The Courage of at Least One Russian

It has been well over two years since I last made an entry on this Blog. That certainly has not been because there is not much going on in the world since 2021 or my lack of interest in all of it. I think I am just a little overwhelmed by the events of the last few years and in a little bit of despair about what the future holds. I am not good at foreseeing what is to come and tend to give more credibility to darker outcomes. However much I try to look at positive things for the future, it all looks pretty grim to me. There are so many disturbing situations that seem perilous for all of us; the polarization of US politics, the China-Taiwan standoff, North Korea sabre rattling, and a whole myriad of tumult in the Middle East. Looming over all of this are the ever-increasing consequences of climate change.

And then there is the most immediate threat of all . . . Russia's illegal and unprovoked attack on Ukraine.

I cannot properly express my disdain for Putin, Russia, the remnants of its Soviet culture, and even its people. I will not say more about this very dim view of all things Russian. But today I read the words of a Russian citizen, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is on trial for speaking out against the tyranny of the Putin regime. Clearly, he is an individual of incredible courage and a beam of light in my very dark view of the future and of Russians.

This was in today's Washington Post:

______________________________________

"Vladimir Kara-Murza delivered these remarks on Monday at the closing session of his trial in Moscow.

MOSCOW CITY COURT — Members of the court: I was sure, after two decades spent in Russian politics, after all that I have seen and experienced, that nothing can surprise me anymore. I must admit that I was wrong. I’ve been surprised by the extent to which my trial, in its secrecy and its contempt for legal norms, has surpassed even the “trials” of Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and ’70s. And that’s not even to mention the harshness of the sentence requested by the prosecution or the talk of “enemies of the state.” In this respect, we’ve gone beyond the 1970s — all the way back to the 1930s. For me, as a historian, this is an occasion for reflection.

At one point during my testimony, the presiding judge reminded me that one of the extenuating circumstances was “remorse for what [the accused] has done.” And although there is little that’s amusing about my present situation, I could not help smiling: The criminal, of course, must repent of his deeds. I’m in jail for my political views. For speaking out against the war in Ukraine. For many years of struggle against Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. For facilitating the adoption of personal international sanctions under the Magnitsky Act against human rights violators.

Not only do I not repent of any of this, I am proud of it. I am proud that Boris Nemtsov brought me into politics. And I hope that he is not ashamed of me. I subscribe to every word that I have spoken and every word of which I have been accused by this court. I blame myself for only one thing: that over the years of my political activity I have not managed to convince enough of my compatriots and enough politicians in the democratic countries of the danger that the current regime in the Kremlin poses for Russia and for the world. Today this is obvious to everyone, but at a terrible price — the price of war.

In their last statements to the court, defendants usually ask for an acquittal. For a person who has not committed any crimes, acquittal would be the only fair verdict. But I do not ask this court for anything. I know the verdict. I knew it a year ago when I saw people in black uniforms and black masks running after my car in the rearview mirror. Such is the price for speaking up in Russia today.

But I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when at the official level it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.

This day will come as inevitably as spring follows even the coldest winter. And then our society will open its eyes and be horrified by what terrible crimes were committed on its behalf. From this realization, from this reflection, the long, difficult but vital path toward the recovery and restoration of Russia, its return to the community of civilized countries, will begin.

Even today, even in the darkness surrounding us, even sitting in this cage, I love my country and believe in our people. I believe that we can walk this path."

_______________________________________

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Global Opinions contributor to The Post, is a Russian politician, author and historian. He holds Russian and British passports and settled his family in the United States. He has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In April 2022, nearly two months after Putin invaded Ukraine, uniformed police officers surrounded Kara-Murza’s car and took him to a Moscow police station. Initially detained on a spurious charge of disobeying the police, Kara-Murza was indicted 11 days later under a law passed in the wake of the invasion. A Russian court charged him with spreading what it considers “false” information. He maintains his innocence. A conviction could bring 10 years in prison.

In my last post I posed the thought there was going to be a little drama in Washington DC on the 6th of January.  I was thinking that it would come from politicians.  A physical assault on the capital building in which rioters gained access to the floor of the House of Congress and sent its members into hiding was certainly not something I thought possible even in the crazy that is America today.  I guess they have gone further down the road to anarchy than I had imagined.

This morning I read this New York Times essay by Timothy Snyder and I thought it to so very insightful of the situation in the United States.  As such, his words are deeply disturbing to me because I just don't see Americans accepting any truth that is not in line with their political creed.

The American Abyss

A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.

By Timothy Snyder

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signalling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.

My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.

Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.

If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland,was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom.

Worries to Start 2021

It is 7 o’clock in the morning of the first day of the new year 2021. I have been awake for a few hours now just thinking of things and the prospects for the new year. I have to admit that I am somewhat unsettled and a little worried.

I perceive 2020 as the year in my lifetime which, by a considerable margin, has been the most catastrophic. This has not been so much for me personally but for generally the sad state of everything. Clearly, this is the result of the COVID 19 pandemic which continues to ravage the populations of most nations and with particular intensity on the United States of America. It is this American disaster that leads me to my concern.

All countries regardless of their system of government or economic health are struggling with the pandemic and to say that it has disrupted global prosperity would be a vast understatement. There has been a whole range of responses by countries of which some have been more successful than others trying to control the pandemic to be manageable by their health care systems. I find it very disturbing that as the richest, most influential and powerful nation on the earth the United States has had the least effective and entirely dysfunctional response to COVID 19. The health care systems in some states are overwhelmed and the number of cases continues to climb out of control. As concerning as this is, it is not what has me preoccupied this morning.

What I have been thinking about is that with the catastrophic public health outcomes of the pandemic, the effects on the political and democratic fabric of the American republic may be even more devastating. The USA was a country very much divided before COVID 19 with Republicans and Democrats drifting ideologically further apart for a number of years encouraged by the divisive rhetoric of their president. I am sure that future historians will wax eloquent on the failures of the current president to provide any leadership to deal with COVID 19 and how he is largely responsible for the complete mess his country is in right now. Tragically, his totally inadequate response to the pandemic has done nothing to unify the nation at a time when it was so important for Americans to join together to fight an enemy that continues to assail them all indiscriminately. The death toll now stands at over 345 thousand souls, by far the greatest of any country. His loss of the 2020 election is directly attributable to all of this.

In a sane world in which reality, facts, science, logic, rule of law, and long-held principles of decency are paramount, the result of the 2020 election was very clear. Joe Biden won! In the modern history of the USA, results that have been even more closely contested have been accepted and the will of the people acknowledged (the 2000 election had to be resolved with a ruling by the Supreme Court before it was accepted). Today, however, the current president, some 58 days after his defeat, refuses to acknowledge this fact even after all but one of over 60 court filings to overturn the results have been unsuccessful. Given his past performance, this is not a surprising stance for him to take. A man completely without shame, he has no respect for the will of the electorate or the law.

What is surprising for me has been the subdued acquiescence - the silence - of most Republicans throughout this process. Their acceptance of the lies and misinformation of the President is truly cowardly. Furthermore, there are a number of them who have so completely immersed themselves into the sewer of lies of this malevolent autocrat that they have openly declared that on January 6th they will vote against the acceptance in the House of Representatives of the count of the Electoral College of some States which are in favour of Joe Biden. Normally this is usually a ceremonial event and, other than the inauguration, is the final process of the election.

It is the Democrats who have a majority in the House.  Such a vote, even if all Republicans voted against acceptance, would not pass. It would however send a very strong message of just how many legislators have no regard for their legal system or the will of their people.

January 6th is but five days way. It is going to be an interesting day in Washington. Most pundits expect that there will be some drama orchestrated by Republicans but that in the end, Joe Biden will receive his final and official endorsement as President-Elect.

I, however, still remain worried knowing how bat-shit crazy things are these days.

A Change of Luck

In a world that has gone topsy-turvy with COVID-19 running rampant throughout we are now practising “physical distancing” to help slow the rate of infection in our community. As we used to say in the navy we are “confined to barracks”. Fortunately, it is still acceptable to go outdoors and walk in the neighbourhood provided that one maintains a separation of six feet from any individual they may encounter on their walk. So, other than our walks in the area we have been spending a lot of time at home.

It's been a long time since I have read a book but with a lot of time on my hands lately I looked for something that I thought might be of interest to me. The book I selected was Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. It has been an excellent choice. A great read just full of interesting facts and marvels of the incredibly complex vessel that is each of us.  It is written in a way and at a level that a poor uneducated soul such as I can understand and enjoy.

This morning I finished the chapter "When Things Go Wrong: Diseases". The chapter ends with these words of Michael S. Kinch, PhD of Washington University in St. Louis:

“The fact is we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky.”

A keen precognitive observation by Dr. Kinch. Clearly, our luck has run out.

Concerns

Clearly, I am not a prolific Blogger! It has been over a year since I last made a post on this page which has made me wonder as to why I am doing this at all. Maybe, years in the future long after I have gone this obscure little corner of the internet will still be accessible and my grandchildren will able to read these posts just out of idle curiosity.

So 2019 has passed and by-and-large it was much the same as the years before. Which is to say that it was a pretty good year. We had a lovely visit in July with all of the family coming home and a trip for a couple of days in PEI. A really pleasant time. Last summer I got lots of golf in and although my game is not quite what it used to be, I did have one bright spot – I scored my lowest score ever. A 74 which was just two strokes short of golfing my age of 72. For no real reason, last year Cathie and I did very little travelling. This year we are planning a two-week trip to the southwest of England, first to St. Ives and then to a cottage in Devon. We will be spending this time with our daughter's family and most importantly our grandchildren (sorry Sara and Anth, you get second billing now).

That briefly was the year and our plans. But on the last day of 2019, China reported to the World Health Organization that they had detected a new corona-virus that had infected some of its citizens in the city of Wuhan. Within days there was considerable alarm about the nature of this disease which I think is now called COVID-19 and its rapid uncontrolled rate of infection. There was considerable uncertainty as to how this new virus is transmitted from human to human, and how long a person can have it before showing symptoms. It appears that older persons and those with other health issues (particularly respiratory issues) are the most at risk. Soon it was found in other cities in China and then in other parts of the world transmitted by travellers from China. And now it is being transmitted within the communities of other countries. The level of anxiety that this has had on the world is astounding. And it is not just the possibility of this illness infecting millions with many fatalities it is its effect on the entire fabric of the global economy. In the 64 days since it was first reported internationally, American stock markets have reported their biggest losses since the 2008 financial crisis and it has had a significant effect on travel especially to Asia. Most travel to China has come to a halt and there are travel bans to other infected areas imposed by countries trying to contain the spread of this disease. China has taken drastic measures to contain the outbreak with a significant effect on its economic output which I suspect will soon be to the detriment of the economies of those who trade with her.

So at this point, I have been holding back on booking our flight to England because I am worried about what the outcome of all of this is going to be. It is all over the news now and each day the problems seem to grow. I have a tendency to take in all that is going on in the world and form ideas that are very foreboding concerning the future only to find that my predictions usually are not as bad as I first conceived. I hope that will be true with this situation.

A Thought of My Brother

On this gray wet cold day, I have been thinking about my brother Jim and that in a few months it will be three years since he passed away. I miss him. There is this now empty spot in my core that he occupied and that connected me to the early part of my existence. With him gone, it is like I lost so much of my connection to the past. His memory was so much better than mine and whenever we did talk of our childhood as twins he would always remind me of that which I had hidden in the foggy recesses of my brain. Yes, I miss him and the good he brought to my life.

A Season Soon Ends

The golfing season is rapidly coming to its end. My home course at Hartlen Point officially closes next Monday and a long winter looms. I am certainly going to miss it. This year I did not get as many games in as I have in the last few years. That was mostly due to other important things going on like the visit of our family for most of July and the weather in May and October was not all that conducive to golf.

A few days ago I had a cursory look at this year's performance stats and there is a distinct decrease in the positive numbers recorded for my games. Other than 2004, when I spent more than a year struggling with a knee injury, my stats and handicap rating have steadily improved (although marginally in recent years).  For the first time since 2004, my golf is in decline.   This year I have had no back problems (which have often affected my play in the past) nor have I had any other health issues.  My health has not been a problem.  This year I seem to be hitting the ball off the tee as well as I have done in previous years but my ability to get the ball on the green from within 50 yards is now non-existent. If I do not have a full swing at the ball I will invariably flub the shot. Very frustrating. Definitely an aspect of my game I need to practice.

I believe it is just the fact that I am getting older and my body just does not function as well as it used to.  I have noticed that I am a little more tired at the end of a round and generally not as limber as I once was. Hey, I'm 71 and I suspect that is not going to get any better but, hopefully, my decline will be slow and that my good health will continue.

Already, I am looking forward to next year when I can work on my short game.

America Votes

Well, today Americans will finally be voting in their mid-term elections. It is a subject which has been in the news for months and in fever pitch these past few weeks. It seems that most pundits are reluctant to commit to a forecast in favour of one party or the other, a stance not surprising given their misreading of the 2016 presidential disaster. I find that to be such a depressing situation.

After almost two years of the buffoonery in the White House, that there is any support for more of it astonishes me. The clearly racist, misogynistic and hatred expressed by its current deceitful and narcissistic occupant has now been accepted and, for many Republicans, endorsed as party policy. That moderate Republicans are largely silent and have acquiesced to all of this is disheartening. Two years of this reality show and there is a significant number of Americans who have not clearly expressed abhorrence of the despicable fool in the White House. The mid-term elections should have been a clear message of rejection of the direction that he has taken the country. These elections should never have been this close.

The Democrats may very well take the majority in House of Congress but will likely lose seats in the Senate. If that happens, one can only hope that some form of restraint can be imposed on the malevolent narcissist who is now the president.

Good luck, America but I suspect you are about to descend further into chaos and party tribalism.

My wife, Cathie, likes to travel and is always checking opportunities for us to visit places near and far.  It is really easy for me - she comes up with ideas which are usually all great and if I am in agreement, she does the research and organizes everything.  No wonder I have such a good life.  Last March we flew off to Brunei again for a five-week stay to be with our daughter Sara and her husband Anth (that's what we say but really it is to see our grandkids, Alex and Isla).  In April we flew to Toronto to attend a memorial for my brother Jim.  It was on the 28th of April on what would have been his and was my 70th birthday.  Then last fall Cathie organized short (2/3 day) trips for us to Cape Breton and Kejimkujik National Park and, for Christmas, a stay at the Quarterdeck Resort just south of Liverpool. Here is a video of our Keji visit.

Keji Visit

In early December last year, we also took a short bus tour down to Boston the highlight of which was an evening with The Boston Pops.  As one who is not all that fussy about attending live events, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed that concert.

So this March we are off to Phoenix Arizona for the start of an 11-day bus tour of Canyons and National Parks of the south-west and end up in Las Vegas Nevada from where we fly back to Canada.

.

Still Grateful

Thirteen years and two days ago I wrote my first Blog here at this site.  My first thoughts concerned how grateful I was to be fortunate enough to be safe in a country like Canada and to be financially secure to live comfortably.  Nothing in the past 13 years has occurred to diminish those feelings.  I understand that this is not the case for all of us Canadians and we have problems.  We are not perfect and there are those of us not well served by our governments or social services.  However, unlike some other prosperous nations, all our political organizations/parties for the most part attempt to deal with these problems for the national good.  This is a good country.

I still am totally fascinated by the political soap opera south of the border.  In earlier blogs I worried that George Bush would destroy their nation and then thought that Barack Obama would right all its wrongs . . . neither occurred.  In retrospect, Bush was not the complete boogie man I saw nor Obama the complete saint.  Despite the many alarms I responded to, America survived.  So it is with some degree of caution that I now try to digest the great proliferation of media and Internet information that is now so readily available about American politics and all of which is totally overwhelming.  So much information and much of it is false and overly alarmist.  In particular, it is very hard now to discern fact-based rational reporting of political happenings.  I am now learning to try and look outside my self-created liberal bubble and appreciate that there must be rational conservative views that are totally valid.  The current president of the United States does not make this endeavour easy, indeed, I do believe it is his desire to create chaos.  He is an individual who has managed to so clearly divide their country into factions that are so intolerant of each other.  And from all this it is hard to hear the rational voices (republican or democrat). With this very confusing noise, I am having difficulty understanding what the hell is going on.  But one thing is very clear to me . . . the current president is a despicable, narcissistic, misogynist and shallow low life who is a disgrace to the human race.


Sigh . . . it is going to be hard to escape my liberal-leaning bubble.

On a more positive note, as I approach my 71st year I am still healthy enough to keep up my winter walking routine.  With the help of technology in the form of a Fitbit and more recently a Garmin GPS fitness tracker on my wrist, I have been keeping a daily record of my endeavors for the last two years. With these fitness trackers, I have been able to determine how many steps I have taken and distance walked in the time that I have had them.  For 2016 I walked 4.8 million steps and a distance of 2549 miles and for 2017 it was 4.9 million steps and a distance of 2425 miles (not sure why the miles in 2017 are less than 2016 while the steps are greater). So far this winter we have had weather which has been very favorable for walking so I have been getting lots of outdoor walks logged in.  This picture was taken a few days ago after a 10K walk on a day that was warm enough for me to remove my jacket.  This year I hope to do better in both steps and distance.  I should mention that this walking also includes all that done on the golf courses that I trek over when they open in the spring and close in the fall.  And that walking adds considerably to my numbers.  Last year at Hartlen Point I was the member with the highest number of recorded rounds - 161.

.

A Reichstag Fire . . . ?

.
Well, three weeks into the new American presidency and the malevolent incompetent (as I heard this man recently described) is fully creating the havoc that his white middle-America base (an appropriate word) seems to believe is going to “Make America Great Again”. Now the president of the United States is at war with American judiciary for blocking his thinly disguised ban on all Muslims from seven countries which are mostly in turmoil as a result of inept American military action in the middle east. 

As this president sees it, the judiciary have prevented him from protecting the American people and it is they (the judiciary) who will be solely responsible for any future terrorist attack. There has been so much written and spoken about this fiasco recently and some analysts have suggested that all this may not be what appears to be gross incompetence but rather it is part of a more sinister strategy to further inflame the fear of Americans. The ultimate goal of these schemes is to consolidate more power and executive authority in the hands of the ultra-conservative right-wing (and white) minority.

This dark view of events seemed all pretty outlandish to me. I subscribed to the idea all these events are more the result of a deeply flawed individual overwhelmed by the enormity of his new job and flying by the seat of his pants. And then I read this article from The New Yorker.

Now I wonder when America is going to have its “Reichstag fire” . . . 

WHEN IT’S TOO LATE TO STOP FASCISM, ACCORDING TO STEFAN ZWEIG

By George Prochnik

February 6, 2017

The Austrian émigré writer Stefan Zweig composed the first draft of his memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” in a feverish rapture during the summer of 1941, as headlines gave every indication that civilization was being swallowed in darkness. Zweig’s beloved France had fallen to the Nazis the previous year. The Blitz had reached a peak in May, with almost fifteen hundred Londoners dying in a single night. Operation Barbarossa, the colossal invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, in which nearly a million people would die, had launched in June. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, roared along just behind the Army, massacring Jews and other vilified groups—often with the help of local police and ordinary citizens.

Zweig himself had fled Austria preëmptively, in 1934. During the country’s brief, bloody civil war that February, when Engelbert Dollfuss, the country’s Clerico-Fascist Chancellor, had destroyed the Socialist opposition, Zweig’s Salzburg home had been searched for secret arms to supply the left-wing militias. Zweig at the time was regarded as one of Europe’s most prominent humanist-pacifists, and the absurd crudity of the police action so outraged him that he began packing his things that night. From Austria, Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, went to England, then to the New World, where New York City became his base, despite his aversion to its crowds and abrasive competitiveness. In June of 1941, longing for some respite from the needs of the exiles in Manhattan beseeching him for help with money, work, and connections, the couple rented a modest, rather grim bungalow in Ossining, New York, a mile uphill from Sing Sing Correctional Facility. There, Zweig set to furious work on his autobiography—laboring like “seven devils without a single walk,” as he put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks. His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote, “that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.” For the benefit of subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings.

Zweig noted that he could not remember when he first heard Hitler’s name. It was an era of confusion, filled with ugly agitators. During the early years of Hitler’s rise, Zweig was at the height of his career, and a renowned champion of causes that sought to promote solidarity among European nations. He called for the founding of an international university with branches in all the major European capitals, with a rotating exchange program intended to expose young people to other communities, ethnicities, and religions. He was only too aware that the nationalistic passions expressed in the First World War had been compounded by new racist ideologies in the intervening years. The economic hardship and sense of humiliation that the German citizenry experienced as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty had created a pervasive resentment that could be enlisted to fuel any number of radical, bloodthirsty projects.

Zweig did take notice of the discipline and financial resources on display at the rallies of the National Socialists—their eerily synchronized drilling and spanking-new uniforms, and the remarkable fleets of automobiles, motorcycles, and trucks they paraded. Zweig often travelled across the German border to the little resort town of Berchtesgaden, where he saw “small but ever-growing squads of young fellows in riding boots and brown shirts, each with a loud-colored swastika on his sleeve.” These young men were clearly trained for attack, Zweig recalled. But after the crushing of Hitler’s attempted putsch, in 1923, Zweig seems hardly to have given the National Socialists another thought until the elections of 1930, when support for the Party exploded—from under a million votes two years earlier to more than six million. At that point, still oblivious to what this popular affirmation might portend, Zweig applauded the enthusiastic passion expressed in the elections. He blamed the stuffiness of the country’s old-fashioned democrats for the Nazi victory, calling the results at the time “a perhaps unwise but fundamentally sound and approvable revolt of youth against the slowness and irresolution of ‘high politics.’ “

In his memoir, Zweig did not excuse himself or his intellectual peers for failing early on to reckon with Hitler’s significance. “The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book, ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program,” he wrote. They took him neither seriously nor literally. Even into the nineteen-thirties, “the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the movement . . . would inevitably collapse in no time.” Prideful of their own higher learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic maverick for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had already amassed vast support. After all, Germany was a state where the law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.”

Zweig recognized that propaganda had played a crucial role in eroding the conscience of the world. He described how, as the tide of propaganda rose during the First World War, saturating newspapers, magazines, and radio, the sensibilities of readers became deadened. Eventually, even well-meaning journalists and intellectuals became guilty of what he called “the ‘doping’ of excitement”—an artificial incitement of emotion that culminated, inevitably, in mass hatred and fear. Describing the healthy uproar that ensued after one artist’s eloquent outcry against the war in the autumn of 1914, Zweig observed that, at that point, “the word still had power. It had not yet been done to death by the organization of lies, by ‘propaganda.’ “ But Hitler “elevated lying to a matter of course,” Zweig wrote, just as he turned “anti-humanitarianism to law.” By 1939, he observed, “Not a single pronouncement by any writer had the slightest effect . . . no book, pamphlet, essay, or poem” could inspire the masses to resist Hitler’s push to war.

Propaganda both whipped up Hitler’s base and provided cover for his regime’s most brutal aggressions. It also allowed truth seeking to blur into wishful thinking, as Europeans’ yearning for a benign resolution to the global crisis trumped all rational skepticism. “Hitler merely had to utter the word ‘peace’ in a speech to arouse the newspapers to enthusiasm, to make them forget all his past deeds, and desist from asking why, after all, Germany was arming so madly,” Zweig wrote. Even as one heard rumors about the construction of special internment camps, and of secret chambers where innocent people were eliminated without trial, Zweig recounted, people refused to believe that the new reality could persist. “This could only be an eruption of an initial, senseless rage, one told oneself. That sort of thing could not last in the twentieth century.” In one of the most affecting scenes in his autobiography, Zweig describes seeing the first refugees from Germany climbing over the Salzburg mountains and fording the streams into Austria shortly after Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship. “Starved, shabby, agitated . . . they were the leaders in the panicked flight from inhumanity which was to spread over the whole earth. But even then I did not suspect when I looked at those fugitives that I ought to perceive in those pale faces, as in a mirror, my own life, and that we all, we all, we all would become victims of the lust for power of this one man.”

Zweig was miserable in the United States. Americans seemed indifferent to the suffering of émigrés; Europe, he said repeatedly, was committing suicide. He told one friend that he felt as if he were living a “posthumous” existence. In a desperate effort to renew his will to live, he travelled to Brazil in August of 1941, where, on previous visits, the country’s people had treated him as a superstar, and where the visible intermixing of the races had struck Zweig as the only way forward for humanity. In letters from the time he sounds chronically wistful, as if he has travelled back to before the world of yesterday. And yet, for all his fondness for the Brazilian people and appreciation of the country’s natural beauty, his loneliness grew more and more acute. Many of his closest friends were dead. The others were thousands of miles away. His dream of a borderless, tolerant Europe (always his true, spiritual homeland) had been destroyed. He wrote to the author Jules Romains, “My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of passport, the self of exile.” In February of 1942, together with Lotte, Zweig took an overdose of sleeping pills. In the formal suicide message he left behind, Zweig wrote that it seemed better to withdraw with dignity while he still could, having lived “a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth.”

I wonder how far along the scale of moral degeneration Zweig would judge America to be in its current state. We have a magnetic leader, one who lies continually and remorselessly—not pathologically but strategically, to placate his opponents, to inflame the furies of his core constituency, and to foment chaos. The American people are confused and benumbed by a flood of fake news and misinformation. Reading in Zweig’s memoir how, during the years of Hitler’s rise to power, many well-meaning people “could not or did not wish to perceive that a new technique of conscious cynical amorality was at work,” it’s difficult not to think of our own present predicament. Last week, as Trump signed a drastic immigration ban that led to an outcry across the country and the world, then sought to mitigate those protests by small palliative measures and denials, I thought of one other crucial technique that Zweig identified in Hitler and his ministers: they introduced their most extreme measures gradually—strategically—in order to gauge how each new outrage was received. “Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength, to see whether the world conscience would still digest the dose,” Zweig wrote. “The doses became progressively stronger until all Europe finally perished from them.”

And still Zweig might have noted that, as of today, President Trump and his sinister “wire-pullers” have not yet locked the protocols for their exercise of power into place. One tragic lesson offered by “The World of Yesterday” is that, even in a culture where misinformation has become omnipresent, where an angry base, supported by disparate, well-heeled interests, feels empowered by the relentless lying of a charismatic leader, the center might still hold. In Zweig’s view, the final toxin needed to precipitate German catastrophe came in February of 1933, with the burning of the national parliament building in Berlin–an arson attack Hitler blamed on the Communists but which some historians still believe was carried out by the Nazis themselves. “At one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed,” Zweig recalled. The destruction of a symbolic edifice—a blaze that caused no loss of life—became the pretext for the government to begin terrorizing its own civilian population. That fateful conflagration took place less than thirty days after Hitler became Chancellor. The excruciating power of Zweig’s memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.

George Prochnik is the author of “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” and “Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem,” which is out in March from Other Press.