest of the South.

Click to enlarge

In this moment, people in Pennsylvania who always vote have been trending more and more Democratic. As recently as 2018, the GOP leaners were more numerous in this subset of the electorate. Over the last three cycles, a broad coalition for Dems has formed and increased with each election. It's always important to bring new voters to a coalition, but bringing the existing base out has become central to getting a Democratic win.

Enjoy unpacking these.

No time for cowards and cowardice

On this second anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, Professor Timothy Snyder, a preeminent historian of central Europe, calls on Americans to buck up. This is no time for weakness; weakness is Donald Trump, his captive GOP enablers, and their swindles.

American newspapers instruct us that Biden is old.  If he’s old (goes the thinking), he must be weak; and if he is weak, then we are permitted to give up.  But Biden is not weak.  He is not running away from prison, or from anything else.  He does not act from fear.  He gets work done.  His record is one of the strongest in the history of the American presidency.  And he went to Ukraine with zero military protection.  That was courageous.  No other president has ever done that.

... It is absurd, in such a world, where so much is at stake, where so much is to be won, to speak of our “fatigue” either with the struggle in Ukraine or the struggle for our own democracy.  Doing so is the prologue to a story of weakness, which ends with the victory of the weak man.  When we fall in line behind the fearful, when we forget the “spirit of freedom,” we help the weak men create a politics of fear.  When we obey in advance, we invite the weak man to take power over our souls, which then means power over our politics.

In 2024, a year of war and a year of elections, a year that will test decency and democracy, the weak man wants to see his fear in our eyes.  We will need the courage to admire the courageous, and to say something that might feel risky.  For example: we believe in our values, and we believe in our strength.  Ukraine can win this war, Biden can win this election, and democracy can thrive.

The situation in Ukraine is not all that Ukrainians or their friends might hope it would be. Some of Ukraine's friends are stepping up; Denmark just sent all its artillery ammunition to the embattled country to begin to make up for the shortfall caused by Republican refusal to fund U.S. commitments. But Republican stalling in Congress threatens what that brave people have suffered for and won.

Michael O’Hanlon from the DC thinktank the Brookings Institution evaluated Ukraine's situation. 

Ukraine remains stronger than you might think
... Much has been made of Ukraine’s disappointing 2023 counteroffensive. But given the strength of defenses on both sides, its failure was no huge surprise. Defense is simply stronger than offense at this stage of the war and, because of this, Ukraine might be able to hang on to most or all of the 82 percent of the pre-2014 territory it now holds, even with constrained military supplies. Yet, as the recent loss of Avdiivka demonstrates, Ukraine might struggle in the event of a complete cutoff of U.S. assistance. The pace of setbacks could accelerate with little warning; like Ernest Hemingway’s quip about bankruptcy, defeat could occur gradually, then suddenly.

... there is no reason for fatalistic thinking about Ukraine. It might very well hold on to at least 82 percent of its territory and eventually gain a strong security link with the West, especially if the United States again leads in addressing the Russian threat to Ukraine. At the moment, however, the U.S. Congress is playing with fire in threatening to end U.S. assistance to Kyiv. Ukraine is resolute in this struggle, but so, alas, is Russia, and if Putin winds up winning this war, NATO’s own security might soon be at risk, too.

 • • •

Oddly, the Ukraine struggle against Russian invasion makes me think about my mother. During the 1930s, she looked on at what was happening in Europe -- at the Nazi takeover of Germany, at the attacks on Jewish Germans, at Hitler's absorption of Austria and Czechoslovakia -- and became a vehement American interventionist. She might be called a "premature anti-fascist." Yet she was a Republican. From her point of view, the worst of isolationists were her fellow Republicans and Hitler apologists like Charles Lindbergh. The threat of fascism made for strange alliances.

That threat does the same today.

Fiery resistance

Before I leave Timothy Garton Ash's Homelands behind, I wanted to share this smidgen of reporting in which he captures the flavor of life in a country whose rulers work to erase reality and replace it with fiction that suits them. 

In Czechoslovakia, Orwell was compounded by a touch of Kafka. On a chilly Tuesday in January 1984, I visited the Olšany cemetery in Prague, just across the road from the Jewish graveyard where Franz Kafka lies.

I was looking for the grave of a woman called Marie Jedličková. Quite often, people would light candles and leave flowers on this grave, with messages such as ‘We remember’. These would rapidly be cleared away by ‘persons unknown’.

Who was Marie Jedličková? No one could tell me. All those mourners knew was that a man called Jan Palach had previously been buried in this place.

Palach was a Czech student who, in 1969, at the age of twenty, set fire to himself on Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet invasion and occupation of his country. He subsequently died of his wounds. His grave had become a site of pilgrimage.

So one night the authorities removed his body, had it cremated and delivered his ashes in an urn to his mother in her country town. Then they buried an old woman from a care home, Marie Jedličková, in his place in the Prague cemetery.

But those who wished to honour Jan Palach would not be cheated, so they placed their tokens of remembrance on the grave of Marie J. What was it the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera had recently written in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting? ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

Self-immolation as a form of protest of the intolerable was a feature of the mid-1960s, worldwide. Several Buddhist monks in Vietnam set fire to themselves in 1963 in protest against a Roman Catholic government imposed by the Americans and the French. In the United States, Alice Herz, an 82 year old German-Jewish refugee become a peace activist and Unitarian, set herself on fire in Detroit in 1965 in protest of President Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam. The same year, the Quaker Norman Morrison immolated himself outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's office and the Catholic Worker Roger Allen LaPorte also set himself ablaze outside the United Nations headquarters.

Horrible as these acts seem, they do seem less generally harmful than picking up an AR-15. 

• • •

Before I completely leave behind Timothy Garten Ash's memoir, I do want to point to his fascinating collection of mostly personal snapshots from his eastern European wanderings, available online. Here's Ash with Czech president Vaclav Havel.

Europe: up from barbarism

Human beings have never succeeded in building heaven on earth, even – perhaps especially – when they have tried. But they have repeatedly built hell on earth. In the first half of the twentieth century, that is what Europeans did to their own continent, as they had in earlier centuries to other people’s continents. No one else did it for us. This was European barbarism, done by Europeans to Europeans – and often in Europe’s name. You cannot begin to understand what Europe has tried to do since 1945 unless you know about this hell.

This sweeping, ponderous, pretentious, and perhaps perspicacious declaration introduces Homelands: A Personal History of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book/memoir compiles very short pieces from this journalist cum historian cum wannabe statesman from five periods of modern European experience: Destroyed (1945); Divided (1961-1979); Rising (1980-1989); Triumphing (1990-2007); and Faltering (2008-2022).

Ash took himself to central and eastern Europe in the days when, for most English speakers (Ash is a Brit), the Soviet-dominated states and their adjacent neighbors were pretty much a blank. He visited the German town his father occupied in 1945.

For an Englishman like my father, England stood for freedom and Europe was a threat to it.

In the mid-1970s he met trade union leader Lech Wałęsa at Poland's Gdansk Shipyards where Wałęsa was leading one of the most significant protests against Soviet domination during the Iron Current era.  

Dashing, dancing, bubbling, bouncing through it all was the skinny figure of an unemployed thirty-eight-year-old electrician with the long moustaches of a seventeenth-century Polish nobleman. His facial expressions were as vivid and rapidly changing as Charlie Chaplin’s. The only time this Lech Wałęsa seemed to sit still was when he was taking communion. There is a photograph of the local priest, Father Henryk Jankowski, putting a communion wafer into his mouth, while behind the priest’s head, instead of a gilded baroque altarpiece with angels and archangels, we see a battery of cameras jostling to capture what press photographers call ‘the money shot’. After mass, Lech -– all the strikers referred to him by his first name –- would deliver his ‘vespers’. Standing on a van so he could be seen above the flower-garlanded gate, he would report to the crowd outside, in his fast-talking, joking, ungrammatical but irresistible colloquial style. Lech was a laugh a minute. No one then imagined that Wałęsa would go on to be the leader of an entire nationwide movement, receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and become the first president of a free Poland in 1990.

This sort of vivid on the spot reporting won Ash a steady position reporting from Eastern Europe. By the time the Russian domination crumbled in 1989, he knew every insurgent who mattered. He also knew or had at least interviewed the great players.

... Gorbachev’s story is rich in unintended consequences. The Soviet patriot whose policies ended up destroying the Soviet Union. The reformer who unleashed revolution. The communist who opened the door to democracy. Without him, freedom would certainly not have come so quickly and peacefully to half of Europe, nor such a rapid, decisive end to the Cold War across the world. ...

... The old movie actor [Ronald Reagan] well understood that the soft power of a narrative can be every bit as important as economic and military power. Hollywood complemented the Pentagon and Wall Street, making three-dimensional American power. Reagan was jeered at by many west Europeans, who dismissed him as a ‘cowboy’ and ‘B-movie actor’. (I may even have done a little jeering myself.) Yet his personal role was almost as important as Gorbachev’s when it came to ending the Cold War.

These two passages illustrate a recurring theme in Ash's story: individual actors -- leaders and/or criminals -- matter in shaping events. Not for him the idea of grinding impersonal forces working out our the human fates -- he sees and records people making their history. I'm not sure this sort of record is enough on its own to explain our collective inventions and follies, but it certainly is more readable than dry economic or sociological accounts.

Ash just missed being there for the momentous day the Berlin Wall dividing West and East Germany opened up.

By the early hours of Friday 10 November [1989], tens of thousands of East Germans had put their feet on the moon. When I got to Berlin the next day, it felt like Pentecost. The whole city was on the move. ... We watched the crowds of excited people walking to and fro, East to West, West to East, and it seemed in that moment that all would be well, and all manner of things would be well. With its internal rhyme in English and its Biblical echo of trumpeters bringing down the walls of Jericho, this phrase would establish itself as the received standard description of the event. It went back into German as a single word: Mauerfall.  … Like the moon landing, the fall of the Wall had become part of the shared historical mythology of humankind.

And then Ash reported on the new European Union that enfolded the east into European freedoms and European capitalism up to the borders of the diminished Russia. For most Europeans, the 1990s were the best of times.

In the 1980s, when my sons were born in England, their life chances were incomparably better than those of my Polish friends’ children. By the 2010s, especially with the freedom of movement offered by the EU, they had similar prospects. The same is true for a whole generation of central and east European students who have come through my door.

In conclusion, Ash looks at the Europe of the present which endured a terrible economic crisis in the 2010s, which has trouble distinguishing an actual violent domestic Islamism from a flood of desperate Muslim refugees from the collapsing states of its Near East such as Syria, and which faces Putin's resurgent imperial Russia in Ukraine. This section of the book skips the blithe philosophizing and bon mots which frame his accounts of the past in order to lay out starkly the challenges of Europe's future.

Timothy Garton Ash has lived at the center of events and relished his proximity to history in the making. He's not a neutral observer; he believes in a humane liberal order, albeit a capitalist one. For an American reader, he comes across as a bit full of himself, but I heartily enjoyed this book -- knowing Ash's account is never all there is to say.

Emigration -- or democratic activism?

Listening to Yascha Mounk and Matthias Matthijs discuss the Future of Europe, a throwaway remark stuck with me. (Do read the whole article; it's thought provoking.)

On the topic of relations between Viktor Orbán's authoritarian Hungary and the rest of the European Union, Matthijs commented:

Many young Hungarians have already left for other EU member states (it’s very easy within the single market with free movement of labor) and they don't vote anymore. Orbán has made it very hard for them to vote when they live in the rest of the EU.

Freedom of movement, including to work, between all 27 member states (and some non-members including Ukraine) is a baseline principle of the European Union.

On 1 January 2021, there were 23.7 million citizens of non-member countries living in one of the EU Member States, representing 5.3% of the EU population. In addition, there were 13.7 million people living in one of the EU Member States with the citizenship of another EU Member State. Eurostat

This must have political consequences in some European states as the young and the skilled migrate to places they find more congenial, taking their energy and modern ideas about society with them. They retain citizenship in their state of origin, but often find themselves outside the practice of democracy in both their homelands and their new abodes. Does this matter? Probably in different ways in different EU states. 

EU flag flies along with Italy's on a San Francisco consulate

•  •  •

Which brings me to that nutcase Georgia Republican Congresswoman who is hawking "a divorce" between red and blue dis-United States. Obviously this is just more attention-seeking bullshit, but still dangerous bullshit.

On this I think Tennessean David French has a right insight from our history:

... The South [in 1860] separated from the North and started a ruinous and futile war not because of calm deliberation, but rather because of hysteria and fear — including hysteria and fear whipped up by the partisan press.

So my question is not “Is divorce reasonable?” but rather, “Are we susceptible to the unreason that triggered war once before?

Much as I participate in my own fear and disgust as I watch the entrepreneurs of hate promote terror of drag queens and the danger of crime (that usually means Black men), I try to remember that the haters are still a minority and still can be overcome. Previous generations have risen to that task; we must again.

Shards from bleeding Ukraine

Putin's imperial war to conquer Ukraine could be the end of us all, so I can hardly ignore it. 

George Packer, usually a pretty hard-boiled journalist, felt he had to see for himself. He questions his own objectivity. His story is worth reading in full.

Journalism that waves the banner of moral clarity makes me uneasy. Moral clarity can be blinding, and most subjects worth writing about are complicated. But a few things are morally clear: slavery, and genocide, and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine. ...

It’s absurd to approach this war from a position of neutrality. As a journalistic stance, neutrality is worthless, and usually spurious, because everyone is a partisan of some kind. Objectivity is different: the necessary effort, always doomed to fall short, of rendering reality exactly, like a carpenter striving for plumb, level, and square. What’s most crucial is independence: refusing to surrender your judgment of the truth for the sake of a political cause. 

Journalism doesn’t require an anesthetized moral faculty. It ought to be possible to want Ukraine to win this war and still tell what you see and hear there honestly. 

... Here was another motive [to go to Ukraine]—the strongest and most dubious of all. I wanted a gulp of Ukrainian air. I wanted to breathe its hope. What a thing to ask of people fighting for their lives. 

...I don’t know if Ukraine can win this war, but I know it must. Putin’s Russia is committing crimes that have not been seen in Europe since Hitler and Stalin—leveling cities, terror-bombing civilian populations, creating millions of refugees, using rape and torture to break the will of those under occupation, separating families, detaining and interrogating at least 1 million Ukrainians and sending many to far-off internment camps, preparing to annex entire regions, erasing their language and culture, burning crops, using vital food and energy supplies to blackmail the world. If Western leaders are too afraid of Putin and their own voters to stop him and punish him for these crimes, he’ll know that the West is as weak and pleasure-seeking as he’s always believed. ...

Packer's full-throated endorsement of Ukrainians' struggle to preserve their country and future is wonderfully attractive. I share his moral enthusiasm; I think he's right. But I don't know how many of us that conclusion will leave unscathed.

• • •

Pundits struggle to discern whether Putin is wily and/or evil and/or simply has drunk a disorienting Koolaid. In this tidbit, Susan Glasser wonders ...

... There is also the matter of Putin getting the West wrong. We in Washington hardly have a monopoly on misguided assumptions being a driving factor in international affairs. Many indicators suggest, in fact, that they were a major reason why this war happened. Putin not only failed to understand that Ukrainians would stand and fight against his aggression; he also failed to foresee the U.S. and its NATO allies remaining united and funding the Ukrainian resistance. Moscow’s bogus annexations of more Ukrainian territory seems likely to produce only more Western sanctions—and the possible extension of the war that Putin looks increasingly like he is losing. “The problem is, of course, us misreading him, but also him misreading us,” [security analyst Fiona] Hill observed. 

• • •

Click to enlarge. This is hard to look at.

Retired U.S. General Mark Hertling argues plausibly that the poor condition of the Russian military means "Putin’s recruits are heading for slaughter."

• • •

Kateryna Kibarova explains why she came Home to Bucha.

I'm Ukrainian. I have no children. I am not putting anyone in any danger. I can be useful to my country. I have a very close friend who lives in Great Britain. I had options to go to Poland. But if we all leave, who will defend the country? Who will support the economy? Who will sustain the belief that we will win? And who will make sense of the fact that we have had to endure it all? This is my home. I'm staying here.

• • •

This is still the disunited United States and there are millions of us who are suspicious of our country's repeated martial adventures. We've lived through decades of misbegotten imperial wars. Some caution about enthusiasm for our righteous endorsement of Ukrainian is certainly advised. Author Robert Wright brings a warning.  

Yet many American elites—politicians, journalists, even “think” tankers—have been reacting to this war as if it were a football game or some other purely zero-sum contest. They’ve celebrated Ukrainian gains on the battlefield with no ambivalence, blissfully unaware that dramatic Ukrainian military success was always bound to encourage Kremlin risk taking, raising the chances of regional or even nuclear war. 

Now, with Ukraine’s big battlefield success having been followed by Russian mobilization and Putin’s declared annexation, bliss will be harder to come by even if awareness fails to grow.

Wright published before Putin's current round of nuclear threats. I just know I don't know what to think, but I choose not to entirely look away.

What went wrong in Poland, Hungary, and their neighbors?

In The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy, Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev and US law professor Stephen Holmes offer their account of why Poland and Hungary have embraced authoritarian illiberalism. When the long Soviet Russian deep freeze finally melted away in eastern Europe in 1989, westerners and many eastern Europeans themselves expected their countries would make a quick transition to consumer capitalism and long repressed individual liberties. And some of that came to pass, as well as a great deal of kleptocratic appropriation of national treasure by newly minted robber barons, as well as culture shock when the rest of Europe became accessible.

Krastev and Holmes posit that these countries went through an "Age of Imitation" during which they tried to mirror western European societies, attempting "copycat Westernization." And what many felt they got was national humiliation. For their mimicry, they were looked down on by the prosperous neighbors they imitated. And so eastern Europeans were ripe for xenophobic nationalisms and anti-democratic leaders who staunched their psychic wounds.

Illiberal politicians owe their political success to popular resentment at having spent two decades genuflecting before putatively canonical foreign models.

Observing this from the United States, it is easy to look at, for example, Orbán's Hungary and see a society bent on building a vicious wall to exclude immigrants. And that's a reality. But Krastev and Holmes insist the actual demographic panic is about emigration.

This fear ... is fuelled by a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse. In the period 1989-2017, Latvia haemorrhaged 27 per cent of its population, Lithuania 22.5 per cent, Bulgaria almost 21 per cent. Two million East Germans, or almost 14 per cent of the country's pre-1989 inhabitants, went to West Germany in search of work and a better life. 3.4 million Romanians, a vast majority of them younger than forty, left the country only after the country joined the EU in 2007. The combination of an ageing population, low birth rates and an unending stream of emigration is arguably the principal source of demographic panic in Central and Eastern Europe. The fear of nation-killing depopulation is seldom openly voiced, perhaps because publicizing high rates of expatriation will encourage imitators. ... 

... An otherwise inexplicable panic in the face of a non-existent immigrant invasion from Central Europe can therefore be understood as a distorted echo of a more realistic underlying fear that huge swathes of one's own population, including the most talented youth, will leave the country and remain permanently abroad. ...

And there's more that riles these places. A gulf between generations commonly existing in a rapidly changing world has been exacerbated in countries where Soviet Russian domination induced cultural stasis.

For those born after 1989, in particular, it was as easy to "synchronize' their attitudes and behavior with Western standards as it was uncool to "coordinate" their expectations with those of earlier generations at home. In post-communist societies, as a result, parents lost their ability to transfer their values and attitudes to offspring. How the parents lived and what they achieved or suffered under communism ceased to matter in either material or moral terms. The young were not really revolting against their parents, as happened in the West in 1968. Instead they started feeling sorry for them and otherwise ignoring them.

Now there's a combustible set up! No wonder the youth leave, an opportunity which the European Union offers.

Could this conjunction of ills Krastev and Holmes describe have been avoided? Probably not, once these countries gave market capitalism free rein. Liberal societies in the West have grown up in tandem with rapacious capitalism and, as a consequence of long push-and-pull, have built some obstacles to its total dominance. Eastern Europeans got the worst of it without historical defenses. The result is not pretty.

• • •

I found this book very interesting -- and also wondered whether the framing the two authors have created doesn't leave much out. I'm not nearly enough of a student of these countries to be able say for sure, but I scanned the index and found no mention anywhere of the Catholic Church. Both Poland and Hungary are famously Catholic countries -- might this be part of why liberal democracy failed to take root?

• • •

And the eastern European disjunctions and discontents that point toward authoritarianism seem all too familiar here in our country. I'm an escapee myself from mid-twentieth century Buffalo, New York, a city losing its steel and auto industry and thus its pride and innovative energy.

And just the other day, I read this sad report from rural Montana, once the home of Wobblies, union members who resisted their exploitation by mining tycoons.

It is hard to overstate the love and attention that rural towns lavish on their children. Local newspapers devote pages of coverage to high school sports and other school news. Many towns have banners hanging from streetlights, each with a picture of a member of the graduating high school class. Each graduate also gets a sponsored picture in the local newspaper, with a paragraph detailing their parents, siblings, and plans after graduation. ... Rural towns pour their scarce resources into school kids, and most of them end up moving to either bigger towns in the state, or to big cities out of state. That’s real, not manufactured, rejection and loss. 

The movement of rural kids is mainly driven by lack of opportunity in small towns, but I can’t see that the Republican desire to revert to Sharia Law will do anything but accelerate the exodus. It’s easy for a 70 year-old to put up an “abortion stops a beating heart” sign, a common sight along rural plains roads. It’s quite another thing to be a 19 year-old young woman who has to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get an abortion, or to live somewhere they’ll get hassled if they want contraception. 

Montanans were smart enough to enshrine the right of privacy into their constitution, so at least they won’t lose the abortion right because of a trigger law (unlike all the bordering states). But who knows how long that will last. And why stick around to find out? Better to get out of town, get a college degree, and move somewhere where freedom is more than a bumper sticker slogan.

And so the divides in our country grow -- but there is reason to believe that there are more of us -- and the future is progressive. If the place remains habitable ...

Ukraine's war and ours

We need to admit to ourselves that, though everyday life and its pleasures and anxieties flow on, this country is now a party to a war ignited by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian successes in halting their overweening neighbor -- and admiration for Ukrainians' effectual valor against all odds -- has drawn us in deeply. We've signed on to be an independent Ukraine's supply depot.

Mural in Cardiff, Wales. By My Dog Sighs

President Biden promises not to send U.S. troops -- and I believe him. But we can't really pretend that this is not our war. Nancy Pelosi goes to Kyiv and announces U.S. support "until victory is won."

Whose victory?, I wonder. If there is any victory, it must belong to the Ukrainians and perhaps their European neighbors, not to their rich supporters. For citizens of this country, the political project must include deterring our government from encouraging fighting to the last Ukrainian ... to support Ukrainians in preserving the political and moral space to define their own war despite their dependence on us. They are plenty tough and smart. Are we?

As I've reluctantly realized, it's a war I can support, tentatively and even prayerfully. The war itself is scary -- and finding myself feeling support is also scary. I know atrocities lead to more atrocities. I also know imperial aggression, the stomping of vulnerable nations and peoples by the powerful, when I see it. My country has been aggressing for most of my life, in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq ... Because I didn't like it when we did it, it is not hard for me to recognize Russia's imperial aggression now.

As Paul Krugman warns, "there's a whiff of 1914" about all this. The reference is to the first 20th century European war, World War I we call it, into which belligerents seemingly stumbled heedlessly. Yes, we could all blunder into World War III ...

The historical analogy that leaps to my mind is France's support for the American Revolution of 1776. Those uppity American colonists -- my ancestors -- wouldn't have worn down the mighty British empire without French support. France was just playing power politics, weakening a competitor empire. But the consequence was a chance for a new nation, the barely United States of America, to get off the ground. (The follow-on from that French adventure -- via the powerful notions of liberty, equality, fraternity -- proved too much for the French metropole a few years later in 1789.)  

The British academic and security policy analyst Anatol Lieven offers a reminder:

... During the Cold War, no U.S. president ever forgot that Washington and Moscow between them have the ability to destroy human civilization and even put an end to the human race. For this reason, first the Truman and then the Eisenhower administration adopted the strategy of “containing” the Soviet Union in Europe, and not trying to “roll back” Soviet power through armed support for anti-Soviet insurgencies in eastern Europe.  

Our leaders of today should remember this. They should also remember that where both sides engaged in proxy warfare outside Europe, the consequences were disastrous for themselves and still more disastrous for the wretched people on the ground who became the pawns of these great power agendas. Have we really learned nothing from history?

Tom Nichols is a deeply knowledgeable U.S. expert on Russia who has been teaching at the U.S. Naval War College for the last twenty-five years. He too has warnings, most especially about not letting ourselves get too caught up on in the emotions that go with this war. Via Twitter. 

If Putin insanely decides that this is a war for the survival of Russia, then we are faced with World War III. Not the rhetorical World War III loosely talked about now, but the real thing, including the deaths of hundreds of millions - in both conventional and nuclear war.

This could happen because of how badly the Russian military and Putin have screwed everything up. But if the only alternative is "surrender Ukraine and then all of Europe," then the world will have to fight it. It will be Russia's choice. There is no policy that will stop it.

There are alternatives and Putin may yet satisfy himself with his limited gains. But those of you saying "bring it on" don't know what you're talking about, and you don't understand what all of us will endure, together, if the Russians are stupid enough to go this road.

The choice to escalate now rests in Moscow. It would be one more ridiculous gamble added to a pile of idiotic strategic miscalculations, but all we can do is help Ukraine defend itself and make clear that there is no day that ends better for Russia than the day before.

But if you're an American whose biggest gripe right now is the price of gas or your student loans or inflation, I understand that we live day to day, but this is the most serious thing in the world and you should be paying attention to it.

I'm already seeing a lot of responses piling on here about "Glory to Ukraine" and "Putin has to go" and the usual stuff. You can just stop that right now; the only thing that matters is ending this war before it finally burns out of control. Diplomats are doing their best.

This war will end with a victory, in the sense that Ukraine will continue to survive. What compromises Zelensky will have to make, I can neither predict nor advise. But there will almost certainly be compromises. ...

This war, including our war, demands a level of seriousness and humane maturity that has not been the hallmark of the U.S. polity in recent years. May peace eventually prevail.

Graffiti in the San Francisco Mission District

More on "the economic weapon"

Preparing to write my previous post about sanctions in international affairs, I came across two contemporary commentaries that seem worth amplifying.

That always interesting commentator Jane Coaston wants nothing to do with feel-good ejections of individual Russians as protest of the Ukraine invasion. 

Banning Russian Tennis Players Won’t Stop the War. ... the All England Lawn Tennis Club (better known as the venue for The Championships at Wimbledon) joined with the British Lawn Tennis Association in banning all Russian and Belarusian players from competing at its event ...

Sports writer including Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post argue the ban is a right move. But not Coaston.

... limiting Russian influence by banning Russian and Belarusian tennis players from Wimbledon is unlikely to bring about a swifter end to the war in Ukraine or concretely damage Putin’s regime. ... feeling strong isn’t the same thing as doing the right thing, or even doing something that makes sense. Russian tennis players didn’t invade Ukraine. And punishing Russian tennis players won’t stop the war in Ukraine. But apparently the ban makes the governing bodies running Wimbledon and the L.T.A. feel as if they have done something. And seemingly, that’s good enough for them.

I'm with Coaston. The horrible reality of the invasion is too awful to be appropriated for a podium by performing sports administrators, in my view especially snotty English ones.

• • •

I almost never read editorial board opinions. I don't get the genre -- how can a publication have an opinion? But "the New York Times editorial board" actually added something essential to discussion of the current economic punishment being visited on Russia. 

... although Russia’s invasion proves that economic integration is no cure for war, economic isolation is also not a recipe for peace. Sanctions are often sold as an alternative to war. But they can also be a precursor to war, as seen with the institution of the American oil embargo against Japan and the freezing of Japanese assets about five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

So, while sanctions can hobble economies, they rarely compel the kinds of wholesale political changes that American officials would like to see. ... Change is unlikely to occur when sanctions are imposed without communicating the steps that must be taken for them to be rolled back.

All the more reason that the United States should have a clear plan for how and under what circumstances it would be appropriate to roll back these latest sanctions. Right now, this has been left deliberately vague to allow the Ukrainians to directly negotiate with Russia. It is laudable to give deference to Ukrainians whose lives are on the line in this terrible war. But creating clear goals and communicating benchmarks for sanctions relief are important factors in successful sanctions. Too often, sanctions are left in place for decades, without evaluation of whether or not they are achieving what they were put in place to do.

Exactly. My emphasis. The Ukrainians will determine how this horrible war ends and at what cost to themselves. But Russia has to know what, if anything, would allow economic reintegration with the parts of the world economy which have cut that country off. Otherwise you get ineffectual stupidity -- like U.S. sanctions on Cuba and Iran.

Making war apples into peace oranges ...

Bill McKibben (climate educator and Methodist Sunday School teacher) is promoting a plan to 1) help Europe deal with a likely cut off of heating gas supplies in response to Russia's Ukraine invasion and 2) assist the transition we all need away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable electric power.

Here's his plan ... heavily edited for length.

Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom

... But [Europe] need cower no longer. New technology—affordable and workable—means Europeans can heat their homes with electricity instead of gas. And if we wanted to we could—before next winter comes—help enormously in this task. President Biden should immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power. The most recent estimates from Europe I’ve seen is that the current electric grid could handle fifty million heat pumps. We’re not going to get that many over there in a year—but any large number hacks away at Putin’s power.

• The Defense Production Act allows this to happen without having to convince the obstructionists in our Congress....

• If manufacturers had a guaranteed federal contract, they could ramp up production quickly: perhaps by fifty percent in a month, and before the summer was out by far more. ...

• We could provide them at cost—or below cost—to Europeans, just as we did with the “lend-lease” program in the run-up to World War II. Europeans know how to install them—about a quarter of heating units installed across the continent last year were these electric heat pumps ....

• If America did this, it would jump start our own capacity ...

• It helps with the climate crisis too—some at least.

... Business won’t do this on its own. In World War II, the Chamber of Commerce (on the wrong side of virtually every important question for a century) opposed Lend-Lease; Henry Ford, the dominant industrialist of the day, was an America Firster (and anti-Semite). But FDR didn’t let that slow him down. ...

• We can do this. Biden could make good on some of his energy promises and some of his manufacturing promises; we could peacefully punch Putin in the kidneys, doing him severe damage without raising the odds of nuclear war; and we could even start to head off the instability and war that will invariably accompany the climate crisis. Heat pumps for peace and freedom!

McKibben is actually talking to people in the bowels of the Biden administration. I heartily urge following McKibben's newsletter, The Crucial Years.

A new German government, climate crisis, and migration

Economic historian Adam Tooze has passed along elements of the platform adopted by the "traffic-light coalition" composing the newly elected German government. Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats are out. The Social Democrats (the red element), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (the cautionary yellow right of center), are in. Olaf Scholz is the new Chancellor -- federal Prime Minister, roughly speaking. 

For anyone who retains an impression of Germany as a the homeland of European regressive nationalism and conservatism -- and after Nazism how could we not? -- this description of the German government's intentions is simply stunning:

“We are united by an understanding of Germany as a diverse society of immigration.” 

In the 1970s-1990s, when the current generation of German leaders were growing up, any such statement would have been politically explosive. 

They continue: “Migration has been and is today a part of the history of our country. Immigrants, their children and grand-children have helped to build our country and shape it. The 60th anniversary of the guest-worker treaty with Turkey is symbolic of that.” 

Like the last Red-Green government, this one promises to modernize Germany’s citizenship laws. This time it will permit multiple citizenship. Naturalization will normally occur after 5 years, or 3 years in the case of exceptional integration performances (sic) (Integrationsleistungen) ... 

Any mention of the concept of ‘race’ will be expunged from the German constitution.

Outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel nearly capsized her government by responding generously to the refugee crisis created by war in Syria. The increasing strength of the proto-Nazi ADF party followed; Merkel was forced to backtrack. The new coalition appears ready to try again to incorporate migrants.

Tooze identifies the underlying and urgent emergency that this new German coalition understands:

This is a government that embraces the climate challenge and has the political backing to do something about it. It has no excuses. Germany is pivotal to Europe’s climate ambitions. And, more generally, the success or failure of this government will tell us a lot about the capacity of sophisticated democracies around the world to adapt to our 21st-century polycrisis.

Climate change prompts new challenges to states and to modern civilization itself from the natural world -- drought, fire, frost, flood, pestilence, and more. Climate change makes civil society and governments unstable. Climate change leads to forced human migration and increased flows of refugees at national borders. These are the great challenges of the 21st century.

• • •

This banner hung on Madrid's City Hall. Why in English?, I don't know. Spain serves as a major entry point for migrants to the European Union, often unwillingly.

British politician David Miliband heads the International Rescue Committee which provides aid to people affected by humanitarian crises all over the world, including people displaced by climate crisis. Founded by the refugee Albert Einstein, the organization got its start in Europe during World War II providing assistance to displaced people. Miliband told the Washington Post that people in the United States could use some simple education about the world's migration challenge.

What do you think people tend to misunderstand about refugee crises, about refugees? 

It’s really important that those of us in America or Europe remember that nearly 90 percent of the world’s refugees are in poor countries, not in rich countries. It’s a myth that Western Europe or the U.S. are bearing an unsustainable burden of refugees; the vast bulk of refugees are in low- or middle-income countries.  

Myth number two is that refugees are displaced for a short period of time, when in fact the averages are closer to 20 years than five.  

Myth number three — this not a short list — is that this is all about young men on the move, when it’s families, with about half of the world’s refugees under the age of 18.  

And myth number four is that refugees are in camps, whereas we know that 60 percent of refugees in the modern era are in urban areas — like Beirut, Istanbul, Islamabad. 

... So we need to change the way we do humanitarian aid. We need to provide education as much as we need to provide water and sanitation. And we’re very clear that a feminist approach is important, not just because two-thirds of our clients are women and girls, but because women and girls face double, triple, multiple vulnerabilities and inequalities, that the structures of power that face them are deeply unequal, and we need to take that into account.

There is nothing in the way the world is currently organized that suggests that the world will see fewer refugees in coming years. Local and international conflicts over power and resources will force people to flee. Climate change guarantees more people will be leaving their homes, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Those of us lucky enough not to be displaced, those of us in rich countries, need to face up to this prospect and figure out what we can do for the less lucky. Our own countries can become better for a well-managed, humane migration influx.

It's big, it's bad, and political choices still matter

Until I read Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, the economic upsets of early 21st century global capitalism had mostly registered with me through the Wall Street melt down that confronted Barack Obama on taking office in 2009 and the grinding Great Recession of Main Street America that fed the resentments of his detractors. Somehow the Obama administration never seemed willing or able to turn its economic policies to the needs of ordinary citizens.

Oh, I knew that what seemed to begin with casino-gambling with home mortgages by the sleazier elements of US finance had somehow nearly brought down the whole world economy -- I read books that sought to decode what they had been doing. (Gillian Tett's was a good one.) And I encountered a Spain in 2013 where the economy was still somehow leveled by the backwash of these shenanigans. And I even knew all this somehow fed those pratfalls by English-speaking democracies in 2016: Brexit and electing Donald Trump.

But until I read Tooze -- he's an erudite Brit who has landed teaching history at Columbia -- I lacked a global picture to put all this together. Crashed does that. It's a masterly account of intricate financial systems and above all their dysfunctional politics. If you suspect any discussion of global capitalist economics is no more than a morass of high falutin jargon, you are usually not wrong -- but Tooze draws a path through vast swathes of human activity and suffering, of myopic leadership and occasional brilliance. I found it fascinating,

This is how Tooze introduces the grand scale of his subject matter:

The events of 2003, 2008, and 2017 are all no doubt defining moments  of recent international history. But what is the relationship among them? What is the relationship of the economic crisis of 2008 to the geopolitical disaster of 2003 [Iraq invasion] and to American's political crisis following the election of November 2016? What arc of historical transition do those three points stake out? What does that arc mean for Europe, for Asia? How does it relate to the minor but no less shattering trajectory traced by the United Kingdom from Iraq to the crisis of the City of London in 2008 and Brexit in 2016?

... the idea that was so prevalent in 2008, the idea that this was basically an American crisis, or even an Anglo-Saxon crisis, and as such a key moment in the demise of American unipolar power, is in fact deeply misleading. ... It pleased people around the world to imagine the hyper power was getting its comeuppance. ... Contrary to the narrative popular on on both sides of the Atlantic, the eurozone crisis is not a separate and distinct event, but follows directly from the shock of 2008. ...

Unexpectedly -- to rest of the world and possibly also to elements of the US political elite  -- the Obama administration and most critically the central Federal Reserve Bank, proved quite adept at saving floundering wealth institutions. Their prescription -- a sophisticated application of "print money" and give it away to rich people -- broke with academic economic orthodoxy, and succeeded. Ordinary citizens remained screwed -- but hey, at least the whole capitalist economy didn't grind to a halt.

However unprecedented and effective the Fed's actions might have been, even for those politicians whose support for globalization was unfailing, its practical implications were barely speakable. Though it is hardly a secret that we inhabit a world dominated by business oligopolies, during the crisis and its aftermath this reality and its implications for the priorities of government stood nakedly exposed. It is an unpalatable and explosive truth that democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic has choked on. 

... America's crisis fighting exhibited massive inequity. People on welfare scraped by while bankers carried on their well-upholstered lives. But though the distribution of costs and benefits was outrageous, at least America's crisis management worked. Since 2009 the US economy has grown continuously and and least by the standards set by official statistics, it is now [pre-pandemic in 2018] approaching full employment.  

By contrast, the eurozone [the European Union countries that share a currency], through willful policy choices, drove tens of millions of its citizens into the depths of a 1930s-style depression. That tiny Greece, with an economy that amounts to 1-1.5 percent of EU GDP, should have been made the pivot of this disaster twists European history into the image of bitter caricature.

And then there's China, whose burgeoning capitalist command economy might also have been dragged down amid these flailings and which both wavered and grew exponentially. Nobody's financial elites look like geniuses in this telling

Until I read Tooze, I had no idea that Obama's foreign travels were usually more about trying to nudge bankers and global financial elites toward what the US thought was economic stability than about arms control, or recovering from the global opprobrium which George W Bush's wars had seeded, and or even climate change. It's an enlightening perspective.

None of this suggests happy prospects for economic justice, democracy, or even truth as Europe and America have known it.

It was the current president of the European Commission who announced in the the spring of 2011: "When it becomes serious, you have to lie." At least one might say, he knows what he is doing. If we believe Jean-Claude Juncker, a posttruth approach to public discourse is simply what the governance of capitalism currently demands.

In the 19th century, economics was sometimes labelled "the dismal science" because it was the study of why human beings would always lack for our basic needs, for food, clothing, and shelter. Modern global capitalism has proved capable of building the components for those needs beyond the wildest dreams of pre-capitalist economists, though it usually flunks the equitable distribution part of the problem.

The crux of Tooze's argument about the unfolding of the crisis of 2008 is that it turns out that contingency, accidents, and politics still matter despite the enormous scale and complexity of financial systems interwoven with modern states. It's possible that global capital has stamped out the possibility of democracy and we didn't notice. But also it's possible that's wrong.

There are ways of describing the operations of these systems that void the presence of politics. But if a history such as this has any purpose, it is to reveal the poverty of such accounts. Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative ... Success and failure, stability and crisis, can indeed pivot on particular moments of choice. ...

Not a bad thought as we enter a different, hopefully better, US political era ...