Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Nicholas

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
manhefnawi

Nicholas I: Russia's Last Absolute Monarch | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...2%80%99s-last-absolute-monarch

Russia Nicholas I

shared by manhefnawi on 22 May 18 - No Cached
  • Nicholas’ power as an Autocrat was indeed so absolute that any command, even as extreme as the one to march on France, was fully within his power should he choose to exercise it
  • Throughout his reign, Nicholas jealously guarded the recognized prerogatives of the ruler in all aspects of government and he exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great
  • Only a strong Emperor could bear the crushing burden of such a system of personal government and, as events after 1848 made clear, even Russia’s iron-willed Emperor himself could not bear such a burden in the face of serious crises.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Nicholas I must be considered Russia’s last absolute monarch, therefore, not because his power was unlimited, but because never again after his reign would the power of the Autocrat be completely undivided
  • As the third son of the Emperor Paul I, Nicholas Pavlovich was given the traditional education of a Russian Grand Duke. He was taught not the art of statecraft, but that of military command; more precisely, in view of his father’s love of the parade ground, he was trained for command on the drill field. Because of his junior position in the Imperial family he was never regarded as a possible candidate for the throne during his childhood or adolescent years; but, during the last decade of his elder brother Alexander I’s reign (1815-1825), the order of succession changed dramatically.
  • Nicholas, as the third son of Paul I, became the heir apparent. As such, the matter of succession seemed clear enough
  • The ill-advised secrecy about the succession soon bore chaotic fruit in late 1825 when Alexander died under mysterious circumstances while on a visit to southern Russia
  • In the absence of his two older brothers, he often had acted as the senior member of the royal family, but even so, Constantine Pavlovich remained heir-apparent in the eyes of the senior state counsellors, the officers of the army, and the nobility. Because he felt that he could not assume the Imperial title until Constantine had publicly renounced the crown, Nicholas therefore proclaimed his brother Emperor when news of Alexander’s death reached St Petersburg in late November 1825
  • Constantine chose to regard his younger brother’s title to the throne as an accomplished fact and, for reasons best known only to himself, he steadfastly refused to come to St Petersburg from Warsaw publicly to renounce his rights to the throne
  • As the victor in the revolt of December 14th, he must defend the full power of autocracy by all possible means, and all threats to such power must be eliminated; translated into terms of foreign policy, this meant that he must stand as the defender of the status quo, of the Holy Alliance of his brother Alexander, in Europe
  • Indeed, the second quarter of the nineteenth century saw the greatest flowering of Russian literature in the Imperial period
  • Nicholas thoroughly distrusted the intelligentsia, he also was apprehensive about the nobility and had no confidence in the regular bureaucracy to plan and execute changes in the existing order. The nobility, he felt, could never be trusted to set aside the social and economic interests of their class in order to work for the welfare of the state as a whole. Further, Nicholas saw in the actions of the Decembrists a potential threat to his power from the nobility
  • From the beginning of his reign, then, Nicholas was aware that changes must come, and he had concluded that these matters could best be accomplished by concentrating the work of reform in institutions over which he could exercise direct personal control. One should, at this point, examine how his efforts worked in practice
  • Agents of the Third Section were everywhere and any unusual event, even such a seemingly insignificant occurrence as the arrival of a stranger in a provincial town, made its way into the Section’s files in St Petersburg
  • the peasantry in Russia did require attention for the conditions under which they lived were extremely harsh. Yet a solution to the serf problem, whether in terms of abolishing serfdom or simply ameliorating peasant living conditions, was beyond the capacities of the system that Nicholas had created. Reforms of state finances, the codification of the law, and the creation of an efficient and paternalistic gendarmerie were possible in Russia of the 1830s and 1840s because their success depended neither on the full co-operation of all levels of the bureaucracy nor on that of the nobility.
  • The Emperor’s reaction to the revolutions of 1848 caused the Nicholas System to degenerate rapidly from a type of paternal state conservatism to a system of stark, sterile reaction. After 1848 it became impossible to discuss progressive ideas in print, and even the works of Karamzin, the court historian during the reign of Alexander I, were censored
  • That the Nicholas System was severely shaken by the revolutions of 1848 is clear enough; nevertheless, it managed to survive the shock. The following year, in response to the pleas of the Habsburg Emperor, Russia’s armies crushed the revolt of Kossuth’s rebels in Elungary, and a year later Russia preserved the uneasy balance of power between the Habsburg Monarchy and Prussia in Germany by dictating the Convention of Olmutz
  • Crushing defeats in the Crimean War dealt the death blow to the Nicholas System. From the very first losses in the South, it was evident that the Empire of 1854 was only a failing shadow of the Empire of 1812 whose armies had driven the Grande Armee from Russia and had pursued Napoleon into Germany. The defeat in the Crimea meant that broad and fundamental reforms must come to Russia, and the Nicholas System had paved the way for them by its failure
  • When Alexander II mounted the throne in 1855, the nobility was indeed weaker, for the policy that Nicholas had pursued toward them during the first twenty years of his reign had taken its toll. Further, the lack of a legal basis for the nobility’s power over their serfs was now clear as a result of the compilation of the laws that Nicholas’ government had achieved
  • Nicholas himself did not live to see the Great Reforms nor did he live to see the final failure of his system; he died in 1855 while war still raged in the Crimea. His system had preserved the absolute power of the Autocrat intact at a time when absolute monarchy had vanished from the scene in Western Europe. The price for preserving an anachronistic system was paid in the Crimea, but it was also paid by Russian society as well
brookegoodman

Czar Nicholas II abdicates Russian throne - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...czar-nicholas-ii-abdicates

politics culture history

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • During the February Revolution, Czar Nicholas II, ruler of Russia since 1894, is forced to abdicate the throne by the Petrograd insurgents, and a provincial government is installed in his place.
  • Nicholas soon retracted most of these concessions, and the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups won wide support.
  • In March 1917, the army garrison at Petrograd joined striking workers in demanding socialist reforms, and Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • After a secret meeting, a death sentence was passed on the imperial family, and Nicholas, his wife, his children, and several of their servants were gunned down on the night of July 16.
aqconces

BBC News - Tsar Nicholas - exhibits from an execution - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-18592372

Tsar Nicholas execution exhibit exhibits

shared by aqconces on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • For the first time, Russians have the chance to examine the evidence surrounding the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family following the Russian Revolution almost 100 years ago.
  • He and his family and four members of staff were killed without trial by Bolsheviks in the early hours of 17 July 1918, in the cellar of a house in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.
  • The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their five children were found in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In Soviet times Nicholas was portrayed as a weak and incompetent leader, whose decisions had led to military defeats and the deaths of millions of his subjects.
manhefnawi

George V: How To Keep Your Crown | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...george-v-how-keep-your-crown

1917 Nicholas II Wilhelm Prussia Russia Britain George V Monarchy

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • In May 1910 seven kings (of Belgium, Greece, Norway, Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark and Portugal), one emperor (of Germany) and some 30 princes and archdukes gathered in London for the funeral of Edward VII
  • Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, also at the funeral, was murdered at Sarajevo in 1914; the new heir Karl abdicated in 1918
  • George’s favourite cousin Nicholas, Tsar of Russia, abdicated in 1917 and was murdered a year later. George’s other cousin Wilhelm II, German Kaiser, was forced from the throne into exile. By 1918 George wasn’t the only king left in Europe, but he was the only emperor
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The reason essentially was because he didn’t have any power.
  • Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas, both to differing degrees autocratic monarchs, had gone to strenuous lengths to ignore aspects of the political landscape they didn’t like or found offensively modern
  • Nicholas, meanwhile, did everything he could to avoid having to engage with the modern world in any shape or form, terrified that any change would threaten his control over Russia. He regarded autocracy as a sacred trust handed down to him that must be kept intact whatever.
  • As for the workers and peasants
  • Nicholas simply never encountered them
  • The king and his secretaries believed the British royal family must sell itself to the nation, justify its existence and seem entirely unthreatening.
  • Of the seven kings at Edward’s funeral, only three others kept their thrones: Belgium, Norway and Denmark. All three were constitutional monarchies.
jongardner04

Future Tsar Nicholas II Born in Russia - 0 views

www.newhistorian.com/...3797

shared by jongardner04 on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • On 18th May, 1868, the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was born near St. Petersburg. Nicholas’ reign would go on to witness some of the most significant moments in Russian history: the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 Revolution, the First World War and ultimately, the Revolution of 1917 which saw the abolition of the monarchy and Russia’s transition to Bolshevism.
jlessner

Smart Guns Save Lives. So Where Are They? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-lives-so-where-are-they.html

guns lives politics US culture policy

shared by jlessner on 30 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • bout 20 children and teenagers are shot daily in the United States, according to a study by the journal Pediatrics.
  • Indeed, more preschool-age children (about 80 a year) are killed by guns each year than police officers are killed by guns (about 50), according to the F.B.I. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • This toll is utterly unnecessary, for the technology to make childproof guns goes back more than a century. Beginning in the 1880s, Smith & Wesson (whose gun was used in the Walmart killing) actually sold childproof handguns that required a lever to be depressed as the trigger was pulled.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Doesn’t it seem odd that your cellphone can be set up to require a PIN or a fingerprint, but there’s no such option for a gun?
  • Kloepfer designed a smart handgun that fires only when a finger it recognizes is on the grip. More than 1,000 fingerprints can be authorized per gun, and Kloepfer says the sensor is 99.999 percent accurate.A child can’t fire the gun. Neither can a thief — important here in a country in which more than 150,000 guns are stolen annually.
fischerry

Nicholas Kristof says North Korea has "galvanized for war" - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...las-kristof-galvanized-for-war

northkorea propaganda crisis

shared by fischerry on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • When New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof traveled North Korea recently, the five-day trip turned out to be "very different" from his prior two visits.
  • "North Korea is always a bizarre place and there's always a certain amount of over-the-top rhetoric. But this time the country has really galvanized for war," Kristof said
bluekoenig

Why blackface is still part of Dutch holidays - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics history culture crisis neatherlands black pete racism discrimination

shared by bluekoenig on 22 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 22 Jan 20
     
    Dutch holidays consisted not only of the fun festivities of St. Nicholas Day, but also a relatively recent new character called Black Pete, traditionally a slave to St. Nicholas and a racist caricature often played by white Dutchmen from the Dutch colonial days. Many arguments have been made for the keeping of Black Pete as a part of the celebration including that black Dutchmen were okay with it (many were not and found it offensive and insignificant enough to be removed from celebrations), that the coloring was not meant to represent skin tone but soot from climbing around in chimneys (which was also not historically true as the author wrote him as a slave from Spain who helps St. Nicholas), that children enjoyed it too much to remove it (as one woman said in the video, Black Pete often scared children because of his stories of hitting or kidnapping naughty children). Black Pete was meant to be removed from celebrations and replaced with an adapted version, Chimney Pete, who is a white Dutchman not in full blackface but with smudges of soot to actually go with the story people have been trying to use to justify its continued use in holiday celebrations after a poll found black children were actually being discriminated against by their peers for looking like Black Pete
Javier E

Inequality And The Right - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...inequality-and-the-right.html

income inequality social economic stability justice

shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as
  • To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.
  • it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.
jlessner

'A Path Appears,' by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kristof-and-sheryl-wudunn.html

shared by jlessner on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • jlessner on 22 Oct 14
     
    In the wrong hands, "A Path Appears" is a dangerous book: You wouldn't want to leave it lying around where your teenager might glance at it. He might get diverted from that reassuring ambition to be a banker. Frankly, only scoundrels and saints can read this book safely: Everyone else will find it upsetting and uplifting in equal measure.
Javier E

Lynching as Racial Terrorism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ching-as-racial-terrorism.html

lynching racism history

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Mr. Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, took a step in that direction on Tuesday when it released a report that chronicles nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The report focuses on what it describes as “racial terror lynchings,” which were used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Victims in these cases were often murdered without being accused of actual crimes but for minor social transgressions that included talking back to whites or insisting on fairness and basic rights.
  • The report is the result of five years of hard work. Researchers reviewed local newspapers, historical archives and court records; interviewed local historians, survivors and victims’ descendants; and scrutinized contemporaneously published articles in African-American newspapers, which took a closer interest in these matters than the white press. In the end, researchers found at least 700 more lynchings in the 12 states than were previously reported, suggesting that “racial terror lynching” was far more common than was generally believed.
  • The report argues compellingly that the threat of death by lynching was far more influential in shaping present-day racial reality than contemporary Americans typically understand. It argues that The Great Migration from the South, in which millions of African-Americans moved North and West, was partly a forced migration in which black people fled the threat of murder at the hands of white mobs.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It sees lynching as the precursor of modern-day racial bias in the criminal justice system. The researchers argue, for example, that lynching declined as a mechanism of social control as the Southern states shifted to a capital punishment strategy, in which blacks began more frequently to be executed after expedited trials. The legacy of lynching was apparent in that public executions were still being used to mollify mobs in the 1930s even after such executions were legally banned.
  • Despite playing a powerful role in the shaping of Southern society, the lynching era has practically disappeared from public discourse. As the report notes: “Most Southern terror lynching victims were killed on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. The Southern landscape is cluttered with plaques, statues and monuments that record, celebrate and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against black citizens during the era of racial terror.”
  • Mr. Stevenson’s group makes the persuasive argument that this history needs to be properly commemorated and more widely discussed before the United States can fully understand the causes and origins of the racial injustice that hobbles the country to this day.
draneka

Czar Nicholas II, Under Arrest and Doomed to Die - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-arrest-and-doomed-to-die.html

new york times

shared by draneka on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • By the time the photograph appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial 100 years ago, it was two months out of date. The imperial family had already been moved to western Siberia.
  • Times Insider is offering glimpses of some of the most memorable wartime illustrations that appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial
malonema1

How One Group Is Pushing Victims' Rights Laws Across The Country : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rights-laws-across-the-country

US politics culture

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • If it wins final approval from voters this fall, the amendment would enshrine a list of rights for crime victims into the state constitution. They include the right to be notified of when the accused is released on bail, the right to be heard at sentencing hearings, and the right to reasonable protection from the accused.
  • "After the funeral, my husband wanted me to get a loaf of bread in the market," said Leach, "and I went in and he was coming out of the market. But we weren't notified or anything." "Standing there, staring down my mother," added Nicholas. The suspect was later convicted. He died in prison while serving his sentence. That might have been the end of the story except that years later, Henry Nicholas started a tech company called Broadcom and became a billionaire.
  • But these efforts haven't been without their critics. The American Civil Liberties Union has argued Marsy's Law infringes on the presumption of innocence by granting rights to a victim before a defendant has been convicted of a crime.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Marsy's Law campaign says it expects to spend millions of dollars to support the amendment. But the idea that a California billionaire could lead the charge to amend the New Hampshire Constitution is also rubbing some local lawmakers the wrong way.
  • Amanda Grady Sexton, state director for the Marsy's Law campaign, disagrees with the argument that the amendment isn't a response to a local problem. Sexton has worked with the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence since 2001 and says acquiring constitutional rights for crime victims has long been a goal for her organization.
  • "I've got a woman whose husband was killed in a car accident in August of last year and she can't get the crime report from [the Department of] Public Safety because they're afraid to release the information," Mickelson said. "They're not sure if there was a crime, and if there was, who the victim is."
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
    " "
Javier E

'Revolution? What Revolution?' Russia Asks 100 Years Later - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...evolution-100-years-putin.html

russia revolution history memory lenin putin

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • MOSCOW — The Kremlin plans to sit out the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
  • There will be no national holiday on Sunday, March 12, the date generally recognized as the start of the uprising. Nor will there even be a government-issued official interpretation, like the one mandating that World War II was a “Great Victory.”
  • In comparison, the Kremlin has turned World War II into the apogee of national unity.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Previously, the official narrative was an essay written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which he argued that deep distrust between the court and the educated elite along with German meddling brought about catastrophe.
  • The latter fits the Kremlin narrative that Russia has long been besieged by foreign aggressors and that the West strives to implant friendly regimes everywhere by sponsoring “color revolutions.” Columnists have been lumping 1917 among more recent color revolutions in places like Georgia and Ukraine, naturally listing the United States among the suspected agitators.
  • There is also a damning lack of heroic figures in the revolution. Czar Nicholas II was deposed and thus weak. Alexander F. Kerensky, the central figure in the provisional government, proved ineffective. Lenin fomented appalling bloodshed and destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church, a pillar of Mr. Putin’s support.
  • “Vladimir Putin cannot compare himself to Nicholas II, nor to Lenin nor to Kerensky, because that is not Russian history to be proud of,” said Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and the author of a best-selling book, “All the Kremlin’s Men,” which details the inner workings of the Putin regime. “In terms of 1917, nothing can be used as a propaganda tool.”
  • Mr. Putin’s critiques of the revolution contrast markedly with his usual glowing tributes to Russian history. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “We know well the consequences that these great upheavals can bring,” he said in his state of the federation speech in December. “Unfortunately, our country went through many such upheavals and their consequences in the 20th century.”At an earlier public forum, after disparaging Lenin, he said, “We didn’t need the world revolution.”
  • At one recent forum, Vladimir R. Medinsky, the conservative minister of culture, said the revolution underscored the dangers of letting liberals rule, because they always put self-interest above Russia.
  • Metropolitan Hilarion of the Russian Orthodox Church, speaking at the same event, lambasted those who destroyed the czarist state rather than seeking compromise.
  • Liberals retort that a repressive government ignoring vast income disparity and curbing basic rights should be worried about history repeating itself.
  • “The authorities cannot celebrate 1917,” said Nikita Sokolov, a historian. “Whatever might have happened, the impulse of the revolution was social justice. A country with such inequality can’t celebrate this. Also, the authorities think that any revolution is a color revolution.”
  • At a recent forum, Leonid Reshetnikov, a historian and retired lieutenant general in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, described trying to explain to his granddaughter why the city of Yekaterinburg had a church dedicated to the czar and his family, who were canonized by the church, as well as a monument to Lenin, the man who ordered them shot there.
  • “We live in historical schizophrenia, with these monuments to Lenin, to all of them,” he said, going on to denounce any street protesters as potential revolutionaries.
Javier E

The Coronavirus Could End American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611605

learning trends history crisis pandemic international

shared by Javier E on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.
  • This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College
  • It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.
  • “The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.
  • When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.
  • We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”
  • By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.
  • Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.
  • Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country
  • Pandemics are, in fact, particularly ripe moments for cross-cultural learning
  • as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.
  • As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.
  • A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.
  • “Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal
  • New Zealand’s record of learning
  • His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.
  • Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing
  • In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change
  • “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.
  • Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis
  • with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”
  • Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.
brookegoodman

Vladimir Lenin - Biography, Policies & Tomb - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...vladimir-lenin

politics

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary and head of the Bolshevik Party who rose to prominence during the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The bloody upheaval marked the end of the oppressive Romanov dynasty and centuries of imperial rule in Russia. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party, making Lenin leader of the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist state.  
  • Later that year, 17-year-old Lenin—still known as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov—was expelled from Kazan Imperial University, where he was studying law, for taking part in an illegal student protest. After his expulsion, Lenin immersed himself in radical political literature, including the writings of German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital.
  • Lenin later moved to Germany and then Switzerland, where he met other European Marxists. During this time, he adopted the pseudonym Lenin and established the Bolshevik Party.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Lenin advocated for Russian defeat in World War I, arguing that it would hasten the political revolution he desired. It was during this time that he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism.
  • When Lenin returned home to Russia in April 1917, the Russian Revolution was already beginning. Strikes over food shortages in March had forced the abdication of the inept Czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of imperial rule.
  • Lenin, aware of the leadership vacuum plaguing Russia, decided to seize power. He secretly organized factory workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors into Red Guards—a volunteer paramilitary force. On November 7 and 8, 1917, Red Guards captured Provisional Government buildings in a bloodless coup d’état.
  • The Bolshevik Revolution plunged Russia into a three-year civil war. The Red Army—backed by Lenin’s newly formed Russian Communist Party—fought the White Army, a loose coalition of monarchists, capitalists and supporters of democratic socialism.
  • As the economy deteriorated during the Russian Civil War, Lenin used the Cheka to silence political opposition, both from his opponents and challengers within his own political party.
  • After the assassination attempt, the Cheka instituted a period known as the Red Terror, a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime, Russia’s upper classes and any socialists who weren’t loyal to Lenin’s Communist Party.
  • About a million people braved the cold Russian winter to stand in line for hours before paying their respects to Lenin, who was lying in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow.
brookegoodman

Russian Revolution - Causes, Timeline & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...russian-revolution

politics crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The violent revolution marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power and destroyed the tradition of csarist rule. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
  • In the early 1900s, Russia was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe with an enormous peasantry and a growing minority of poor industrial workers.
  • In 1861, the Russian Empire finally abolished serfdom. The emancipation of serfs would influence the events leading up to the Russian Revolution by giving peasants more freedom to organize.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the population of major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow nearly doubled, resulting in overcrowding and destitute living conditions for a new class of Russian industrial workers.
  • The massacre sparked the Russian revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country.
  • Russia entered into World War I in August 1914 in support of the Serbs and their French and British allies. Their involvement in the war would soon prove disastrous for the Russian Empire.
  • Czar Nicholas left the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1915 to take command of the Russian Army front. (The Russians had renamed the imperial city in 1914, because the name “St. Petersburg” had sounded too German.)
  • Russian nobles eager to end Rasputin’s influence murdered him on December 30, 1916. By then, most Russians had lost faith in the failed leadership of the czar. Government corruption was rampant, the Russian economy remained backward and Nicholas repeatedly dissolved the Duma, the toothless Russian parliament established after the 1905 revolution, when it opposed his will.
  • The leaders of the provisional government, including young Russian lawyer Alexander Kerensky, established a liberal program of rights such as freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the right of unions to organize and strike. They opposed violent social revolution.
  • The Russian Revolution paved the way for the rise of communism as an influential political belief system around the world. It set the stage for the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power that would go head-to-head with the United States during the Cold War.
Javier E

No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China's Cultural Revolution - by Nicholas ... - 0 views

grossman.arcdigital.media/...-america-is-not-experiencing-a

Cultural Revolution woke liberalism free speech Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.
  • Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.
  • State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.
  • We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.
  • Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.
  • Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”
  • The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.
  • Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.
  • For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be
  • In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.
  • In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998
  • The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).
  • Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”
  • There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.
  • There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).
  • Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.
  • Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.
  • Two things jump out here:
  • Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:
  • even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.
  • The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.
  • Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.
  • The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).
  • If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism
  • Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.
  • Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.
  • When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.
  • Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.
  • Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them
  • Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution
  • Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.
  • With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.
  • a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.
  • Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.
  • To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).
  • It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.
  • It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.
  • American politics is often binary.
  • Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants
  • There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.
  • I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.
  • I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control
  • I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.
  • I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.
  • I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.
  • I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.
  • at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.
  • I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.
  • I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.
  • I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?
  • I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.
  • I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.
  • I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.
  • I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.
  • I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.
  • I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.
  • I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.
  • I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.
  • If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.
  • I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.
  • I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.
Javier E

Opinion | If Democrats Win Back the House, They Will Have John Roberts to Thank - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lligan-voting-rights-2024.html

scotus opinion voting

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Milligan, Wasserman continued, “could reverberate across the Deep South leading to the creation of new Black-majority, strongly Democratic seats in multiple states
  • If Democrats can gain five seats, it will critically affect the balance of power in Washington.
  • Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard and an expert on election law, wrote by email that Milligan is significant both substantively and politically:First, it means that Section 2 remains fully operative as a bulwark against racial vote dilution; second, it signals to conservative lower courts that they need to rule in favor of plaintiffs on facts like those in Milligan; third, it takes off the table arguments that Section 2 must be narrowly construed to avoid constitutional problems; and fourth, if Section 2 is constitutional, so should be other laws targeting racial disparities.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • it comes at a time when “a confluence of at least four political and technological developments will make its practical effect significant.”
  • First, technological advances, as used in the Milligan case, make it easier to find new V.R.A. districts that can be reasonably configured.
  • Third, the private bar has become extremely well resourced to pursue these cases.
  • Second, minority-preferred candidates can win with lower minority voting-age populations (falling from estimates as high as 65 percent in the 1990s to below 45 percent now), which means more minority voters are available to create additional V.R.A. districts.
  • Fourth, the debates over partisan gerrymandering in the last decade brought many new strong social scientists into this area, in which expert analysis of maps and voting patterns plays a critical role.
  • John Roberts’s majority opinion is particularly important because it rejects the argument that race-based remedial districting is unconstitutional:Alabama further argues that, even if the Fifteenth Amendment authorizes the effects test of section 2, that Amendment does not authorize race-based redistricting as a remedy for section 2 violations. But for the last four decades, this Court and the lower federal courts have repeatedly applied the effects test of section 2 as interpreted in Gingles and, under certain circumstances, have authorized race-based redistricting as a remedy for state districting maps that violate section 2.In that context, Roberts continued, “we are not persuaded by Alabama’s arguments that section 2 as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress.”
  • My best guess is that Roberts and Kavanaugh thought it best to proceed cautiously and bide their time. The court as an institution can only take so many bombshells at a time. The issue will come back to the court soon enough.
  • But, Tribe continued, “Allen v. Milligan remains highly significant as an essential reminder that the court doesn’t exist in an isolation booth, unaffected by public reactions to its decisions that venture too far from the mainstream of legal and social thought.”
  • Roberts and Kavanaugh, in Tribe’s view, chose not to press the case against race-based redistricting in part because of “the controversy unleashed by the court in its shattering abortion ruling in Dobbs last June, coupled with other unrestrained shocks to the system delivered by the court in the landmark cases involving guns and climate change, and aggravated by the ethical stench swirling about the court as a result of improprieties.”
  • These developments, Tribe continued, “almost certainly had an impact, however subconscious, on the chief justice and on Justice Kavanaugh, who has increasingly sought to distance himself from the hard right.”
1 - 20 of 92 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page