Unfair? A world that revolves around American military, economic and cultural power, and uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency?
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Europe's Dependence on the U.S. Was All Part of the Plan - POLITICO Magazine - 0 views
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What Trump fails to understand is that the disparity in spending, with the U.S. paying more than its allies, is not a bug of the system. It is a feature. This is how the great postwar statesmen designed it, and this immensely foresighted strategy has ensured the absence of great power conflict—and nuclear war—for three-quarters of a century.
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Dean Acheson, George Marshall and the other great statesmen of their generation pursued this strategy because they had learned, at unimaginable cost, that the eternal American fantasy of forever being free of Europe—isolationism, or America Firstism, in other words—was just that: a fantasy.
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Our postwar statesmen were neither weak nor incompetent. They were the architects of the greatest foreign policy triumph in U.S. history.
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o successful was this policy that Americans now—most of whom weren’t alive to witness the enormity of these wars—see peace, unity, prosperity and stability as Europe’s natural state. This is an illusion. For centuries, Europe was the fulcrum of global violence. With the age of global exploration, it became the globe’s primary exporter of violence
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The U.S. military was always an integral part of the plan to unite and rebuild Europe from the rubble. Since World War II, U.S. troops have been deployed in Eurasia to ensure the continent cannot be dominated by a single power capable of monopolizing its resources and turning them against the U.S. The United States has built overwhelmingly massive military assets there to deter local arms races before they begin, and it has simultaneously assured those under U.S. protection that there is no need to begin local arms races, for their safety is guaranteed.
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Only America, and massive power as the U.S. exercised it, could have pacified and unified Europe under its aegis. No other continental country possessed half the world’s GDP. No other country had enough distance from Europe to be trusted, to a large extent, by all parties and indifferent to its regional jealousies. No other country had a strategic, moral and economic vision for Europe that its inhabitants could be persuaded gladly to share
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The founders of these institutions fully intended them to be the foundations of a United States of Europe, much like the United States of America. Profound economic interdependence, they believed, would make further European wars impossible.
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At the same time, the United States built an open, global order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the International Court of Justice. This order is in many respects an empire—a Pax Americana—but it is more humane than any empire that preceded it, with institutions that are intended to benefit all parties.
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Through the application of economic, diplomatic and military force majeure, the United States suppressed Europe’s internal security competition. This is why postwar Europe ceased to be the world’s leading exporter of violence and became, instead, the world’s leading exporter of luxury sedans.
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American grand strategy rests upon the credibility of its promise to protect American allies; this credibility rests, in turn, upon U.S. willingness to display its commitment.
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The Soviet Union’s criticism of the Marshall Plan and other American involvement in Europe was eerily similar to the language Russia’s now uses in its campaign to undermine NATO and the EU. The vocabulary and tropes of Russian propaganda are widely echoed, wittingly or unwittingly, by far-right, far-left and other antiliberal politicians, parties and movements throughout the West
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The loudest exponent of the idea that the U.S. is getting rolled, that the European Union was “created to destroy us,” and that multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization assault the “sovereignty” of the nations concerned is, unfortunately, the president of the United States.
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It’s hard to understate how foolish and reckless these notions are. History can be shoved down the memory hole, for a time, but reality is never so cooperative.
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The Second World War proved not only that isolationism and American-Firstism were fantasies, but exceptionally childish and dangerous ones, at that. In the age of hyperglobalized trade, international air travel, the internet, nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, these fantasies are even more childish and dangerous. The U.S. may be on another continent, but it is not on another planet.
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It is true that the U.S. spends more on its military, in absolute dollars and as a percentage of GDP, than any European country. That was always part of the deal. The U.S. is a global superpower. It can fight a war anywhere in the world, invade any country at will, and (at least in theory) fight multiple simultaneous major wars—even in space. Of course this costs more. It is in America’s advantage to be the only power on the planet that can do this.
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Conversely, it is not remotely in America’s advantage for other countries to spend as much money on their militaries as we do
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Trump’s refusal to deter our shared enemies and protect our allies risks provoking a regional European arms race—exactly what the U.S. has sought to avoid for 74 years
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Above all, Trump’s overt support for sordid, Kremlin-backed actors who seek to undermine Europe’s unity is unfathomable: How could it be in Europe’s interest, or in ours, for the American president to lend the United States’ prestige and support to Europe’s Nazis, neo-Nazis, doctrinal Marxists, populists, authoritarians, and ethnic supremacists, particularly since all of them are ideologically hostile to the United States?
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Should the unraveling of the order the U.S. built proceed at this pace, the world will soon be neither peaceful nor prosperous. Nor will the effects be confined to regions distant from the United States. America will feel them gradually, and then, probably, overnight—in the form of a devastating, sudden shock.
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The American-led world order, undergirded by the ideal of liberal democracy, has been highly imperfect. But it has been the closest thing to Utopia our fallen and benighted species has ever seen. Its benefits are not just economic, although those benefits are immense. Its benefits must be measured in wars not fought, lives not squandered
High Trust, High Fear: Inside the Dystopian Hellhole of Trumpism - Talking Points Memo - 0 views
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The clear implication is not simply that Trump hires bad or untrustworthy people. It is far more organic. Trump creates and operates in a world in which anyone can be tossed overboard, fired or denigrated more or less at the drop of a hat. Having the dignity crushed out of you amounts to the most reliable and universal aspect of Trump service. Trump also notoriously sets lieutenants against each other, both for kicks and as a method of control. Trump is himself impulsive and erratic by nature. He uses this culture of disruption and unpredictability as a method of managing himself and others.
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All of this breeds a climate of mistrust and suspicion both in the ‘bilateral’ relationships between Trump and individual staffers and within the whole subculture – vertical and horizontal mistrust, we might say. It’s a low trust, high fear climate which breeds backstabbing, betrayal, paranoia which only deepens in a self-validating, self-perpetuating way.
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It is a system of maximal public obsequiousness and maximal private subterfuge. Everything is a lie. It breeds all these negative behaviors because it is an unsafe environment in which they become rational.
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What is worth noting is how this pattern is rooted in the zero-sum mentality which informs every aspect of Trump’s world. That applies to everything from ‘deals’ and how he treats people to the extreme preference for bullying bilateral trade agreements over the more rules-based treaty systems which have been the focus of US foreign policy for three-quarters of century.
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One of the most illuminating concepts I ever learned about international relations came from my friend Steve Clemons who spoke about “high trust” versus “high fear” international environments. Broadly agreed rules, norms, transparency, frameworks for arbitration, conciliation over aggression each build environments of relative trust in contrast to high fear environments in which force, duplicity and advantage play decisive role
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The key is that these environments build on themselves and perpetuate themselves. In a high fear environment, secrecy, force and seeking maximum advantage in every case become rational choices. They become critical to self-preservation
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Trump’s White House is simply a microcosm of this dark and self-defeating worldview: a system of aggression, betrayal, unpredictable behavior and dishonesty, all of which foster and encourage similar behavior from everyone who enters it.
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even for relatively normal people, he creates an environment in which his values and behaviors become rational. It a classic Hobbesian world, the war against all against all – a comic dystopia Trump is building in the White House and aspires to create worldwide.
How Trump Is Endangering His Prized Tax Cuts - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“If there’s anything that unifies Republicans, it’s tax reform,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell assured reporters on Tuesday who were wondering if President Trump’s latest feud with a GOP senator would threaten his top legislative priority.McConnell is undeniably correct. Tax reform, even more than repealing and replacing Obamacare, is the GOP lodestar. But the reason Republicans haven’t unveiled a tax bill, much less held a vote on one, is that they haven’t figured out how to pay for their ambitious economic plan. And on that score, the president isn’t making their jobs any easier.
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In each case, the president was probably playing good politics, as none of these proposals would be broadly popular. The BAT would have hit retailers who might have passed the cost onto consumers with higher prices. Millions of Americans in states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California benefit from deducting their high local taxes off their federal bill. And tens of millions more take advantage of 401(k) plans, which allow employees to accrue investment earnings that won’t be taxed for decades to come.
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There have been plenty of indications over the last few months that Trump and Republican leaders in Congress would have different answers to that question. For years, Ryan and his allies in the House have talked up the idea of a “once-in-a-generation” reform that would simplify the code, cut rates both for businesses and individuals, and pay for it by eliminating exemptions, deductions, and other loopholes that taxpayers use to their advantage. Implicit in that goal is the need to make difficult political choices; every loophole is someone’s prized and essential tax break, with a team of highly-paid lobbyists fighting to keep it. “We will not wait for a path free of obstacles because it does not exist,” Ryan said in a speech in June. “And we will not cast about for quick fixes and half-measures.”
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It’s up for debate whether Trump’s interjections on tax policy will ultimately harm the party or save Republicans from politically dangerous choices they would later come to regret. But the more fundamental question is whether Trump actually shares the party’s desire for a bold and comprehensive tax overhaul, as opposed to a quicker and easier tax cut. If he does, the president may have to start helping Republicans make the case for some tax tradeoffs, instead of just nipping them in the bud.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Conservative Obsession - The Atlantic - 0 views
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More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.
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The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”
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More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
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The entirety of the Republican Party’s response to this situation during its two years of unified control of the federal government was a failed effort to slash health-care coverage for millions and a successful effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The GOP needs a different story to tell about what’s wrong with the country, and the one about people of color living lavishly at the expense of white people who work hard and play by the rules is an old classic.
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What this narrative is meant to obscure is the reality that American policy making has not created some nightmare inversion of power between white people and ethnic minorities, but a landscape of harrowing inequality where people are forced to beg strangers for money on the internet to pay their medical bills. Upward mobility is stagnant; those who are born rich, die rich, and those who are born poor, die poor. Real wages have risen painfully slowly for decades; housing, particularly in urban centers, is unaffordable; and young people are saddled with skyrocketing student debt for educations that did not provide the opportunities they were supposed to.
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Even after Obama was elected, conservative pundits argued that Obama wasn’t “really popular” because he maintained sky-high support among black voters—who, they implied, should count less. The underlying argument behind the claim, no matter how mundane or outlandish, was that being black confers unearned benefits rather than systemic obstacles to be overcome. Obama became the living, breathing symbol of the narrative that undeserving people of color were being elevated even as hardworking white people were being left behind
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In America, when people of color succeed despite the limits placed on them, and use their newfound status to indict the system for holding others back, they are held up as proof that the limits do not exist, they are denounced as ingrates, or they are pilloried as frauds incapable of the successes attributed to them.
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The exception is if they present their success as evidence that the structural barriers are not as great as they seem, and that in truth the only thing that holds back marginalized communities is their own lack of ability or motivation. If they affirm the righteousness of the class and caste system that they defied to succeed, they are hailed as heroes by the same people who would otherwise have denounced them as frauds.
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When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system.
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Trump is president in large part because of his ability to speak to this insecurity.
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During the 2016 campaign, for every problem America faced, Trump found an enemy, an outsider to blame: Latino immigrants stealing jobs and lowering wages, Muslims engaging in terrorism, black men committing crimes. Then there were the white liberals, such as Elizabeth Warren, whose claim to American Indian heritage was touted as proof that the system is rigged to the advantage of undeserving people of color—so much so that even white liberals seek to get in on the scam
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The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans.
The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
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Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
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Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
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If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
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Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
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Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
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In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
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The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
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the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
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Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
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Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
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In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
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The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
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To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
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Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
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In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
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the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
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No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
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Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
Why 'they' seem more violent than 'we' are - The Washington Post - 0 views
shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 18
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While we are used to approaching America’s gun culture as a singular phenomenon, it is worth considering how it relates to those other headlines about immigration.
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— from President Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants are rapists to the language of the original travel ban, which targeted Muslim-majority countries and was titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”
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a powerful narrative persists that immigrants are preternaturally violent and that our safety is best guaranteed by closing our doors to anyone with brown skin.
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while one hand draws up plans for border walls, the other doles out AR-15s to white, male, homegrown terrorists: Between 54 and 63 percent of the mass shootings since 1982 were committed by white men. A hypothetical outside threat is seen as far more deadly than a very real internal one. How do we account for these seemingly contradictory impulses?
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In recent years, for instance, politicians and pundits have gone to great lengths to distinguish “our” violence from “theirs,” referring to Muslims.
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Where does a political motive diverge from a delusion? Only in the case of Muslim killers are we confident that we can draw a bright line.
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We’ve embraced the false dichotomy: If browser history and social media accounts link a shooter to some form of radical Islam, then he is a terrorist (as in the case of Syed Rizwan Farouk, one of the San Bernardino, Calif., attackers), even though the animating factor may have been mental illness.
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If we look beyond America, we might notice features common among perpetrators across religious and ethnic lines. As Olivier Roy argues in his recent book, “Jihad and Death,” they tend to be young men from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds, often with a history of petty crime
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white American perpetrators are deemed “troubled” or “disturbed” (as Trump described Cruz on Thursday), while their Muslim counterparts are purportedly motivated by nothing but religious fanaticism.
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“People suffering from psychological troubles can undoubtedly find in the jihadi imaginary a way to situate their madness within a realm of meaning shared by others,” Roy writes; “in other words, to cease being considered mad when their insanity reaches its murderous height, because they will be given the prestigious label of terrorist instead of being called a psychopath.”
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Perhaps most important — and chilling — what links mass shootings is the sense of sheer randomness they invoke
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they rarely stop to target foes or spare friends. The mere act of being present makes one a legitimate target. It is this feature of contemporary terrorism — whether in Paris or Parkland — that unites disparate acts of violence and constitutes their prime psychological menace: It could be anyone, anywhere.
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That truth transcends borders, but Americans continue to embrace the expensive fiction that outsiders are the real threat, with 45 percent of Americans saying immigrants worsen U.S. crime.
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Even as the Islamic State entreats would-be fighters to take advantage of America’s lax gun laws (“their” domestic attacks depend on “our” policies), our leaders offer “thoughts and prayers” to shooting victims.
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Scholars in a range of disciplines — from comparative literature to social theory to psychoanalysis — have long noted the tendency to project our faults on people who seem alien to us.
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With regard to safety and security, demonizing refugees, Muslims, Mexicans and so on does the important work of seeming to take action while leaving the existing order (and the incredible profits of gun manufacturers) intact.
Washington Monthly | How to Fix Facebook-Before It Fixes Us - 0 views
washingtonmonthly.com/...ix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us
fb google propaganda social media disinformation monopoly regulation crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 18
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Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.
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And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?
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Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.
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They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.
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Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy
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The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
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for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members
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On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.
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It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.
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Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.
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Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”
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The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs
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Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts
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No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.
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Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.
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We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.
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The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.
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Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.
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Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.
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A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.
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2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.
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Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
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It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.
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Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.
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Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.
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To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.
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No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
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Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.
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The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
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It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
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We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost
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Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
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Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
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Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
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Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
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This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.
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decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
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Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session
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This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
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We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
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First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.
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At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
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Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
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An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
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This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.
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There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
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Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
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Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.
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Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic
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Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.
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Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.
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All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.
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“Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?
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Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.
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Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.
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There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.
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Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.
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It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.
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Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.
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Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.
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While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.
In Sports Cars and Roller Coasters, Europe Zooms Ahead - WSJ - 0 views
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A company in Liechtenstein built the world’s fastest roller coaster, part of a niche industry combining innovation with no economies of scale
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ABU DHABI—The world’s fastest roller coaster, which can reach 149 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds, is at an amusement park called—what else?—Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi.
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The tiny alpine principality, sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, is one of a handful of European countries that dominate the niche business of producing roller coasters.
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there are no scale economies,” said Claus Frimand, a Danish amusement-park expert at attractions consultants MR ProFun Management Group.
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designing coasters “is a European tradition,
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Europe has remained prosperous after years of financial crises and unemployment in part because of its dominance in any number of small but profitable businesses like roller coasters, which combine highly specialized engineering skills with a centuries-old tradition of innovation.
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He noted that European coaster makers tap the same pool of engineers known for their “obsession with detail and precision” as German car makers.
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Of the world’s 20 leading countries for engineering skills, 15 are in Europe, according to a study by London-based analysts at the Centre for Economic and Business Research.
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Where we have a compelling advantage in Europe is cutting-edge stuff coming from companies you haven’t heard of,
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global competition and shifting trends in Europe mean the advantage is “fragile,” he said.
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Schwarzkopf and its main U.S. rival, Arrow Dynamics, chased orders and cut prices in heated pursuit of business that ultimately landed both in bankruptcy, industry veterans say. T
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Such high-margin exports support thousands of production and design firms that demand large numbers of skilled employees and pay wages that manufacturers in few parts of the world can afford.
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On a computer, you can simulate anything, but when it comes to production, it’s a question of how precisely you can bend the track,”
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even though all outsource track fabrication to specialized metalworks. “You can come up with a nice design but if it has a rough ride, nobody will want to ride it,” he said.
Henry VII and the Shaping of the Tudor State | History Today - 0 views
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Shakespeare's later Tudor view of Henry VII changed very little between the first study of the reign by Francis Bacon in 1622 and Henry's last academic biography, by Stanley Chrimes, in 1973
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Henry Tudor could not understand the problems he faced, and was essentially a bad medieval king. He could only have changed their policies after he had learned how to be an effective king. However, this interpretation takes little account of Henry's particular circumstances in 1485. It was precisely because of his unique upbringing and disconnection from England that Henry Tudor was able to bring new ways of doing things to his kingdom. Between about 1480 and 1520 England was certainly transformed from what Nicholas Pronay described as the 'merry but unstable England ruled by Edward IV to the tame, sullen and tense land inherited by Henry VIII'
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It was control of personal relationships and mental attitudes among the people who represented the king that Henry VII saw as the key to forcing change upon the medieval ruling structures he inherited
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What Henry VII did have great expertise in also grew from the circumstances of his exile
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Henry's power base of support did cut across existing and inherited allegiances. This was an advantage if it could be transformed into Tudor loyalty.
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That Henry VIII became such a gross figure of monarchy must be due partly to the freedom given to ministers like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell to direct royal policy
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Henry VII also began to free the crown from the direct influence of the aristocracy
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Fifteenth-century kings, dukes and earls were royal cousins with a common descent from Edward III (1327-77). They held a shared elite outlook. Henry VII arrived from relative obscurity in 1485 and began to rule more like a landlord than the first among aristocratic equals.
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Henry VII stayed closely involved in the daily tasks of ruling because he had a suspicious personality and was obsessed with the security of his Tudor dynasty
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It removed the politically active gentry from the king's personal chambers, although over time figures such as the groom of the stool, Hugh Denys, became important because they had the ear of the king
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Henry's permanent adult exile separated him entirely from England's ruling elite, both literally and in terms of his outlook and experiences. On the one hand, this gave Henry an opportunity to unlock the closed network of personal service that had surrounded medieval royal heirs as Princes of Wales or royal nobles. On the other, it created a great dependence upon the advice and skills of others. Some, like Sir Giles Daubeney and Sir Edward Poynings, had joined Henry after 1483 in opposition to Richard III. Others, like John de Vere, earl of Oxford, followed Henry because he was the only chance they had of recovering their lands and influence. Henry could not fully trust them to remain loyal if political circumstances changed again.
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Henry VIII's early years, with a vibrant youthful court and military glory in France and Scotland, were certainly more like those of Edward IV's second reign (1471-83) than the more sombre final years of Henry VII's
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To keep their status these men became agents of the Tudor crown
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Henry pressed these prerogative rights to the very edge of the law, and many subjects complained of injustice. But the ability of the crown to intervene in their life became much more apparent
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By regulating their roles as JPs, sheriffs, escheators and jury members, the Tudor crown further encroached upon the political and social freedoms of the ruling elite. Under weak leadership in Henry VI's reign (1422-61), they had been partly responsible for the descent into lawlessness and civil war. The Tudor king sought to remedy both deficiencies
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Henry created few new nobles and was reluctant to promote or reward his servants excessively.
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Henry also kept the personal estates of the crown (the demesne lands) in his own hands
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The king's men soon learned that they could still wield great power: Sir Thomas Lovell's retinue, based on a number of scattered crown stewardships, was as large as any noble connection during this period. But Henry's knights were closely monitored. In another case, the king was willing to sacrifice Sir Richard Guildford's influence in Kent, when it became clear after 1504 that he could no longer represent the crown's interests effectively.
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Towards the end of Henry VII's reign, members of the elite were competing for office and influence within a clearly defined structure of crown service. They were not challenging independently for resources of land and men that could threaten Tudor stability. Nobles could still be great landowners, courtiers or commissioners, like the restored earl of Surrey in the north before 1500
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Henry VII's reliance on the policies of his Yorkist predecessors is well known
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No historian has so far explained how Henry VII gained a foothold on power long enough to exploit the few advantages he held in 1485, or how he withstood the very serious early threats to his dynasty.
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Henry VII began to use these tools on a large scale to enforce loyalty during the conspiracies of the first decade of Tudor rule. The backlash to the Tudor accession arose in the heartland of Richard III's support in Yorkshire
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This was most obvious with the pretender Perkin Warbeck's call upon the loyalty of former servants of Edward V for most of the 1490s. Henry did try to heal the factionalism that had prevented a harmonious resolution of the civil wars in earlier reigns, and he did this by reshaping the political loyalties of the ruling classes
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If the system worked as Henry VII intended it to, then little revenue would be generated from this source. The extent to which this aspect of the use of bonds was developed has been hidden from most Tudor historians
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Henry VII's reign therefore remains an intriguing period to study. With several historians now working exclusively on Henry, we can expect a major growth in our level of understanding of the first Tudor reign in the near future
The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ian Buruma) - 0 views
DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/e8c30608a7379054d18fe4e9e2b1c397
Japan history revisionist memory remembrance WWII interwar germany DDR
shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19
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the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.
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elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.
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unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.
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“We never knew,” a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.
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Right-wing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel remorse about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified—even noble—war of Asian liberation.
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in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early postwar years. Such honesty is much less evident now.
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Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo publicly doubted whether Japan’s military aggression in China could even be called an invasion.
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The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, and have to do with the pacifist constitution—written by American jurists in 1946—and with the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General Douglas MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.
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Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution,
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a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as an infringement of their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the Allied Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by left-wing teachers and intellectuals would be seen in this light.
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The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive right-wing politicians and commentators became about the Japanese war.
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Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning.
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To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to much political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
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For several decades, the chauvinistic right wing, with its reactionary views on everything from high school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union and academics.
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the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.
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Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying right-wing nationalists,
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Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments.
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Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.
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By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted toward the reactionary side.
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My instinct—call it a prejudice, if you prefer—before embarking on this venture was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances.
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The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways—but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.
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Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.
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The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.
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the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
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I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European:
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this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness.
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Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.
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The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war—Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism—had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany. Why?
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the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese.
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Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.
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I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.
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I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life.
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Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?
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why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself?
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the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.
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when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”
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To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.
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In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions.
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There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism,
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heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment.
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It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor.
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German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.
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There was a real dilemma: at least two generations had been educated to renounce war and never again to send German soldiers to the front, educated, in other words, to want Germany to be a larger version of Switzerland. But they had also been taught to feel responsible for the fate of Israel, and to be citizens of a Western nation, firmly embedded in a family of allied Western nations. The question was whether they really could be both.
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the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West.
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the West German mistrust of East Germans—the East Germans whose soldiers still marched in goose step, whose petit bourgeois style smacked of the thirties, whose system of government, though built on a pedestal of antifascism, contained so many disturbing remnants of the Nazi past; the East Germans, in short, who had been living in “Asia.”
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Michael, the Israeli, compared the encounter of Westerners (“Wessies”) with Easterners (“Ossies”) with the unveiling of the portrait of Dorian Gray: the Wessies saw their own image and they didn’t like what they saw.
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he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”
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Germany for its Nazi inheritance and its sellout to the United States. But now that Germany had been reunified, with its specters of “Auschwitz” and its additional hordes of narrow-minded Ossies, Adenauer was deemed to have been right after
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The picture was of Kiel in 1945, a city in ruins. He saw me looking at it and said: “It’s true that whoever is being bombed is entitled to some sympathy from us.”
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“My personal political philosophy and maybe even my political ambition has to do with an element of distrust for the people I represent, people whose parents and grandparents made Hitler and the persecution of the Jews possible.”
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in the seventies he had tried to nullify verdicts given in Nazi courts—without success until well into the eighties. One of the problems was that the Nazi judiciary itself was never purged. This continuity was broken only by time.
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To bury Germany in the bosom of its Western allies, such as NATO and the EC, was to bury the distrust of Germans. Or so it was hoped. As Europeans they could feel normal, Western, civilized. Germany; the old “land in the middle,” the Central European colossus, the power that fretted over its identity and was haunted by its past, had become a Western nation.
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It is a miracle, really, how quickly the Germans in the Federal Republic became civilized. We are truly part of the West now. We have internalized democracy. But the Germans of the former GDR, they are still stuck in a premodern age. They are the ugly Germans, very much like the West Germans after the war, the people I grew up with. They are not yet civilized.”
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“I like the Germans very much, but I think they are a dangerous people. I don’t know why—perhaps it is race, or culture, or history. Whatever. But we Japanese are the same: we swing from one extreme to the other. As peoples, we Japanese, like the Germans, have strong collective discipline. When our energies are channeled in the right direction, this is fine, but when they are misused, terrible things happen.”
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to be put in the same category as the Japanese—even to be compared—bothered many Germans. (Again, unlike the Japanese, who made the comparison often.) Germans I met often stressed how different they were from the Japanese,
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To some West Germans, now so “civilized,” so free, so individualistic, so, well, Western, the Japanese, with their group discipline, their deference to authority, their military attitude toward work, might appear too close for comfort to a self-image only just, and perhaps only barely, overcome.
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To what extent the behavior of nations, like that of individual people, is determined by history, culture, or character is a question that exercises many Japanese, almost obsessively.
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not much sign of betroffenheit on Japanese television during the Gulf War. Nor did one see retired generals explain tactics and strategy. Instead, there were experts from journalism and academe talking in a detached manner about a faraway war which was often presented as a cultural or religious conflict between West and Middle East. The history of Muslim-Christian-Jewish animosity was much discussed. And the American character was analyzed at length to understand the behavior of George Bush and General Schwarzkopf.
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In the words of one Albrecht Fürst von Urach, a Nazi propagandist, Japanese emperor worship was “the most unique fusion in the world of state form, state consciousness, and religious fanaticism.” Fanaticism was, of course, a positive word in the Nazi lexicon.
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the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It
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It was a respectable view, but also one founded on a national myth of betrayal. Japan, according to the myth, had become the unique moral nation of peace, betrayed by the victors who had sat in judgment of Japan’s war crimes; betrayed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua; betrayed by the arms race, betrayed by the Cold War; Japan had been victimized not only by the “gratuitous,” perhaps even “racist,” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by all subsequent military actions taken by the superpowers,
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When the Prime Minister of Japan, Shidehara Kijuro, protested in 1946 to General MacArthur that it was all very well saying that Japan should assume moral leadership in renouncing war, but that in the real world no country would follow this example, MacArthur replied: “Even if no country follows you, Japan will lose nothing. It is those who do not support this who are in the wrong.” For a long time most Japanese continued to take this view.
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What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.
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The denial of historical discrimination is not just a way to evade guilt. It is intrinsic to pacifism. To even try to distinguish between wars, to accept that some wars are justified, is already an immoral position.
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That Kamei discussed this common paranoia in such odd, Volkish terms could mean several things: that some of the worst European myths got stuck in Japan, that the history of the Holocaust had no impact, or that Japan is in some respects a deeply provincial place. I think all three explanations apply.
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“the problem with the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult. A racial problem, really. Yankees are friendly people, frank people. But, you know, it’s hard. You see, we have to be friendly …”
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Like Oda, indeed like many people of the left, Kamei thought in racial terms. He used the word jinshu, literally race. He did not even use the more usual minzoku, which corresponds, in the parlance of Japanese right-wingers, to Volk, or the more neutral kokumin, meaning the citizens of a state.
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many Germans in the liberal democratic West have tried to deal honestly with their nation’s terrible past, the Japanese, being different, have been unable to do so. It is true that the Japanese, compared with the West Germans, have paid less attention to the suffering they inflicted on others, and shown a greater inclination to shift the blame. And liberal democracy, whatever it may look like on paper, has not been the success in Japan that it was in the German Federal Republic. Cultural differences might account for this. But one can look at these matters in a different, more political way. In his book The War Against the West, published in London in 1938, the Hungarian scholar Aurel Kolnai followed the Greeks in his definition of the West: “For the ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’
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According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East.
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There was a great irony here: in their zeal to make Japan part of the West, General MacArthur and his advisers made it impossible for Japan to do so in spirit. For a forced, impotent accomplice is not really an accomplice at all.
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In recent years, Japan has often been called an economic giant and a political dwarf. But this has less to do with a traditional Japanese mentality—isolationism, pacifism, shyness with foreigners, or whatnot—than with the particular political circumstances after the war that the United States helped to create.
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when the Cold War prompted the Americans to make the Japanese subvert their constitution by creating an army which was not supposed to exist, the worst of all worlds appeared: sovereignty was not restored, distrust remained, and resentment mounted.
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Kamei’s hawks are angry with the Americans for emasculating Japan; Oda’s doves hate the Americans for emasculating the “peace constitution.” Both sides dislike being forced accomplices, and both feel victimized, which is one reason Japanese have a harder time than Germans in coming to terms with their wartime past.
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As far as the war against the Jews is concerned, one might go back to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Or at the latest to 1935, when the race laws were promulgated in Nuremberg. Or perhaps those photographs of burning synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938, truly marked the first stage of the Holocaust.
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There is the famous picture of German soldiers lifting the barrier on the Polish border in 1939, but was that really the beginning? Or did it actually start with the advance into the Rhineland in 1936, or was it the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia?
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IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY when the war actually began for the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot think of a single image that fixed the beginning of either war in the public mind.
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Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.”
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only Japanese of a liberal disposition call World War II the Pacific War. People who stick to the idea that Japan was fighting a war to liberate Asia from Bolshevism and white colonialism call it the Great East Asian War (Daitowa Senso), as in the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
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The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin.
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People of this opinion separate the world war of 1941–45 from the war in China, which they still insist on calling the China Incident.
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Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45).
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images marking the end are more obvious.
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argued that the struggle against Western imperialism actually began in 1853, with the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s ships, and spoke of the Hundred-Year War.
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These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.
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The Germans called it Zusammenbruch (the collapse) or Stunde Null (Zero Hour): everything seemed to have come to an end, everything had to start all over. The Japanese called it haisen (defeat) or shusen (termination of the war).
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kokka (nation, state) and minzoku (race, people) are not quite of the same order as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) or Einsatzgruppe (special action squad). The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps.
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The German people are spiritually starved, Adenauer told him. “The imagination has to be provided for.” This was no simple matter, especially in the German language, which had been so thoroughly infected by the jargon of mass murder.
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All they had been told to believe in, the Germans and the Japanese, everything from the Führerprinzip to the emperor cult, from the samurai spirit to the Herrenvolk, from Lebensraum to the whole world under one (Japanese) roof, all that lay in ruins
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How to purge this language from what a famous German philologist called the Lingua Tertii Imperii? “… the language is no longer lived,” wrote George Steiner in 1958, “it is merely spoken.”
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out of defeat and ruin a new school of literature (and cinema) did arise. It is known in Germany as Trümmerliteratur (literature of the ruins). Japanese writers who came of age among the ruins called themselves the yakeato seidai (burnt-out generation). Much literature of the late forties and fifties was darkened by nihilism and despair.
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It was as though Germany—Sonderweg or no Sonderweg—needed only to be purged of Nazism, while Japan’s entire cultural tradition had to be overhauled.
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In Germany there was a tradition to fall back on. In the Soviet sector, the left-wing culture of the Weimar Republic was actively revived. In the Western sectors, writers escaped the rats and the ruins by dreaming of Goethe. His name was often invoked to prove that Germany, too, belonged to the humanist, enlightened strain of European civilization.
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the Americans (and many Japanese leftists) distrusted anything associated with “feudalism,” which they took to include much of Japan’s premodern past. Feudalism was the enemy of democracy. So not only did the American censors, in their effort to teach the Japanese democracy, forbid sword-fight films and samurai dramas, but at one point ninety-eight Kabuki plays were banned too.
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yet, what is remarkable about much of the literature of the period, or more precisely, of the literature about that time, since much of it was written later, is the deep strain of romanticism, even nostalgia. This colors personal memories of people who grew up just after the war as well.
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If the mushroom cloud and the imperial radio speech are the clichés of defeat, the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan), is a stock image in postwar movies about the occupation.
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To Ango, then, as to other writers, the ruins offered hope. At last the Japanese, without “the fake kimono” of traditions and ideals, were reduced to basic human needs; at last they could feel real love, real pain; at last they would be honest. There was no room, among the ruins, for hypocrisy.
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Böll was able to be precise about the end of the Zusammenbruch and the beginning of bourgeois hypocrisy and moral amnesia. It came on June 20, 1948, the day of the currency reform, the day that Ludwig Erhard, picked by the Americans as Economics Director in the U.S.-British occupation zone, gave birth to the Deutsche Mark. The DM, from then on, would be the new symbol of West German national pride;
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the amnesia, and definitely the identification with the West, was helped further along by the Cold War. West Germany now found itself on the same side as the Western allies. Their common enemy was the “Asiatic” Soviet empire. Fewer questions needed to be asked.
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Indeed, to some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along: Germany always had been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it earlier.
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The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.
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“Prosperity for All” was probably the best that could have happened to the Germans of the Federal Republic. It took the seed of resentment (and thus future extremism) out of defeat. And the integration of West Germany into a Western alliance was a good thing too.
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The “inability to mourn,” the German disassociation from the piles of corpses strewn all over Central and Eastern Europe, so that the Third Reich, as the Mitscherlichs put it, “faded like a dream,” made it easier to identify with the Americans, the victors, the West.
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Yet the disgust felt by Böll and others for a people getting fat (“flabby” is the usual term, denoting sloth and decadence) and forgetting about its murderous past was understandable.
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The Brückners were the price Germany had to pay for the revival of its fortunes. Indeed, they were often instrumental in it. They were the apparatchik who functioned in any system, the small, efficient fish who voted for Christian conservatives in the West and became Communists in the East.
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Staudte was clearly troubled by this, as were many Germans, but he offered no easy answers. Perhaps it was better this way: flabby democrats do less harm than vengeful old Nazis.
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the forgetful, prosperous, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany was in many more or less hidden ways a continuation of Hitler’s Reich. This perfectly suited the propagandists of the GDR, who would produce from time to time lists of names of former Nazis who were prospering in the West. These lists were often surprisingly accurate.
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In a famous film, half fiction, half documentary, made by a number of German writers and filmmakers (including Böll) in 1977, the continuity was made explicit. The film, called Germany in Autumn (Deutschland in Herbst),
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun.
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To lifelong “antifascists” who had always believed that the Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi Germany, unification seemed—so they said—almost like a restoration of 1933. The irony was that many Wessies saw their new Eastern compatriots as embarrassing reminders of the same unfortunate past.
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Rarely was the word “Auschwitz” heard more often than during the time of unification, partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalist, idealistic Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the East, had now been dashed forever.
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Ludwig Erhard’s almost exact counterpart in Japan was Ikeda Hayato, Minister of Finance from 1949 and Prime Minister from 1960 to 1964. His version of Erhard’s “Prosperity for AH” was the Double Your Incomes policy, which promised to make the Japanese twice as rich in ten years. Japan had an average growth rate of 11 percent during the 1960s.
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It explains, at any rate, why the unification of the two Germanys was considered a defeat by antifascists on both sides of the former border.
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Very few wartime bureaucrats had been purged. Most ministries remained intact. Instead it was the Communists, who had welcomed the Americans as liberators, who were purged after 1949, the year China was “lost.”
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so the time of ruins was seen by people on the left as a time of missed chances and betrayal. Far from achieving a pacifist utopia of popular solidarity, they ended up with a country driven by materialism, conservatism, and selective historical amnesia.
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the “red purges” of 1949 and 1950 and the return to power of men whose democratic credentials were not much better helped to turn many potential Japanese friends of the United States into enemies. For the Americans were seen as promoters of the right-wing revival and the crackdown on the left.
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For exactly twelve years Germany was in the hands of a criminal regime, a bunch of political gangsters who had started a movement. Removing this regime was half the battle.
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It is easier to change political institutions and hope that habits and prejudices will follow. This, however, was more easily done in Germany than in Japan.
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There had not been a cultural break either in Japan. There were no exiled writers and artists who could return to haunt the consciences of those who had stayed.
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There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed.
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In Japan there was never a clear break between a fascist and a prefascist past. In fact, Japan was never really a fascist state at all. There was no fascist or National Socialist ruling party, and no Führer either. The closest thing to it would have been the emperor, and whatever else he may have been, he was not a fascist dictator.
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whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.
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Japan was effectively occupied only by the Americans. West Germany was part of NATO and the European Community, and the GDR was in the Soviet empire. Japan’s only formal alliance is with the United States, through a security treaty that many Japanese have opposed.
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But the systematic subservience of Japan meant that the country never really grew up. There is a Japanese fixation on America, an obsession which goes deeper, I believe, than German anti-Americanism,
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Yet nothing had stayed entirely the same in Japan. The trouble was that virtually all the changes were made on American orders. This was, of course, the victor’s prerogative, and many changes were beneficial.
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like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur.
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Older Japanese do, however, remember the occupation, the first foreign army occupation in their national history. But it was, for the Japanese, a very unusual army. Whereas the Japanese armies in Asia had brought little but death, rape, and destruction, this one came with Glenn Miller music, chewing gum, and lessons in democracy. These blessings left a legacy of gratitude, rivalry, and shame.
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did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer:
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think it is a romantic assumption, based less on history than on myth; a religious notion, expressed less through scholarship than through monuments, memorials, and historical sites turned into sacred grounds.
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The past, wrote the West German historian Christian Meier, is in our bones. “For a nation to appropriate its history,” he argued, “is to look at it through the eyes of identity.” What we have “internalized,” he concluded, is Auschwitz.
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Auschwitz is such a place, a sacred symbol of identity for Jews, Poles, and perhaps even Germans. The question is what or whom Germans are supposed to identify with.
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The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true.
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To visit the site of suffering, any description of which cannot adequately express the horror, is upsetting, not because one gets closer to knowing what it was actually like to be a victim, but because such visits stir up emotions one cannot trust. It is tempting to take on the warm moral glow of identification—so easily done and so presumptuous—with the victims:
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Were the crimes of Auschwitz, then, part of the German “identity”? Was genocide a product of some ghastly flaw in German culture, the key to which might be found in the sentimental proverbs, the cruel fairy tales, the tight leather shorts?
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yet the imagination is the only way to identify with the past. Only in the imagination—not through statistics, documents, or even photographs—do people come alive as individuals, do stories emerge, instead of History.
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nature. It is all right to let the witnesses speak, in the courtroom, in the museums, on videotape (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has been shown many times on German television), but it is not all right for German artists to use their imagination.
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the reluctance in German fiction to look Auschwitz in the face, the almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege.
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beneath the fear of bad taste or sacrilege may lie a deeper problem. To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.
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the flight into religious abstraction was to be all too common among Germans of the Nazi generation, as well as their children; not, as is so often the case with Jews, to lend mystique to a new identity, as a patriotic Zionist, but on the contrary to escape from being the heir to a peculiarly German crime, to get away from having to “internalize” Auschwitz, or indeed from being German at all.
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a Hollywood soap opera, a work of skillful pop, which penetrated the German imagination in a way nothing had before. Holocaust was first shown in Germany in January 1979. It was seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal Republic; 58 percent wanted it to be repeated; 12,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards were sent to the broadcasting stations; 5,200 called the stations by telephone after the first showing; 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative.
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“After Holocaust,” wrote a West German woman to her local television station, “I feel deep contempt for those beasts of the Third Reich. I am twenty-nine years old and a mother of three children. When I think of the many mothers and children sent to the gas chambers, I have to cry. (Even today the Jews are not left in peace. We Germans have the duty to work every day for peace in Israel.) I bow to the victims of the Nazis, and I am ashamed to be a German.”
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Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure. “Death is a master from Germany.” But it was a different Germany. To insist on viewing history through the “eyes of identity,” to repeat the historian Christian Meier’s phrase, is to resist the idea of change.
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Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.
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The novelist Martin Walser, who was a child during the war, believes, like Meier, that Auschwitz binds the German people, as does the language of Goethe. When a Frenchman or an American sees pictures of Auschwitz, “he doesn’t have to think: We human beings! He can think: Those Germans! Can we think: Those Nazis! I for one cannot …”
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Adorno, a German Jew who wished to save high German culture, on whose legacy the Nazis left their bloody finger marks, resisted the idea that Auschwitz was a German crime. To him it was a matter of modern pathology, the sickness of the “authoritarian personality,” of the dehumanized SS guards, those inhumane cogs in a vast industrial wheel.
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To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima. But it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz.
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has the atmosphere of a religious center. It has martyrs, but no single god. It has prayers, and it has a ready-made myth about the fall of man. Hiroshima, says a booklet entitled Hiroshima Peace Reader, published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “is no longer merely a Japanese city. It has become recognized throughout the world as a Mecca of world peace.”
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They were not enshrined in the Japanese park, and later attempts by local Koreans to have the monument moved into Peace Park failed. There could only be one cenotaph, said the Hiroshima municipal authorities. And the cenotaph did not include Koreans.
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What is interesting about Hiroshima—the Mecca rather than the modern Japanese city, which is prosperous and rather dull—is the tension between its universal aspirations and its status as the exclusive site of Japanese victimhood.
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it is an opinion widely held by Japanese nationalists. The right always has been concerned with the debilitating effects on the Japanese identity of war guilt imposed by American propaganda.
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The Japanese, in contrast, were duped by the Americans into believing that the traces of Japanese suffering should be swept away by the immediate reconstruction of Hiroshima. As a result, the postwar Japanese lack an identity and their racial virility has been sapped by American propaganda about Japanese war guilt.
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Hiroshima, Uno wrote, should have been left as it was, in ruins, just as Auschwitz, so he claims, was deliberately preserved by the Jews. By reminding the world of their martyrdom, he said, the Jews have kept their racial identity intact and restored their virility.
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But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany.
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There is another view, however, held by leftists and liberals, who would not dream of defending the “Fifteen-Year War.” In this view, the A-bomb was a kind of divine punishment for Japanese militarism. And having learned their lesson through this unique suffering, having been purified through hellfire and purgatory, so to speak, the Japanese people have earned the right, indeed have the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit.”
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The left has its own variation of Japanese martyrdom, in which Hiroshima plays a central role. It is widely believed, for instance, that countless Japanese civilians fell victim to either a wicked military experiment or to the first strike in the Cold War, or both.
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However, right-wing nationalists care less about Hiroshima than about the idée fixe that the “Great East Asian War” was to a large extent justified.
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This is at the heart of what is known as Peace Education, which has been much encouraged by the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union and has been regarded with suspicion by the conservative government. Peace Education has traditionally meant pacifism, anti-Americanism, and a strong sympathy for Communist states, especially China.
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The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position.
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left-wing pacifism in Japan has something in common with the romantic nationalism usually associated with the right: it shares the right’s resentment about being robbed by the Americans of what might be called a collective memory.
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The romantic pacifists believe that the United States, to hide its own guilt and to rekindle Japanese militarism in aid of the Cold War, tried to wipe out the memory of Hiroshima.
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few events in World War II have been described, analyzed, lamented, reenacted, re-created, depicted, and exhibited so much and so often as the bombing of Hiroshima
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The problem with Nagasaki was not just that Hiroshima came first but also that Nagasaki had more military targets than Hiroshima. The Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki produced the bulk of Japanese armaments. There was also something else, which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived. And unlike in Hiroshima, much of the rest of the city was spared the worst.
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yet, despite these diatribes, the myth of Hiroshima and its pacifist cult is based less on American wickedness than on the image of martyred innocence and visions of the apocalypse.
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The comparison between Hiroshima and Auschwitz is based on this notion; the idea, namely, that Hiroshima, like the Holocaust, was not part of the war, not even connected with it, but “something that occurs at the end of the world
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still I wonder whether it is really so different from the position of many Germans who wish to “internalize” Auschwitz, who see Auschwitz “through the eyes of identity.”
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the Japanese to take two routes at once, a national one, as unique victims of the A-bomb, and a universal one, as the apostles of the Hiroshima spirit. This, then, is how Japanese pacifists, engaged in Peace Education, define the Japanese identity.
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the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.
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In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.
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The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral.
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in the history of Japan’s foreign wars, the city of Hiroshima is far from innocent. When Japan went to war with China in 1894, the troops set off for the battlefronts from Hiroshima, and the Meiji emperor moved his headquarters there. The city grew wealthy as a result. It grew even wealthier when Japan went to war with Russia eleven years later, and Hiroshima once again became the center of military operations. As the Hiroshima Peace Reader puts it with admirable conciseness, “Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, became more populous and prosperous as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.” At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo). In short, the city was swarming with soldiers. One of the few literary masterpieces to emerge
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when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner” was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
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Yukoku Ishinkai (Society for Lament and National Restoration), thought the bombing had saved Japan from total destruction. But he insisted that Japan could not be held solely responsible for the war. The war, he said, had simply been part of the “flow of history.”
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They also demanded an official recognition of the fact that some of the Korean victims of the bomb had been slave laborers. (Osaka, like Kyoto and Hiroshima, still has a large Korean population.) Both requests were denied. So a group called Peace Link was formed, from local people, many of whom were Christians, antinuclear activists, or involved with discriminated-against minorities.
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The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the “flow of history.”
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“You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist. We must go back to the basic roots. We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.”
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Only when a young Japanese history professor named Yoshimi Yoshiaki dug up a report in American archives in the 1980s did it become known that the Japanese had stored 15,000 tons of chemical weapons on and near the island and that a 200-kilogram container of mustard gas was buried under Hiroshima.
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what was the largest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. More than 5,000 people worked there during the war, many of them women and schoolchildren. About 1,600 died of exposure to hydrocyanic acid gas, nausea gas, and lewisite. Some were damaged for life. Official Chinese sources claim that more than 80,000 Chinese fell victim to gases produced at the factory. The army was so secretive about the place that the island simply disappeared from Japanese maps.
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in 1988, through the efforts of survivors, the small museum was built, “to pass on,” in the words of the museum guide, “the historical truth to future generations.”
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Surviving workers from the factory, many of whom suffered from chronic lung diseases, asked for official recognition of their plight in the 1950s. But the government turned them down. If the government had compensated the workers, it would have been an official admission that the Japanese Army had engaged in an illegal enterprise. When a brief mention of chemical warfare crept into Japanese school textbooks, the Ministry of Education swiftly took it out.
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I asked him about the purpose of the museum. He said: “Before shouting ‘no more war,’ I want people to see what it was really like. To simply look at the past from the point of view of the victim is to encourage hatred.”
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“Look,” he said, “when you fight another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.”
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The fact that Japanese had buried poison gas under Hiroshima did not lessen the horror of the A-bomb. But it put Peace Park, with all its shrines, in a more historical perspective. It took the past away from God and put it in the fallible hands of man.
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What did he think of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima? “At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized,” he said. “But we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal.”
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Nanking, as the capital of the Nationalist government, was the greatest prize in the attempted conquest of China. Its fall was greeted in Japan with banner headlines and nationwide celebration. For six weeks Japanese Army officers allowed their men to run amok. The figures are imprecise, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (the Chinese say 300,000) of Chinese soldiers and civilians, many of them refugees from other towns, were killed. And thousands of women between the ages of about nine and seventy-five were raped, mutilated, and often murdered.
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Was it a deliberate policy to terrorize the Chinese into submission? The complicity of the officers suggests there was something to this. But it might also have been a kind of payoff to the Japanese troops for slogging through China in the freezing winter without decent pay or rations. Or was it largely a matter of a peasant army running out of control? Or just the inevitable consequence of war, as many Japanese maintain?
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inevitable cruelty of war. An atrocity is a willful act of criminal brutality, an act that violates the law as well as any code of human decency. It isn’t that the Japanese lack such codes or are morally incapable of grasping the concept. But “atrocity,” like “human rights,” is part of a modern terminology which came from the West, along with “feminism,” say, or “war crimes.” To right-wing nationalists it has a leftist ring, something subversive, something almost anti-Japanese.
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During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Nanking had the same resonance as Auschwitz had in Nuremberg. And being a symbol, the Nanking Massacre is as vulnerable to mythology and manipulation as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
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Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.”
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In her opinion, a “society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on man’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition …” But in “a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about.” However, this “chagrin cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement …”
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memory was admitted at all, the Mitscherlichs wrote about Germans in the 1950s, “it was only in order to balance one’s own guilt against that of others. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated by crimes committed by the adversary.” This was precisely what many Japanese claimed, and still do claim. And it is why Mori insists on making his pupils view the past from the perspective of the aggressors.
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Two young Japanese officers, Lieutenant N. and Lieutenant M., were on their way to Nanking and decided to test their swordsmanship: the first to cut off one hundred Chinese heads would be the winner. And thus they slashed their way through Chinese ranks, taking scalps in true samurai style. Lieutenant M. got 106, and Lieutenant N. bagged 105.
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The story made a snappy headline in a major Tokyo newspaper: “Who Will Get There First! Two Lieutenants Already Claimed 80.” In the Nanking museum is a newspaper photograph of the two friends, glowing with youthful high spirits. Lieutenant N. boasted in the report that he had cut the necks off 56 men without even denting the blade of his ancestral sword.
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I was told by a Japanese veteran who had fought in Nanking that such stories were commonly made up or at least exaggerated by Japanese reporters, who were ordered to entertain the home front with tales of heroism.
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Honda Katsuichi, a famous Asahi Shimbun reporter, was told the story in Nanking. He wrote it up in a series of articles, later collected in a book entitled A Journey to China, published in 1981.
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the whole thing developed into the Nankin Ronso, or Nanking Debate. In 1984, an anti-Honda book came out, by Tanaka Masaaki, entitled The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre.”
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back in Japan, Lieutenant M. began to revise his story. Speaking at his old high school, he said that in fact he had beheaded only four or five men in actual combat. As for the rest … “After we occupied the city, I stood facing a ditch, and told the Chinese prisoners to step forward. Since Chinese soldiers are stupid, they shuffled over to the ditch, one by one, and I cleanly cut off their heads.”
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The nationalist intellectuals are called goyo gakusha by their critics. It is a difficult term to translate, but the implied meaning is “official scholars,” who do the government’s bidding.
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the debate on the Japanese war is conducted almost entirely outside Japanese universities, by journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil rights activists, and so forth. This means that the zanier theories of the likes of Tanaka…
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The other reason was that modern history was not considered academically respectable. It was too fluid, too political, too controversial. Until 1955, there was not one modern historian on the staff of Tokyo University. History stopped around the middle of the nineteenth century. And even now, modern…
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In any case, so the argument invariably ends, Hiroshima, having been planned in cold blood, was a far worse crime. “Unlike in Europe or China,” writes Tanaka, “you won’t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan.” This is because the Japanese…
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One reason is that there are very few modern historians in Japan. Until the end of the war, it would have been dangerously subversive, even blasphemous, for a critical scholar to write about modern…
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they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians.
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Tanaka and others have pointed out that it is physically impossible for one man to cut off a hundred heads with one blade, and that for the same reason Japanese troops could never have…
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Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up…
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He admits that a few innocent people got killed in the cross fire, but these deaths were incidental. Some soldiers were doubtless a bit rough, but…
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even he defends an argument that all the apologists make too: “On the battlefield men face the ultimate extremes of human existence, life or death. Extreme conduct, although still ethically…
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atrocities carried out far from the battlefield dangers and imperatives and according to a rational plan were acts of evil barbarism. The Auschwitz gas chambers of our ‘ally’ Germany and the atomic bombing of our…
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The point that it was not systematic was made by leftist opponents of the official scholars too. The historian Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote that the Nanking Massacre, whose scale and horror he does not deny, “may have been a reaction to the fierce Chinese resistance after the Shanghai fighting.” Ienaga’s…
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The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
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the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.
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The politics behind the symbol are so divided and so deeply entrenched that it hinders a rational historical debate about what actually happened in 1937. The more one side insists on Japanese guilt, the more the other insists on denying it.
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The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre.
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The Japanese, he said, should see their history through their own eyes, for “if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history.” Yet another variation of seeing history through the eyes of identity.
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their emotions were often quite at odds with the idea of “shame culture” versus “guilt culture.” Even where the word for shame, hazukashii, was used, its meaning was impossible to distinguish from the Western notion of guilt.
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wasn’t so bad in itself. But then they killed them. You see, rape was against military regulations, so we had to destroy the evidence. While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it, no guilt. If we had, we couldn’t have done it.
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“Whenever we would enter a village, the first thing we’d do was steal food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men, women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese troops where we were. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”
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Clearly, then, the Nanking Massacre had been the culmination of countless massacres on a smaller scale. But it had been mass murder without a genocidal ideology. It was barbaric, but to Azuma and his comrades, barbarism was part of war.
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“Sexual desire is human,” he said. “Since I suffered from a venereal disease, I never actually did it with Chinese women. But I did peep at their private parts. We’d always order them to drop their trousers. They never wore any underwear, you know. But the others did it with any woman that crossed our path.
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He did have friends, however, who took part in the killings. One of them, Masuda Rokusuke, killed five hundred men by the Yangtze River with his machine gun. Azuma visited his friend in the hospital just before he died in the late 1980s. Masuda was worried about going to hell. Azuma tried to reassure him that he was only following orders. But Masuda remained convinced that he was going to hell.
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“One of the worst moments I can remember was the killing of an old man and his grandson. The child was bayoneted and the grandfather started to suck the boy’s blood, as though to conserve his grandson’s life a bit longer. We watched a while and then killed both. Again, I felt no guilt, but I was bothered by this kind of thing. I felt confused. So I decided to keep a diary. I thought it might help me think straight.”
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What about his old comrades? I asked. How did they discuss the war? “Oh,” said Azuma, “we wouldn’t talk about it much. When we did, it was to justify it. The Chinese resisted us, so we had to do what we did, and so on. None of us felt any remorse. And I include myself.”
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got more and more agitated. “They turned the emperor into a living god, a false idol, like the Ayatollah in Iran or like Kim II Sung. Because we believed in the divine emperor, we were prepared to do anything, anything at all, kill, rape, anything. But I know he fucked his wife every night, just like we do …” He paused and lowered his voice. “But you know we cannot say this in Japan, even today. It is impossible in this country to tell the truth.”
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My first instinct was to applaud West German education. Things had come a long way since 1968. There had been no school classes at Nuremberg, or even at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt from 1963 till 1965. Good for the teacher, I thought. Let them hear what was done. But I began to have doubts.
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Just as belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off. It may be that show trials can be good politics—though I have my doubts about this too. But good politics don’t necessarily serve the truth.
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There is a story about the young Richard when he was in Nuremberg at the time of the war crimes trials. He is said to have turned to a friend and to have remarked, in his best Wehrmacht officer style, that they should storm the court and release the prisoners. The friend, rather astonished, asked why on earth they should do such a thing. “So that we can try them ourselves” was Weiszäcker’s alleged response.
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There was also concern that international law might not apply to many of the alleged crimes. If revenge was the point, why drag the law into it? Why not take a political decision to punish? This was what Becker, in his office, called the Italian solution: “You kill as many people as you can in the first six weeks, and then you forget about it: not very legal, but for the purposes of purification, well …”
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Becker was not against holding trials as such. But he believed that existing German laws should have been applied, instead of retroactive laws about crimes against peace (preparing, planning, or waging an aggressive war).
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It was to avoid a travesty of the legal process that the British had been in favor of simply executing the Nazi leaders without a trial. The British were afraid that a long trial might change public opinion. The trial, in the words of one British diplomat, might be seen as a “put-up job.”
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The question is how to achieve justice without distorting the law, and how to stage a trial by victors over the vanquished without distorting history. A possibility would have been to make victors’ justice explicit, by letting military courts try the former enemies.
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This would have avoided much hypocrisy and done less damage to the due process of law in civilian life. But if the intention was to teach Germans a history lesson, a military court would have run into the same problems as a civilian one.
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Due process or revenge. This problem had preoccupied the ancient Greek tragedians. To break the cycle of vendetta, Orestes had to be tried by the Athens court for the murder of his mother. Without a formal trial, the vengeful Furies would continue to haunt the living.
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The aspect of revenge might have been avoided had the trial been held by German judges. There was a precedent for this, but it was not a happy one. German courts had been allowed to try alleged war criminals after World War I. Despite strong evidence against them, virtually all were acquitted, and the foreign delegates were abused by local mobs. Besides, Wetzka was right: German judges had collaborated with the Nazi regime; they could hardly be expected to be impartial. So it was left to the victors to see that justice was done.
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When the American chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, was asked by the British judge, Lord Justice Lawrence, what he thought the purpose of the trials should be, Jackson answered that they were to prove to the world that the German conduct of the war had been unjustified and illegal, and to demonstrate to the German people that this conduct deserved severe punishment and to prepare them for
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What becomes clear from this kind of language is that law, politics, and religion became confused: Nuremberg became a morality play, in which Göring, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and the others were cast in the leading roles. It was a play that claimed to deliver justice, truth, and the defeat of evil.
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The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people—a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice. This was certainly the way some German writers felt about it. Some welcomed it
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We now have this law on our books, the prosecutor said: “It will be used against the German aggressor this time. But the four powers, who are conducting this trial in the name of twenty-three nations, know this law and declare: Tomorrow we shall be judged before history by the same yardstick by which we judge these defendants today.”
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“We had seen through the amorality of the Nazis, and wanted to rid ourselves of it. It was from the moral seriousness of the American prosecution that we wished to learn sensible political thinking. “And we did learn. “And we allowed ourselves to apply this thinking to the present time. For example, we will use it now to take quite literally the morality of those American prosecutors. Oradour and Lidice—today they are cities in South Vietnam” (Italics in the original text.)
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The play ends with a statement by the American prosecutor on crimes against peace
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(It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
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after Nuremberg, most Germans were tired of war crimes. And until the mid-1950s German courts were permitted to deal only with crimes committed by Germans against other Germans. It took the bracing example of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to jolt German complacency—that, and the fact that crimes committed before 1946 would no longer be subject to prosecution after 1965.
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Trying the vanquished for conventional war crimes was never convincing, since the victors could be accused of the same. Tu quoque could be invoked, in private if not in the Nuremberg court, when memories of Dresden and Soviet atrocities were still fresh. But Auschwitz had no equivalent. That was part of another war, or, better, it was not really a war at all; it was mass murder pure and simple, not for reasons of strategy or tactics, but of ideology alone.
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Whether you are a conservative who wants Germany to be a “normal” nation or a liberal/leftist engaging in the “labor of mourning,” the key event of World War II is Auschwitz, not the Blitzkrieg, not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front. This was the one history lesson of Nuremberg that stuck. As Hellmut Becker said, despite his skepticism about Nuremberg: “It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during the trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
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In his famous essay on German guilt, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), written in 1946, Karl Jaspers distinguished four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, for breaking the law; political guilt, for being part of a criminal political system; moral guilt, for personal acts of criminal behavior; and metaphysical guilt, for failing in one’s responsibility to maintain the standards of civilized humanity. Obviously these categories overlap.
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The great advantage, in his view, of a war crimes trial was its limitation. By allowing the accused to defend themselves with arguments, by laying down the rules of due process, the victors limited their own powers.
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In any event, the trial distanced the German people even further from their former leaders. It was a comfortable distance, and few people had any desire to bridge it. This might be why the Nazi leaders are hardly ever featured in German plays, films, or novels.
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And: “For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively.”
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Serious conservative intellectuals, such as Hermann Lübbe, argued that too many accusations would have blocked West Germany’s way to becoming a stable, prosperous society. Not that Lübbe was an apologist for the Third Reich. Far from it: the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, in his opinion, lay in its complete rejection of the Nazi state.
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their reaction was often one of indignation. “Why me?” they would say. “I just did my duty. I just followed orders like every decent German. Why must I be punished?”
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“that these criminals were so like all of us at any point between 1918 and 1945 that we were interchangeable, and that particular circumstances caused them to take a different course, which resulted in this trial, these matters could not be properly discussed in the courtroom.” The terrible acts of individuals are lifted from their historical context. History is reduced to criminal pathology and legal argument.
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they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
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The GDR had its own ways of using courts of law to deal with the Nazi past. They were in many respects the opposite of West German ways. The targets tended to be the very people that West German justice had ignored.
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Thorough purges took place in the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and industry. About 200,000 people—four-fifths of the Nazi judges and prosecutors—lost their jobs. War crimes trials were held too; until 1947 by the Soviets, after that in German courts.
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There were two more before 1957, and none after that. All in all, about 30,000 people had been tried and 500 executed. In the Federal Republic the number was about 91,000, and none were executed, as the death penalty was abolished by the 1949 constitution.
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East German methods were both ruthless and expedient, and the official conclusion to the process was that the GDR no longer had to bear the burden of guilt. As state propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West. There the fascists still sat as judges and ran the industries that produced the economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder.
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society. Although some of his critics, mostly on the old left, in both former Germanys, called him a grand inquisitor, few doubted the pastor’s good intentions. His arguments for trials were moral, judicial, and historical. He set out his views in a book entitled The Stasi Documents. Echoes of an earlier past rang through almost every page. “We can
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Germany of the guilty, the people who felt betroffen by their own “inability to mourn,” the nation that staged the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials, that Germany was now said to stand in judgment over the other Germany—the Germany of the old antifascists, the Germany that had suffered under two dictatorships, the Germany of uniformed marches, goose-stepping drills, and a secret police network, vast beyond even the Gestapo’s dreams.
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It is almost a form of subversion to defend a person who stands accused in court. So the idea of holding political and military leaders legally accountable for their actions was even stranger in Japan than it was in Germany. And yet, the shadows thrown by the Tokyo trial have been longer and darker in Japan than those of the Nuremberg trial in Germany.
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never was—unlike, say, the railway station or the government ministry—a central institution of the modern Japanese state. The law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was, rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over the people. Even today, there are relatively few lawyers in Japan.
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Japanese school textbooks are the product of so many compromises that they hardly reflect any opinion at all. As with all controversial matters in Japan, the more painful, the less said. In a standard history textbook for middle school students, published in the 1980s, mention of the Tokyo trial takes up less than half a page. All it says is that the trial…
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As long as the British and the Americans continued to be oppressors in Asia, wrote a revisionist historian named Hasegawa Michiko, who was born in 1945, “confrontation with Japan was inevitable. We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of…
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West German textbooks describe the Nuremberg trial in far more detail. And they make a clear distinction between the retroactive law on crimes against peace and the…
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Nationalist revisionists talk about “the Tokyo Trial View of History,” as though the conclusions of the tribunal had been nothing but rabid anti-Japanese propaganda. The tribunal has been called a lynch mob, and Japanese leftists are blamed for undermining the morale of generations of Japanese by passing on the Tokyo Trial View of History in school textbooks and liberal publications. The Tokyo Trial…
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When Hellmut Becker said that few Germans wished to criticize the procedures of the Nuremberg trial because the criminality of the defendants was so plain to see, he was talking about crimes against humanity—more precisely, about the Holocaust. And it was…
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The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731—of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things—was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors…
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those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as “logs”) carried out by Unit 731 in…
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There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a…
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This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception. To the Japanese, crimes against humanity are not associated with an equivalent to the…
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on what grounds would Japanese courts have prosecuted their own former leaders? Hata’s answer: “For starting a war which they knew they would lose.” Hata used the example of General Galtieri and his colleagues in Argentina after losing the Falklands War. In short, they would have been tried for losing the war, and the intense suffering they inflicted on their own people. This is as though German courts in 1918 had put General Hindenburg or General Ludendorff on trial.
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it shows yet again the fundamental difference between the Japanese war, in memory and, I should say, in fact, and the German experience. The Germans fought a war too, but the one for which they tried their own people, the Bogers and the Schwammbergers, was a war they could not lose, unless defeat meant that some of the enemies survived.
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Just as German leftists did in the case of Nuremberg, Kobayashi used the trial to turn the tables against the judges. But not necessarily to mitigate Japanese guilt. Rather, it was his intention to show how the victors had betrayed the pacifism they themselves had imposed on Japan.
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the Japanese left has a different view of the Tokyo trial than the revisionist right. It is comparable to the way the German left looks upon Nuremberg. This was perfectly, if somewhat long-windedly, expressed in Kobayashi Masaki’s documentary film Tokyo Trial, released in 1983. Kobayashi is anything but an apologist for the Japanese war. His most famous film, The Human Condition, released in 1959, took a highly critical view of the war.
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Yoshimoto’s memory was both fair and devastating, for it pointed straight at the reason for the trial’s failure. The rigging of a political trial—the “absurd ritual”—undermined the value of that European idea of law.
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Yoshimoto went on to say something no revisionist would ever mention: “I also remember my fresh sense of wonder at this first encounter with the European idea of law, which was so different from the summary justice in our Asiatic courts. Instead of getting your head chopped off without a proper trial, the accused were able to defend themselves, and the careful judgment appeared to follow a public procedure.”
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Yoshimoto Takaaki, philosopher of the 1960s New Left. Yet he wrote in 1986 that “from our point of view as contemporaries and witnesses, the trial was partly plotted from the very start. It was an absurd ritual before slaughtering the sacrificial lamb.”
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This, from all accounts, was the way it looked to most Japanese, even if they had little sympathy for most of the “lambs.” In 1948, after three years of American occupation censorship and boosterism, people listened to the radio broadcast of the verdicts with a sad but fatalist shrug: this is what you can expect when you lose the war.
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Some of the information even surprised the defendants. General Itagaki Seishiro, a particularly ruthless figure, who was in command of prison camps in Southeast Asia and whose troops had massacred countless Chinese civilians, wrote in his diary: “I am learning of matters I had not known and recalling things I had forgotten.”
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hindsight, one can only conclude that instead of helping the Japanese to understand and accept their past, the trial left them with an attitude of cynicism and resentment.
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After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that “the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.”
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Political trials produce politicized histories. This is what the revisionists mean when they talk about the Tokyo Trial View of History. And they are right, even if their own conclusions are not.
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Frederick Mignone, one of the prosecutors, said a trifle histrionically that “in Japan and in the Orient in general, the trial is one of the most important phases of the occupation. It has received wide coverage in the Japanese press and revealed for the first time to millions of Japanese the scheming, duplicity, and insatiable desire for power of her entrenched militaristic leaders, writing a much-needed history of events which otherwise would not have been written.” It was indeed much-needed, since so little was known.
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The president of the Tokyo tribunal, Sir William Webb, thought “the crimes of the German accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” Put in another way, nearly all the defendants at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, were also found guilty of crimes against humanity. But half the Japanese defendants received life sentences for political crimes only.
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the question of responsibility is always a tricky affair in Japan, where formal responsibility is easier to identify than actual guilt. Not only were there many men, such as the hero of Kinoshita’s play, who took the blame for what their superiors had done—a common practice in Japan, in criminal gangs as well as in politics or business corporations—but the men at the top were often not at all in control of their unscrupulous subordinates.
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“These men were not the hoodlums who were the powerful part of the group which stood before the tribunal at Nuremberg, dregs of a criminal environment, thoroughly schooled in the ways of crime and knowing no other methods but those of crime. These men were supposed to be the elite of the nation, the honest and trusted leaders to whom the fate of the nation had been confidently entrusted
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many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.
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“The Japanese people are of the opinion that the actual goal of the war crimes tribunals was never realized, since the judgments were reached by the victors alone and had the character of revenge. The [Japanese] war criminal is not conscious of having committed a crime, for he regards his deeds as acts of war, committed out of patriotism.”
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Yamashita Tomoyuki. Terrible atrocities were committed under his command in the Philippines. The sacking of Manila in 1945 was about as brutal as the Nanking Massacre. So to depict him in the movie as a peaceful gentleman, while portraying the American prosecutor in Manila as one of the main villains, might seem an odd way to view the past.
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The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials.
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The political theorist Maruyama Masao called the prewar Japanese government a “system of irresponsibilities.” He identified three types of political personalities: the portable Shrine, the Official, and the Outlaw.
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those who carry it, the Officials, are the ones with actual power. But the Officials—bureaucrats, politicians, admirals and generals—are often manipulated by the lowest-ranking Outlaws, the military mavericks, the hotheaded officers in the field, the mad nationalists, and other agents of violence.
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But it was not entirely wrong, for the trial was rigged. Yamashita had no doubt been a tough soldier, but in this case he had been so far removed from the troops who ran amok in Manila that he could hardly have known what was going on. Yet the American prosecutor openly talked about his desire to hang “Japs.”
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When the system spins out of control, as it did during the 1930s, events are forced by violent Outlaws, reacted to by nervous Officials, and justified by the sacred status of the Shrines.
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Here we come to the nub of the problem, which the Tokyo trial refused to deal with, the role of the Shrine in whose name every single war crime was committed, Emperor Hirohito,
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The historian Ienaga Saburo tells a story about a Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about having to dissect a live frog. The teacher rapped him hard on the head with his knuckles and said: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”
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the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hitler’s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
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A veteran of the war in China said in a television interview that he was able to kill Chinese without qualms only because he didn’t regard them as human.
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For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito’s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
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The same was true of the Japanese imperial institution, no matter who sat on the throne, a ruthless war criminal or a gentle marine biologist.
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the chaplain at Sugamo prison, questioned Japanese camp commandants about their reasons for mistreating POWs. This is how he summed up their answers: “They had a belief that any enemy of the emperor could not be right, so the more brutally they treated their prisoners, the more loyal to their emperor they were being.”
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The Mitscherlichs described Hitler as “an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy.
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The fear after 1945 was that without the emperor Japan would be impossible to govern. In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history.
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Aristides George Lazarus, the defense counsel of one of the generals on trial, was asked to arrange that “the military defendants, and their witnesses, would go out of their way during their testimony to include the fact that Hirohito was only a benign presence when military actions or programs were discussed at meetings that, by protocol, he had to attend.” No doubt the other counsel were given similar instructions. Only once during the trial
Why Southern white women vote against feminism - The Washington Post - 0 views
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McGovern was on to something that is still misunderstood today: Republicans had capitalized upon a strong advantage with anti-feminist white women, most notably in the South. The GOP had wooed these women by dropping its previous support for the Equal Rights Amendment and offering up a new dog-whistle tactic: preaching the politics of “family values.”
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This advantage helped propel Reagan to the White House and reignited the partisan transformation of the South that had stalled after Richard Nixon’s resignation.
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In fall 1971 and spring 1972, the ERA sailed through the House of Representatives and the Senate by votes of 354 to 24 and 84 to 8. It received such broad bipartisan support because legislators understood that the amendment would create equal opportunities for women should they choose to pursue them.
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in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly launched an anti-feminist crusade, STOP ERA, which reframed this notion of choice. The ERA, Schlafly insisted, would actually require women to put their children in government day care and put themselves on the front lines in warfare. Schlafly depicted feminism as a mandate and presented anti-feminism as a morally superior alternative.
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Schlafly had successfully organized Southern white, mostly religious women — the very people the GOP needed to recapture the South after Jimmy Carter’s victories there in 1976. Reagan appealed to these same Southern white women not by overtly opposing women’s equality, but by expressing his concern that the ERA would weaken the American family and diminish special protections for women.
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Southern white culture had long been a stronghold of traditional gender norms. In theory, the ideal Southern white woman was placed on a pedestal: financially supported, removed from the hardships of public life and protected from dangerous black men she was taught to fear. For poor and working-class white women, the pedestal and its protections were more aspirational than real, but the ideal was nonetheless powerful and pervasive in the South.
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In 1976, 64 percent of Southern white women supported the ERA, while 16 percent were opposed. By 1980, however, support had dropped to 42 percent, while opposition swelled to 44 percent — a much more drastic shift than in other regions of the country.
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more distorting, coverage of this new gender gap often ignored significant racial and regional distinctions. Reagan actually won white women by a 52-39 margin, which jumped to 59-34 percent among Southern white women. Women’s perceived preference for Carter really only reflected the way that the president had trounced Reagan among African American women.
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This post-election narrative took root in part because the idea that white women, particularly in the South, would not only hand the presidency to the party that opposed the ERA, but that they would do so because it opposed the ERA, was just too hard to accept
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The next time a woman appeared on the Democratic ticket — this time at the top — the problem of the oversimplified notion of a gender gap was even clearer. Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump among nonwhite women and even won white women living outside the South. However, among white women in the states of the former Confederacy, Trump, who was endorsed early on by Phyllis Schlafly, bested Clinton by 25 points, 58 percent to 33 percent.
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Courting anti-feminist white women was a critical part of the GOP’s Southern strategy, one often forgotten today, and it has solidified them into an integral component of the Republican base. Their preferences help explain why feminist candidates struggle in the South, why the gender gap has been misunderstood, why the ERA failed and why the 2016 election turned out the way it did
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If Democrats hope to build a winning coalition in 2020, anti-feminist white women must be considered distinct not only from women of color, but also from feminist white women both inside the South and beyond its borders
'It's a Leadership Argument': Coronavirus Reshapes Health Care Fight - The New York Times - 0 views
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Democrats were already talking about health care before the coronavirus, but the outbreak gives new urgency to a central issue for the party.
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The future of America’s health insurance system has already been a huge part of the 2020 presidential race. At campaign events over the past year, voters have shared stories of cancer diagnoses, costly medications and crushing medical debt.
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“Health care was always going to be a big issue in the general election, and the coronavirus epidemic will put health care even more top of mind for voters,”
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That was before more than 68,000 people in the United States tested positive for the coronavirus, grinding the country to a halt, upending lives from coast to coast, and postponing primary elections in many states. The virus has made the stakes, and the differing visions the two parties have for health care in America, that much clearer.
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“Sometimes these health care debates can get a bit abstract, but when it’s an immediate threat to the health of you and your family, it becomes a lot more real.”
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While the Democrats spent much of their primary fighting about whether to push for “Medicare for all” or build on the Affordable Care Act, the coronavirus crisis may streamline the debate to their advantage: At a time when the issue of health care is as pressing as ever, they can present themselves as the party that wants people to have sufficient coverage while arguing that the Republicans do not.
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“A crisis like the coronavirus epidemic highlights the stake that everyone has in the care of the sick,” said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton who served as a health policy adviser in the Clinton White House. “It really strengthens the Democratic case for expanded health coverage, and that should work, I should think, to Biden’s advantage in a campaign against Trump.”
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The virus is also having dire economic consequences, depriving Mr. Trump of a potent re-election argument rooted in stock market gains and low unemployment numbers. It is testing Mr. Trump’s leadership in the face of a national emergency like nothing he has encountered, and if voters give him poor marks, that could inflict lasting damage on his chances in November’s general election.
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Four years ago, Mr. Trump ran for president promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. But his campaign pledge quickly turned into a debacle in the first year of his presidency when Republicans struggled and ultimately failed to repeal and replace the health law. In the midterm elections the next year, Democrats emphasized health care, highlighting issues like preserving protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and they won control of the House.
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Mr. Trump is particularly vulnerable on the issue of health care. Over the course of his presidency, his administration has repeatedly taken steps to undermine the Affordable Care Act, including by arguing in court that the entire law should be invalidated. The Supreme Court agreed this month to hear an appeal in that case, which is the latest major challenge to the law. The court is not expected to rule until next year, but Democrats point to the Trump administration’s legal position as yet another example of the president’s desire to shred the Affordable Care Act.
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In his campaign, Mr. Biden has already put a focus on health care, promising to build on the Affordable Care Act and create a so-called public option, an optional government plan that consumers could purchase. On the campaign trail, he has talked about his own exposure to the health care system
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In the Democratic primary race, the health care debate has largely focused on the divide between moderate-leaning Democrats looking to build on the Affordable Care Act and progressives calling for Medicare for all, a government-run health insurance program. Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders represent the two sides of that argument.
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In a poll this month by Morning Consult, four in 10 Americans said the coronavirus outbreak had made them more likely to support universal health care proposals in which everyone would receive their health insurance from the government.
Opinion | The Real Russia Story in American Politics - The New York Times - 0 views
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the story of the convergence between Russia’s political culture and our own.
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an essay from 2000 by Yuri Levada, a pioneering Russian sociologist, called “The Wily Man.” The essay was Levada’s attempt to understand why so many pathologies of the Soviet era — the propensity for double-think and an adaptive, accommodating response to power — persisted so powerfully in modern Russia.
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In Levada’s telling, the wily man or woman “not only tolerates deception, but is willing to be deceived.” Indeed, says Levada, he even “requires self-deception for the sake of his own self-preservation.”
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guided by the prism of Levada’s wily man, I have studied the ways that many of Russia’s brightest figures — television producers, humanitarian aid workers, theater directors, Orthodox priests — have compromised themselves to accommodate to the state. Some of those compromises were venal and self-serving. But many started out with motives that were understandable, even admirable.
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Levada’s description of “wiliness” has become an intrinsic feature of a large and growing swath of American politics in the Trump age.
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The starkest example of this came during the recent impeachment trial in the Senate, where Republicans metamorphosed into bodyguards and apologists for President Trump
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It is not just politicians who have compromised. Numerous evangelical leaders have contorted themselves to hold up Mr. Trump as a virtuous, even godly, figure
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As Levada put it in his essay, a wily individual looks to “use the rules of the game for his own interest, but at the same time — and no less important — he is constantly trying to circumvent those very same rules.” Just so with Mr. Bolton, who has sought to project loyalty to the system while looking to outsmart and subvert it when personally advantageous.
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More often, as in Russia, these choices look understandable — perhaps even commendable. It’s hard to argue with those who accepted jobs in the Trump administration and federal agencies on the grounds that they could make a difference on policy issues, or at least prevent Armageddon.
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in America, at least at the moment, a wider spectrum of choices remains. And that is the scary thing about observing wiliness at home: how readily and quickly we bend, not when there is truly no other choice, but when there are plenty of other choices, the wily one being merely the easiest and most expedient.
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One could readily choose not to take the bribe, or pay one, whether literally or with one’s conscience — but that would mean less power, fewer riches, less comfort or advantage in the moment. Some find those temptations hard to resist. Others convince themselves that by making a compromise this time, they can do some good the next time.
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The danger is that wiliness quickly becomes a self-perpetuating spiral,
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Levada died, in 2006, gloomy about the prospects of his country ever transcending its culture of wiliness. Reading him now, nearly 15 years later, I wonder about the prospects for my own
How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...609862
social effects pandemic crisis culture politics financial youths Generation C
shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20
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Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
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With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
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“Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
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“We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
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People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
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To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
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Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
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investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
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Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
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Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
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Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
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American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
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The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
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Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
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as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
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there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
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those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
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Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
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there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
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What will become of Generation C?
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Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
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“People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
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Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
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Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
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Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
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in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
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For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
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This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
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When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
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the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
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“There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
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The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
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Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
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a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
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the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
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But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
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Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
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As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
'We can lose this election': what top Democrats fear could go wrong in 2020 | US news |... - 0 views
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Donald Trump has a huge campaign war chest and a vast, aggressive digital operation. And the US economy has shown stubborn resilience throughout the president’s three years in office, keeping unemployment levels low and stock markets high.
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hat’s the overall sentiment of Democrats based on interviews with over a dozen senior party figures – including ex-mayors and former governors – and top strategists during a chaotic month in the Democratic primary leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
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Bernie Sanders surging in Iowa, to the chagrin of centrist Democratic leaders who hoped a candidate like former vice-president Joe Biden or even the young and charismatic former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg might score an early win.
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“I’m still very bullish on 2020. I think Trump’s going to have a very difficult time winning re-election,” said the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe.
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Money money money!
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“I think someone who’s not worried about the money is crazy. Trump’s sitting on $100m right now and we’re nowhere close to having a nominee and they will be able to raise money but we’re still so fractured,”
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“I don’t think it’s going to be hard to raise all the money you need but that early advantage is not inconsequential given that this is coming down to a few voters in a few states,” Emanuel said.
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$20m on more than 218,000 Facebook ads. And Democrats have noticed.
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Incumbency
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But Trump is a divisive figure, to put it mildly. Democrats point to their gains in suburban districts across the country and flipping seven governor’s mansions in the 2018 midterm elections. They see that as a herald of Democratic competitiveness in Republican-leaning parts of the country. Democratic strategists hope fatigue from seemingly daily national crises will see reluctant moderates and swing voters vote Trump out of office.
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Emanuel said the deciding issues will be the key aspects of the economy versus a set of issues Democrats have run and won on in recent years.
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The most persistent source of Democratic handwringing is a traditional aspect of any presidential cycle: the months-long primary where fellow candidates turn on each other. After months of relatively respectful campaigning, the knives are finally coming out just before the first vote in Iowa next week.
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Running out of money – and a brokered convention?
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Democrats worry a long, bloody primary could advantage Trump. It could also drain Democrats’ resources.
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ppealing to swing voters A persistent fear throughout the Democratic primary has been picking a viable nominee. The 2020 Democratic primary has been full of ideological and policy debates over Medicare for All, immigration, a Green New Deal and whether a veteran or young charismatic leader can beat Trump.
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“The thing that concerns me the absolute most right now is Bernie being the nominee,” a veteran Democratic strategist with ties to multiple candidates said.
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The veteran Democratic strategist pointed to questions about where Warren stands on healthcare and Medicare for All. “I think Warren’s a problem. I think any candidate who would lose the healthcare debate to Trump is a problem. I think her stance is a problem. I think a lot of what’s ailing her is correctable. I think it’s not correctable with Bernie and he has no desire to correct it.”
Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Stree... - 2 views
DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/74ec4c99e72deda4a64da10692a15bf6
economics history literature good evil theory philosophy philosophers Bible Gilgamesh Adam Smith
shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19
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Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
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The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
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most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
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Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer
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“The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”
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Outside of our history, we have nothing more.
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The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.
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History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.
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Almost all of the key concepts by which economics operates, both consciously and unconsciously, have a long history, and their roots extend predominantly outside the range of economics, and often completely beyond that of science.
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That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.
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stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
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“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”
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contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,
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I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.
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Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.
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is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.
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mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?
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we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).
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In this sense, “the study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insight, unless complemented and completed by a study of metaeconomics.”17
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The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.
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I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.
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We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I
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argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.
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In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.
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I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.
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This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.
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Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)
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The Economy of Good and Evil
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from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.
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the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?
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The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor
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Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?
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All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.
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idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”
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The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep
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Masters of the Truth
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Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?
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Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.
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The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.
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The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus
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We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).
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When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.
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By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.
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the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.
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there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something.5 No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence.
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Gilgamesh becomes a hero not only due to his strength, but also due to discoveries and deeds whose importance were in large part economic—direct gaining of construction materials in the case of felling the cedar forest, stopping Enkidu from devastating Uruk’s economy, and discovering new desert routes during his expeditions.
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Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.
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is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.
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But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.16
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But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.
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As Joseph Stiglitz says, One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic.
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Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality, fellowship, or, if you want to use a desecrated term, comradeship. These “lesser relationships” are useful and necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level
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But true friendship, which becomes one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from completely different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis accurately describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, unnecessary for civilization, and an unneeded relationship
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Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform (or break down) a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu.
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Due to their friendship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then intend to stand up to the gods themselves and turn a holy tree into mere (construction) material they can handle almost freely, thereby making it a part of the city-construct, part of the building material of civilization, thus “enslaving” that which originally was part of wild nature. This is a beautiful proto-example of the shifting of the borders between the sacred and profane (secular)—and to a certain extent also an early illustration of the idea that nature is there to provide cities and people with raw material and production resources.
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started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.
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Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive;
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Both heroes change—each from opposite poles—into humans. In this context, a psychological dimension to the story may be useful: “Enkidu (…) is Gilgamesh’s alter ego, the dark, animal side of his soul, the complement to his restless heart. When Gilgamesh found Enkidu, he changed from a hated tyrant into the protector of his city. (…)
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To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We
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this moment of rebirth from an animal to a human state, the world’s oldest preserved epic implicitly hints at something highly important. Here we see what early cultures considered the beginning of civilization. Here is depicted the difference between people and animals or, better, savages. Here the epic quietly describes birth, the awakening of a conscious, civilized human. We are witnesses to the emancipation of humanity from animals,
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The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.
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The price we pay for independence from the whims of nature is dependence on our societies and civilizations. The more sophisticated a given society is as a whole, the less its members are able to survive on their own as individuals, without society.
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The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.
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Human life in the city gains a new dimension and suddenly it seems more natural to take up issues going beyond the life span of an individual. “The city wall symbolizes as well as founds the permanence of the city as an institution which will remain forever and give its inhabitants the certainty of unlimited safety, allowing them to start investing with an outlook reaching far beyond the borders of individual life.
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The wall around the city of Uruk is, among other things, a symbol of an internal distancing from nature, a symbol of revolts against submission to laws that do not come under the control of man and that man can at most discover and use to his benefit.
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“The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47
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If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”
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can be said that Enkidu was therefore happy in his natural state, because all of his needs were satiated. On the other hand, with people, it appears that the more a person has, the more developed and richer, the greater the number of his needs (including the unsaturated ones).
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the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53
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Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.
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Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.
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The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.
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is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.
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Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.
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this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.
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If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.
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If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.
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How does this affect economics?
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us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.
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Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.
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Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.
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By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil
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Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.
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A similar motif appears a thousand years after the reversal, which is well known even to noneconomists as the central idea of economics: the invisible hand of the market.
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A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.
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Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.
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immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77
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After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.
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In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh
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The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81
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It is simpler to observe the main features of our civilization at a time when the picture was more readable—at a time when our civilization was just being born and was still “half-naked.” In other words, we have tried to dig down to the bedrock of our written civilization;
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today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.
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the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax
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is there something from it that is valid today? Have we found in Gilgamesh certain archetypes that are in us to this day?
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The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.
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We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.
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Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.
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Gilgamesh had a wall built that divided the city from wild nature and created a space for the first human culture. Nevertheless, “not even far-reaching works of civilization could satisfy human desire.”
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Friendship shows us new, unsuspected adventures, gives us the opportunity to leave the wall and to become neither its builder nor its part—to not be another brick in the wall.
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with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.
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to change the system, to break down that which is standing and go on an expedition against the gods (to awaken, from naïveté to awakening) requires friendship.
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For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,
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The thought that humanity comes at the expense of efficiency is just as old as humanity itself—as we have shown, subjects without emotion are the ideal of many tyrants.
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The epic later crashes this idea through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Friendship—the biologically least essential love, which at first sight appears to be unnecessary
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less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.
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human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.
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For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.
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Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It
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They practiced money lending, traded in many assets (…) and especially were engaged in the trading of shares on capital markets, worked in currency exchange and frequently figured as mediators in financial transactions (…), they functioned as bankers and participated in emissions of all possible forms.
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As regards modern capitalism (as opposed to the ancient and medieval periods) … there are activities in it which are, in certain forms, inherently (and completely necessarily) present—both from an economic and legal standpoint.7
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As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:
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Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.
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Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.
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For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?
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Hebrew religiosity is therefore strongly connected with this world, not with any abstract world, and those who take pleasure in worldly possessions are not a priori doing anything wrong.
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PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.
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The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at
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There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12
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about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.
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What’s more, economic progress has almost become an assumption of modern functional societies. We expect growth. We take it automatically. Today, if nothing “new” happens, if GDP does not grow (we say it stagnates) for several quarters, we consider it an anomaly.
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however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.
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Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,
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This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.
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Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.
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Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.
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economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.
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REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.
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Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21
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As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,
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The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.
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The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,
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The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),
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THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.
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This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.
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manliness and strength,28 knowledge and intelligence,29 wisdom and understanding, vigilance and performance, fame and renown (fame which overcomes enemies because “a thousand men would not be able to stand firmly in his presence”);30 the hero is a good shepherd (who takes care of his subordinates), is a copper-clad rampart, the shield of the land, and the defender of heroes.
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Each of us probably has a sort of “hero within”—a kind of internal role-model, template, an example that we (knowingly or not) follow. It is very important what kind of archetype it is, because its role is dominantly irrational and changes depending on time and the given civilization.
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The oldest was the so-called Trickster—a fraudster; then the culture bearer—Rabbit; the musclebound hero called Redhorn; and finally the most developed form of hero: the Twins.
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the Egyptian ruler, just as the Sumerian, was partly a god, or the son of a god.31
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Jacob defrauds his father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Moses murders an Egyptian. King David seduces the wife of his military commander and then has him killed. In his old age, King Solomon turns to pagan idols, and so on.
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Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.
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The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32
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We do not have to go far for examples. Noah gets so drunk he becomes a disgrace; Lot lets his own daughters seduce him in a similar state of drunkenness. Abraham lies and (repeatedly) tries to sell his wife as a concubine.
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the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.
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To a certain extent it can be said that the Hebrews—and later Christianity—added another archetype, the archetype of the heroic Sufferer.35 Job
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Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress
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For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.
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the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods
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This is very important for democratic capitalism, because the Jewish heroic archetype lays the groundwork much better for the development of the later phenomenon of the hero, which better suits life as we know it today. “The heroes laid down their arms and set about trading to become wealthy.”
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in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).
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RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.
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Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an
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The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39
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Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.
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44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.
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which for the methodology of science and economics is very important because disorder and chaos are difficult to examine scientifically.43 Faith in some kind of rational and logical order in a system (society, the economy) is a silent assumption of any (economic) examination.
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THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,
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From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.
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Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.
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Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.
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I was there when he set heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep (…) Then I was the craftsman at his side.47
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There are more urgings to gain wisdom in the Old Testament. “Wisdom calls aloud in the street (…): ‘How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?’”49 Or several chapters later: “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”50
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examination is not forbidden. The fact that order can be grasped by human reason is another unspoken assumption that serves as a cornerstone of any scientific examination.
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then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways (…) Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord.
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the rational examination of nature has its roots, surprisingly, in religion.
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The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled in place,
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The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:
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The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:
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MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:
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Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.
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The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.
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Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53
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He invented (fictitiously and completely abstractly!) a framework that was generally accepted and soon “made into” reality. Marx invented similarly; he created the notion of class exploitation. Through his idea, the perception of history and reality was changed for a large part of the world for nearly an entire century.
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Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we
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How does this relate to economics? Reality itself, our “objective” world, is cocreated, man himself participates in the creation; creation, which is somewhat constantly being re-created.
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Our scientific models put the finishing touches on reality, because (1) they interpret, (2) they give phenomena a name, (3) they enable us to classify the world and phenomena according to logical forms, and (4) through these models we de facto perceive reality.
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When man finds a new linguistic framework or analytical model, or stops using the old one, he molds or remolds reality. Models are only in our heads; they are not “in objective reality.” In this sense, Newton invented (not merely discovered!) gravity.
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A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).
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Keynes enters into the history of economic thought from the same intellectual cadence; his greatest contribution to economics was precisely the resurrection of the imperceptible—for example in the form of animal spirits or uncertainty. The economist Piero Mini even ascribes Keynes’s doubting and rebellious approach to his almost Talmudic education.63
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God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61
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in this viewpoint it is possible to see how Jewish thought is mystical—it admits the role of the incomprehensible. Therefore, through its groundedness, Jewish thought indulges mystery and defends itself against a mechanistic-causal explanation of the world: “The Jewish way of thinking, according to Veblen, emphasizes the spiritual, the miraculous, the intangible.
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The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.
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What’s more, history seems to be based on morals; morals seem to be the key determining factors of history. For the Hebrews, history proceeds according to how morally its actors behave.
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The Sumerians believed in dualism—good and evil deities exist, and the earth of people becomes their passive battlefield.
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GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.
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This was not about moral-human evil, but rather a kind of natural evil. It is as if good and evil were not touched by morality at all. Evil simply occurred. Period.
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the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.
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Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65
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discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence
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The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.
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sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To
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It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.
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Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).
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The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.
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This principle stands directly against the self-fulfilling prophecy,80 the well-known concept of social science. Certain prophecies become self-fulfilling when expressed (and believed) while others become self-contradicting prophecies when pronounced (and believed).
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If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.
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Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.
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back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.
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Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.
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If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your forefathers. He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers.
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Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,
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From today’s perspective, we can state that the moral dimension entirely disappeared from economic thought for a long time, especially due to the implementation of Mandeville’s concept of private vices that contrarily support the public welfare
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Without being timid, we can say this is the first documented attempt to explain the economic cycle. The economic cycle, the explanation of which is to this day a mystery to economists, is explained morally in the Old Testament.
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But how do we consolidate these two conflicting interpretations of the economic cycle: Can ethics be responsible for it or not? Can we influence reality around us through our acts?
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it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.
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THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.
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Kant, the most important modern thinker in the area of ethics, answers on the contrary that if we carry out a “moral” act on the basis of economic calculus (therefore we carry out an hedonistic consideration; see below) in the expectation of later recompense, its morality is lost. Recompense, according to the strict Kant, annuls ethics.
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Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.
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Job’s friends try to show that he must have sinned in some way and, in doing so, deserved God’s punishment. They are absolutely unable to imagine a situation in which Job, as a righteous man, would suffer without (moral) cause. Nevertheless, Job insists that he deserves no punishment because he has committed no offense: “God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”94
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But Job remains righteous, even though it does not pay to do so: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.95 And till I die, I will not deny my integrity I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.96
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He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?
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morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.
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This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.
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So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.
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the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly
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constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.
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In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.
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the mining of enjoyment must not come at the expense of exogenously given rules. “Judaism comes therefore to train or educate the unbounded desire … for wealth, so that market activities and patterns of consumption operate within a God-given morality.”102
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The Epicureans acted with the goal of maximizing utility without regard for rules (rules developed endogenously, from within the system, computed from that which increased utility—this was one of the main trumps of the Epicurean school; they did not need exogenously given norms, and argued that they could “calculate” ethics (what to do) for every given situation from the situation itself).
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The Stoics could not seek their enjoyment—or, by another name, utility. They could not in any way look back on it, and in no way could they count on it. They could only live according to rules (the greatest weakness of this school was to defend where exogenously the given rules came from and whether they are universal) and take a indifferent stand to the results of their actions.
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To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.
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Their relationship to the law was not supposed to be one of duty,105 but one of gratitude, love. Hebrews were to do good (outgoing), because goodness (incoming) has already been done to them.
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This is in stark contrast with today’s legal system, where, naturally, no mention of love or gratefulness exists. But God expects a full internalization of the commandments and their fulfillment with love, not as much duty. By no means was this on the basis of the cost-benefit analyses so widespread in economics today, which determines when it pays to break the law and when not to (calculated on the basis of probability of being caught and the amount of punishment vis-à-vis the possible gain).
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And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers and loved them….
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the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.
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The Hebrews, originally a nomadic tribe, preferred to be unrestrained and grew up in constant freedom of motion.
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Human laws, if they are in conflict with the responsibilities given by God, are subordinate to personal responsibility, and a Jew cannot simply join the majority, even if it is legally allowed. Ethics, the concept of good, is therefore always superior to all local laws, rules, and customs:
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THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.
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Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,
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The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.
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The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:
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In addition, they were aware of a thin two-way line between owner and owned. We own material assets, but—to a certain extent—they own us and tie us down. Once we become used to a certain material
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This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.
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One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”
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SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM
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regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.
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In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126
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Such provisions can be seen as the antimonopoly and social measures of the time. The economic system even then had a clear tendency to converge toward asset concentration, and therefore power as well. It would appear that these provisions were supposed to prevent this process
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Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.
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These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.
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Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.
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Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.
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“Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135
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In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.
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With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.
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Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.
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ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.
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Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.
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The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”
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To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”
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Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
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there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:
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In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157
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Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.
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In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,
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Today the position and significance of money and debt has gone so far and reached such a dominant position in society that operating with debts (fiscal policy) or interest or money supply (monetary policy) means that these can, to a certain extent, direct (or at least strongly influence) the whole economy and society.
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In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.
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As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.
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money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever
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Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.
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MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)
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Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.
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labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.
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LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY
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The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.
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It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain
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But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.
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If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.
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Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.
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Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”
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Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.
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Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.
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good example is the commandment on the Sabbath. No one at all could work on this day, not even the ones who were subordinate to an observant Jew:
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the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.
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Paradoxically, it is precisely this commandment out of all ten that is probably the most violated today.
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Aristotle even considers labor to be “a corrupted waste of time which only burdens people’s path to true honour.”
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we have days when we must not toil connected (at least lexically) with the word meaning emptiness: the English term “vacation” (or emptying), as with the French term, les vacances, or German die Freizeit, meaning open time, free time, but also…
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Translated into economic language: The meaning of utility is not to increase it permanently but to rest among existing gains. Why do we learn how to constantly increase gains but not how to…
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This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…
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Six-sevenths of time either be dissatisfied and reshape the world into your own image, man, but one-seventh you will rest and not change the creation. On the seventh day, enjoy creation and enjoy the work of your hands.
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the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…
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Saturday was not established to increase efficiency. It was a real ontological break that followed the example of the Lord’s seventh day of creation. Just as the Lord did not rest due to tiredness or to regenerate strength; but because He was done. He was done with His work, so that He could enjoy it, to cherish in His creation.
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If we believe in rest at all today, it is for different reasons. It is the rest of the exhausted machine, the rest of the weak, and the rest of those who can’t handle the tempo. It’s no wonder that the word “rest…
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Related to this, we have studied the first mention of a business cycle with the pharaoh’s dream as well as seen a first attempt (that we may call…
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We have tried to show that the quest for a heaven on Earth (similar to the Jewish one) has, in its desacralized form, actually also been the same quest for many of the…
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We have also seen that the Hebrews tried to explain the business cycle with morality and ethics. For the Hebrews,…
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ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.
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CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…
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We have tried to show how the Torah desacralized three important areas in our lives: the earthly ruler, nature,…
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What is the relationship between the good and evil that we do (outgoing) and the utility of disutility that we (expect to) get as a reward (incoming)? We have seen…
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The Hebrews never despised material wealth; on contrary, the Jewish faith puts great responsibility on property management. Also the idea of progress and the linear perception of time gives our (economic)…
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the Hebrews managed to find something of a happy compromise between both of these principles.
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will not be able to completely understand the development of the modern notion of economics without understanding the disputes between the Epicureans and the Stoics;
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poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.
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those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.
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Today’s scientific truth is founded on the notion of exact and objective facts, but poetic truth stands on an interior (emotional) consonance with the story or poem. “It is not addressed first to the brain … [myth] talks directly to the feeling system.”
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“epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.
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Ancient philosophy, just as science would later, tries to find constancy, constants, quantities, inalterabilities. Science seeks (creates?) order and neglects everything else as much as it can. In their own experiences, everyone knows that life is not like that,
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Just as scientists do today, artists drew images of the world that were representative, and therefore symbolic, picturelike, and simplifying (but thus also misleading), just like scientific models, which often do not strive to be “realistic.”
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general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8
Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook - The Washingt... - 0 views
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There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior.
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In particular, momentum is building in Congress and elsewhere in the federal government for a law requiring tech companies — like newspapers, television stations and other traditional carriers of campaign messages — to disclose who buys political ads and how much they spend on them.
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“There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society — that sentiment is definitely turning,” said Tim O’Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O’Reilly Media.
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the Russian disinformation effort has proven far harder to track and combat because Russian operatives were taking advantage of Facebook’s core functions, connecting users with shared content and with targeted native ads to shape the political environment in an unusually contentious political season, say people familiar with Facebook’s response.
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Unlike the Islamic State, what Russian operatives posted on Facebook was, for the most part, indistinguishable from legitimate political speech. The difference was the accounts that were set up to spread the misinformation and hate were illegitimate.
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Facebook’s cyber experts found evidence that members of APT28 were setting up a series of shadowy accounts — including a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks — to promote stolen emails and other documents during the presidential race. Facebook officials once again contacted the FBI to share what they had seen.
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The sophistication of the Russian tactics caught Facebook off-guard. Its highly regarded security team had erected formidable defenses against traditional cyber attacks but failed to anticipate that Facebook users — deploying easily available automated tools such as ad micro-targeting — pumped skillfully crafted propaganda through the social network without setting off any alarm bells.
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One of the theories to emerge from their post-mortem was that Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas in order to increase enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton.
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The software tool was given a secret designation, and Facebook is now deploying it and others in the run-up to elections around the world. It was used in the French election in May, where it helped disable 30,000 fake accounts, the company said. It was put to the test again on Sunday when Germans went to the polls. Facebook declined to share the software tool’s code name.
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“It is our responsibility,” he wrote, “to amplify the good effects [of the Facebook platform] and mitigate the bad — to continue increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive impact on the world.”
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The extent of Facebook’s internal self-examination became clear in April, when Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos co-authored a 13-page white paper detailing the results of a sprawling research effort that included input from experts from across the company, who in some cases also worked to build new software aimed specifically at detecting foreign propaganda.
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“Facebook sits at a critical juncture,” Stamos wrote in the paper, adding that the effort focused on “actions taken by organized actors (governments or non-state actors) to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome.” He described how the company had used a technique known as machine learning to build specialized data-mining software that can detect patterns of behavior — for example, the repeated posting of the same content — that malevolent actors might use.
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the intelligence agencies had little data on Russia’s use of Facebook and other U.S.-based social media platforms, in part because of rules designed to protect the privacy of communications between Americans.
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Officials said Stamos underlined to Warner the magnitude of the challenge Facebook faced policing political content that looked legitimate. Stamos told Warner that Facebook had found no accounts that used advertising but agreed with the senator that some probably existed. The difficulty for Facebook was finding them.
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Technicians then searched for “indicators” that would link those ads to Russia. To narrow down the search further, Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm.
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By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.
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Congressional investigators say the disclosure only scratches the surface. One called Facebook’s discoveries thus far “the tip of the iceberg.” Nobody really knows how many accounts are out there and how to prevent more of them from being created to shape the next election — and turn American society against itself.
The Geography of Trumpism - The New York Times - 0 views
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We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.
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What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
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“It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
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in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
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Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.
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the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.
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have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.
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I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.
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Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.
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I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.
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Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.
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Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.
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there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.
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Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.
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among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.
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The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.
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Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.
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As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.
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Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.
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Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.
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This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.
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The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.
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I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture
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Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."
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It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.
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Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.
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The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.
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If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.
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You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.
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There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.
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However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.
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It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future
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So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.
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this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.
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There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker
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The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.
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These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.
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Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history
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I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that
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racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.
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One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.
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The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.
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Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.
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We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.
Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent - The New York Times - 0 views
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Silicon Valley’s start-ups have always had a recruiting advantage over the industry’s giants: Take a chance on us and we’ll give you an ownership stake that could make you rich if the company is successful.
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Now the tech industry’s race to embrace artificial intelligence may render that advantage moot — at least for the few prospective employees who know a lot about A.I.
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Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from face-scanning smartphones and conversational coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous vehicles.
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As they chase this future, they are doling out salaries that are startling even in an industry that has never been shy about lavishing a fortune on its top talent.
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Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them. All of them requested anonymity because they did not want to damage their professional prospects.
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Well-known names in the A.I. field have received compensation in salary and shares in a company’s stock that total single- or double-digit millions over a four- or five-year period. And at some point they renew or negotiate a new contract, much like a professional athlete.
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At the top end are executives with experience managing A.I. projects. In a court filing this year, Google revealed that one of the leaders of its self-driving-car division, Anthony Levandowski, a longtime employee who started with Google in 2007, took home over $120 million in incentives before joining Uber last year through the acquisition of a start-up he had co-founded that drew the two companies into a court fight over intellectual property.
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Salaries are spiraling so fast that some joke the tech industry needs a National Football League-style salary cap on A.I. specialists. “That would make things easier,” said Christopher Fernandez, one of Microsoft’s hiring managers. “A lot easier.”
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There are a few catalysts for the huge salaries. The auto industry is competing with Silicon Valley for the same experts who can help build self-driving cars. Giant tech companies like Facebook and Google also have plenty of money to throw around and problems that they think A.I. can help solve, like building digital assistants for smartphones and home gadgets and spotting offensive content.