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Javier E

The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ian Buruma) - 0 views

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Japan history revisionist memory remembrance WWII interwar germany DDR

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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:
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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”?
  • 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?
  • the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”
  • 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
  • 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.”
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • “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.”
  • 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,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It
  • 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,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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 …”
  • 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.
  • 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.’
  • According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.”
  • 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.
  • The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin.
  • 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.
  • Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45).
  • images marking the end are more obvious.
  • 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.
  • These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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;
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.
  • “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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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),
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed.
  • 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.
  • whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.
  • 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.
  • 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,
  • 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.
  • like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur.
  • 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.
  • 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:
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true.
  • 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:
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.
  • 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 …”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.”
  • 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 …”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians.
  • 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…
  • Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • “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.
  • 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.
  • “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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 …”
  • 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).
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.”
  • “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.)
  • The play ends with a statement by the American prosecutor on crimes against peace
  • (It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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?”
  • “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.
  • they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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
  • 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.
  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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,
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
brookegoodman

UK troops fear Covid-19 outbreak in 'cramped' barracks lockdown | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...reak-cramped-barracks-lockdown

culture crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Three hundred soldiers recalled to a barracks in Aldershot this week have complained they are being locked down without sufficient hygiene essentials amid concerns that their cramped conditions could lead to a coronavirus outbreak.
  • Although thousands of troops have been placed on standby to help tackle the coronavirus crisis, frustrated soldiers in Aldershot said it was not clear why they had been recalled to “essentially an open prison”.
  • “We even have a dozen or so people within camp who are self-isolating through showing symptoms, and no effort is being made for them to receive medical treatment at all. They’re just being told to stay in their rooms and if they have to smoke they’re to smoke out of their window.”
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  • But concerns are growing in some quarters of the armed forces that the military is not practising physical distancing and could be at risk of spreading coronavirus when it is most needed, while images are circulating on social media of forces personnel conducting physical training in large groups.
  • An email from a commanding officer in the Royal Engineers seen by the Guardian says: “Where we can respect social distancing in the training environment we should seek to do so.” But it adds: “This will not always be possible, pleased [sic] be relaxed about this.”
  • Soldiers in the Grenadier Guards have single-person rooms, the army source added, and special arrangements such as staggered mealtimes had been arranged to help distance people while they are on standby at barracks. “Soldiers are used to keeping good hygiene: there are rigorous hand-washing routines for instance,” the source said.
  • It was impossible in practice to minimise contact with “people living in what are essentially university-style dormitories that have a shared kitchen and shared washing machines and dryers which obviously present considerable risk of cross-contamination. No cleaning equipment has been provided such as hand sanitisers for personal use, so people are having to share their own limited stock.”
  • An MoD spokesperson said: “We are well prepared for the outbreak of coronavirus, and have well-rehearsed plans in place for dealing with health matters. All our people have been reminded of the guidance issued by Public Health England, which is the same advice for the general population.”
brookegoodman

Did a New York Times article inspire Trump's 'back to work' plan? | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...oronavirus-back-to-work-column

crisis trump us politics

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • At the start of this week, as millions were following US government advice to combat the coronavirus pandemic by physical distancing and staying indoors, Donald Trump abruptly declared that people needed to soon return to work.
  • The policy of returning to normal, nearly all epidemiologists warn, carries a threat of catastrophe: of allowing the virus to spread just as the measures proven to curb it are starting to work.
  • On Sunday, the Fox News host Steve Hilton railed against the idea of long-term social distancing. Hilton claimed “working Americans” will be “crushed” by an indefinite work shutdown. Hilton mused that there could be a situation where “the cure is worse than the disease”.
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  • The idea of sending people back to work and restarting the economy had been floating around last weekend, propagated by two opinion pieces in particular. One was written on Medium. Another, published two days before the Hilton show, was an opinion piece by David Katz, a former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, which was published by the New York Times. Given the reach of the New York Times this piece, headlined Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?, attracted huge attention.
  • In time, people would develop immunity to the coronavirus, and in the meantime, damage to the economy would be minimized, Katz opined.
  • Katz’s piece was shared widely among conservatives, including by Fox News host and informal Trump adviser Pete Hegseth. The article served as a handy tool for conservatives advancing the argument that the economy shouldn’t be sacrificed for coronavirus containment.
  • “Dr Katz’s efforts on behalf of public health during this pandemic are uncompensated and born from a sense of duty and commitment to public health,” a spokeswoman for Katz told the Guardian. She pointed to a post Katz wrote on LinkedIn following the criticism, where he stresses how damage to the economy is also a massive public health issue.
  • He said: “The other thing is, low risk doesn’t mean no risk. We don’t know the natural history of the disease well enough to say: ‘Everybody under 65 is A-OK and ready to go back to work.’”
  • The concept of trading off self-isolation for returning to normal to help the economy has also been pushed by Trump’s cabinet including, his economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who on Tuesday told reporters: “Public health includes economic health.”
Javier E

We scientists said lock down. But UK politicians refused to listen | Helen Ward | Opini... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...coronavirus-science-who-advice

politicians scientist advice response pandemic uk

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • It’s now clear that so many people have died, and so many more are desperately ill, simply because our politicians refused to listen to and act on advice. Scientists like us said lock down earlier; we said test, trace, isolate. But they decided they knew better.
  • it is the role of policymakers to act on the best available evidence. In the context of a rapidly growing threat, that means listening to experts with experience of responding to previous epidemics.
  • When I say that politicians “refused to listen”, I am referring to the advice and recommendations coming from the World Health Organization, from China and from Italy. The WHO advice, based on decades of experience and widely accepted by public health leaders and scientists around the world was clear – use every possible tool to suppress transmission. That meant testing and isolating cases, tracing and quarantining contacts, and ramping up hygiene efforts
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  • Neither the advice nor the science were followed that week. My colleagues, led by Neil Ferguson, published a report on 16 March estimating that without strong suppression, 250,000 people could die in the UK. The government responded that day with a recommendation for social distancing, avoiding pubs and working from home if possible. But there was still no enforcement, and it was left up to individuals and employers to decide what to do. Many people were willing but unable to comply as we showed in a report on 20 March. It was only on 23 March that a more stringent lockdown and economic support was announced.
  • etween 12 and 23 March, tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people will have been infected.
  • The current best estimate is that around 1% of those infected will die.
  • So where to now? Once again, public health experience, including modelling, leads to some very clear recommendations. First, find cases in the community as well as hospitals and care homes; isolate them, and trace their contacts using a combination of local public health teams and digital tools.
  • Second, know your epidemic. Track the epidemic nationally and locally using NHS, public health and digital surveillance to see where cases are continuing to spread
  • Build community resilience by providing local support for vulnerable people affected by the virus and the negative impact of the control measures.
  • Third, ensure transmission is suppressed in hospitals, care homes and workplaces through the right protective equipment, testing, distancing and hygiene
  • Fourth, ensure that the most vulnerable, socially and medically, are fully protected through simple access to a basic income, rights for migrants, and safety for those affected by domestic violence.
  • I am not looking to blame – but for scrutiny so that lessons can be learned to guide our response. We need to avoid further mistakes, and ensure that the government is hearing, and acting on, the best advice.
Javier E

Dan Patrick's on-air plea captures an essential truth about Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...an-essential-truth-about-trump

trump crisis economics policy pandemic

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Patrick, a Republican, noted that it’s time to “get back to work,” adding that seniors such as him should be willing to be “sacrificed” if necessary, so our children don’t “lose our whole country” to an “economic collapse”:
  • Right now, Trump is actively considering relaxing federal recommendations on social distancing. As Trump put it, “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
  • Health experts are screaming warnings. As Tom Inglesbe, the director of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, powerfully argues, the failure to test has dramatically undercounted the true numbers of those infected. This, plus a looming exponential surge in cases, almost certainly means that, if we don’t continue major social distancing, our health system will soon be overwhelmed.
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  • the World Health Organization is now warning that a major acceleration could turn the United States into the next coronavirus global epicenter.
  • What Trump is really proposing here — and what Patrick is justifying — is a further washing-of-hands of responsibility for this whole affair.
  • the current Trump/Patrick line is that we should risk millions more dying, even though we’d only be guessing that relaxing social distancing would help the economy, when in fact the mounting deaths would take their own economic toll.
  • the very indeterminate nature of this guesswork — by Patrick and Trump alike — is what captures an essential truth about Trump’s handling of this whole disaster.
  • Trump plainly wants to ward off the coming economic downturn — no matter the cost — because he fears for his reelection
  • We don’t have to choose between unbearably high mass death totals and an economic collapse that dooms the American experiment. The government can send people money in sufficient sums and fortify the welfare state to save them from personal economic calamity, while bailing out small and large businesses with tight conditions that sagely protect taxpayers and working people.
  • That directive becomes exponentially more irresponsible and dangerous, because Trump is advocating a course of action that will result in many more cases while also refusing to do everything possible to marshal the needed supplies for dealing with that coming tidal wave.
Javier E

The Coronavirus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ronavirus-restrictions-us.html

pandemic response strategy WHO

shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.
  • for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.
  • This contagion has a weakness.
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  • the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues,
  • “You can contain clusters,” Dr. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”
  • The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.
  • Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home
  • Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.
  • It was not at all clear that a nation so fundamentally committed to individual liberty and distrustful of government could learn to adapt to many of these measures, especially those that smack of state compulsion.
  • What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The Times.
  • they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.
  • medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.
  • doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones.
  • Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health.
  • “At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,”
  • The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing.If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.
  • The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated.
  • The crisis would be over.
  • Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze.
  • In contrast to the halting steps taken here, China shut down Wuhan — the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak — and restricted movement in much of the country on Jan. 23, when the country had a mere 500 cases and 17 deaths.Its rapid action had an important effect: With the virus mostly isolated in one province, the rest of China was able to save Wuhan.
  • Even as many cities fought their own smaller outbreaks, they sent 40,000 medical workers into Wuhan, roughly doubling its medical force.
  • Stop transmission within cities
  • the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.
  • People in lockdown adapt. In Wuhan, apartment complexes submit group orders for food, medicine, diapers and other essentials. Shipments are assembled at grocery warehouses or government pantries and dropped off. In Italy, trapped neighbors serenade one another.
  • Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.
  • South Korea avoided locking down any city, but only by moving early and with extraordinary speed. In January, the country had four companies making tests, and as of March 9 had tested 210,000 citizens — the equivalent of testing 2.3 million Americans.
  • As of the same date, fewer than 9,000 Americans had been tested.
  • Fix the testing mess
  • Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.In China, those seeking a test must describe their symptoms on a telemedicine website. If a nurse decides a test is warranted, they are directed to one of dozens of “fever clinics” set up far from all other patients.
  • Isolate the infected
  • As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75 to 80 percent of all transmission occurred in family clusters.
  • Cellphone videos from China show police officers knocking on doors and taking temperatures. In some, people who resist are dragged away by force. The city of Ningbo offered bounties of $1,400 to anyone who turned in a coronavirus sufferer.
  • In China, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization’s observer team there, people originally resisted leaving home or seeing their children go into isolation centers with no visiting rights — just as Americans no doubt would.
  • In China, they came to accept it.“They realized they were keeping their families safe,” he said. “Also, isolation is really lonely. It’s psychologically difficult. Here, they were all together with other people in the same boat. They supported each other.”
  • Find the fevers
  • Make masks ubiquitous
  • In China, having a fever means a mandatory trip to a fever clinic to check for coronavirus. In the Wuhan area, different cities took different approaches.
  • In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.
  • The city of Qianjiang, by contrast, offered the same amount of money to any resident who came in voluntarily and tested positive
  • Voluntary approaches, like explaining to patients that they will be keeping family and friends safe, are more likely to work in the West, she added.
  • Trace the contacts
  • Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.
  • Dr. Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.” Social media also is used in Asia, but in different ways
  • When he lectured at a Singapore university, Dr. Heymann said, dozens of students were in the room. But just before he began class, they were photographed to record where everyone sat.
  • Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate under the care and observation of nurses.
  • There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them.
  • The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.
  • Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging
  • Preserve vital services
  • Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing across state lines to cities and suburbs
  • “I sense that most people — and certainly those in business — get it. They would prefer to take the bitter medicine at once and contain outbreaks as they start rather than gamble with uncertainty.”
  • Produce ventilators and oxygen
  • The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.
  • Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously. Inventors have proposed combining C-PAP machines, which many apnea sufferers own, and oxygen tanks to improvise a ventilator.
  • One of the lessons of China, he noted, was that many Covid-19 patients who would normally have been intubated and on ventilators managed to survive with oxygen alone.
  • Retrofit hospitals
  • In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.
  • Wherever that was impractical, hospitals were divided into “clean” and “dirty” zones, and the medical teams did not cross over. Walls to isolate whole wards were built
  • Decide when to close schools
  • Recruit volunteers
  • China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.
  • Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders, or as crematory workers.
  • “In my experience, success is dependent on how much the public is informed and participates,” Admiral Ziemer said. “This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation.”
  • Prioritize the treatments
  • Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.
  • An alternative is to harvest protective antibodies from the blood of people who have survived the illness,
  • The purified blood serum — called immunoglobulin — could possibly be used in small amounts to protect emergency medical workers, too.
  • “Unfortunately, the first wave won’t benefit from this,” Dr. Hotez said. “We need to wait until we have enough survivors.”Find a vaccine
  • testing those candidate vaccines for safety and effectiveness takes time.
  • The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.
  • After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.
  • If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.
  • In the past, some experimental vaccines have produced serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can paralyze and kill. A greater danger, experts said, is that some experimental vaccines, paradoxically, cause “immune enhancement,” meaning they make it more likely, not less, that recipients will get a disease. That would be a disaster.
  • One candidate coronavirus vaccine Dr. Hotez invented 10 years ago in the wake of SARS, he said, had to be abandoned when it appeared to make mice more likely to die from pneumonia when they were experimentally infected with the virus.
  • Reach out to other nations
katherineharron

Dan Patrick: 'I'm all in' on risking my health to lift social distancing guidelines for... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Monday night that he's "not living in fear" of the novel coronavirus pandemic and is "all in" on lifting social distancing guidelines recommended by public health experts in order to help the economy.
  • The CDC reports that 8 in 10 coronavirus deaths reported in the US are among adults 65 years old and older.
  • "Our country wasn't built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down," the President said during a Monday evening briefing at the White House, even as he acknowledged the effects of coronavirus are likely to worsen.
brickol

Live Coronavirus News, Updates and Video - The New York Times - 0 views

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politics us trump COVID-19 crisis economics

shared by brickol on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Tokyo Olympics have been postponed. New York, now the center of the outbreak in America, braces for a flood of patients. The playwright Terrence McNally dies of complications from the coronavirus.
  • tocks rallied on the hope that Washington was close to producing a stimulus bill. Shares soared for airlines and other companies expected to benefit.
  • Trump expressed outrage at having to ‘close the country’ to curb the spread of the virus.
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  • Even as nations from Britain to India declare nationwide economic lockdowns, President Trump said he “would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” less than three weeks away, a goal that top health professionals have called far too quick.
  • he expressed outrage about having to “close the country” to curb the spread of the coronavirus and indicated that his guidelines on business shutdowns and social distancing would soon be lifted.
  • “I gave it two weeks,” he said, adding, “We can socially distance ourselves and go to work.”
  • “We are honored to serve and put our lives on the front line to protect and save as many lives as possible,” the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association and American Nurses Association wrote in an open letter. “But we need your help.”
  • Mr. Trump fell back on his comparison of the coronavirus to the flu, saying that despite losing thousands of people to the flu, “We don’t turn the country off.”
  • States including California, Maryland, Illinois and Washington have declared stay-at-home or shutdown orders, but other states have been looking for directives from the Trump administration. And countries in Asia are beginning to see a resurgence of coronavirus after easing up on restrictions.
  • For governors and mayors who have been trying to educate people about the urgent need to stay home and maintain social distance, Mr. Trump’s recent statements suggesting that such measures may be going too far threatened to make their jobs more difficult.
  • Mr. Hogan, the chairman of the bipartisan National Governors Association, said that health officials suggest that the virus’s peak could be weeks or months away. “We’re just trying to take the best advice that we can from the scientists and all the experts, and making the decisions that we believe are necessary for our states,” he said.
  • Both Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence said that a lockdown had never been under consideration for the United States.
  • But the president and vice president were resolute that they want the country reopened. Mr. Pence said the administration’s timeline for trying to get businesses restarted and workers out of their homes was shorter than the period that health experts have said would be necessary to flatten the curve.
  • “We’ll focus on our most vulnerable, but putting America back to work will also be a priority, in weeks not months,” Mr. Pence said.
  • Mr. Pence also said two malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for off-label use treating patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The F.D.A. did not immediately confirm that assertion, but two administration health officials said it was not true.
  • India, the world’s second-most populous country, will order its 1.3 billion people to stay inside their homes for three weeks to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared on Tuesday.
  • Left unclear was how Indians would be able to get food and other needed supplies. Mr. Modi alluded vaguely to the government and civil society groups stepping in to help, but offered no details.
  • Mr. Modi also pledged to spend about $2 billion on medical supplies, isolation rooms, ventilators, intensive care units and training for medical personnel to combat the pandemic.
  • New York’s case count is doubling every three days, the governor says.
  • “We haven’t flattened the curve,” he said. “And the curve is actually increasing.” The governor, appearing in front of piles of medical supplies, spoke in a far more sober tone and delivered notably bleaker news than he has in previous days.The peak of infection in New York could come as soon as two to three weeks, far earlier than previously anticipated, Mr. Cuomo said, which would put even bigger strain on the health care system than officials had feared.
  • The governor said the state now projects that it may need as many as 140,000 hospital beds to house virus patients, up from the 110,000 projected a few days ago. As of now, only 53,000 are available. Up to 40,000 intensive-care beds could be needed. “Those are troubling and astronomical numbers,” he said.
  • In New York City alone, there have been around 15,000 cases.“Look at us today,” he warned the rest of the country. “Where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”
  • Perhaps it was inevitable that New York City and surrounding suburbs would become the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States. The population density, reliance on public transportation and constant influx of tourists — all would seem to make the metropolitan area a target.
  • But to stop the virus, scientists have to figure out which factors played a greater role than others. As it turns out, that is not so simple.
  • Perhaps the epidemic in New York had less to do with the virus than with discrete opportunities to spread: In so-called super-spreader events, one patient somehow manages to infect dozens, even scores of others. At one point, half the cases in Massachusetts were attributed to a single initial infection.
Javier E

Flatten the Coronavirus Curve at a Lower Cost - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ve-at-a-lower-cost-11585067354

mitigation strategy pandemic WSJ gop response economics politics culture

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • governors must also use this time to work with businesses on a plan for reopening the economy in a way that mitigates health risks. The White House is reportedly discussing ways to ease restrictions as early as next week, but local and state officials will have to produce well-considered plans to open up the economy in a relatively safe way.
  • A blanket lockdown can’t go on. Keeping every business closed and every worker at home until a vaccine is available won’t work
  • If this were the plague, with 50% of the infected dying, it might be a different story. But people won’t put up with losing many trillions of dollars to flatten the curve of this virus.
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  • Government officials should mandate safety measures, but those regulations need to be more tailored than a total shutdown of “nonessential” companies. Businesses were doing a good job already: announcing sanitation, social distancing and other protocols to keep operations safe and reassure customers. Visit any airline’s website.
  • State and local governments need to work with businesses to figure out a satisfactory combination of personal distance, self-isolation, frequent testing, stricter rules for those who must interact with customers, cleaning protocols and so on. Each industry will likely be different
  • The massive cost of a shutdown justifies costly measures to avoid it.
  • Retired people have income streams that aren’t as disrupted by the virus. They can stay home.
  • Government officials need to work with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Isolate old people and those with pre-existing health conditions, who are much more likely to end up needing emergency care, while letting the young and healthy get back to work, carefully
  • For instance, send some of the rivers of federal cash to purchasing more beds, ventilators, test kits, masks and gowns. Even $100 billion is cheap compared with $1 trillion a month.
  • Follow the Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore models: extensive testing, contact tracing, detailed people tracking. But keep the economy open, subject to stringent safety rules.
  • Lock down hotspots, but not entire states.
  • That approach may be expensive and onerous, but it’s better than destroying Americans’ livelihoods. It is time to craft a much more detailed, thoughtful, and cost-efficient policy to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
Javier E

Torn Over Reopening Economy, Trump Says He Faces 'Biggest Decision I've Ever Had to Mak... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-trump-economy.html

economy strategy pandemic response business trump

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • In actuality, the decision on when and how to reopen is not entirely Mr. Trump’s to make because he never ordered it closed. The stay-at-home edicts that have kept the vast bulk of Americans indoors were issued by governors state by state.
  • if he were to issue new guidance saying it was safe to reopen or outlining a path toward reopening, many states would most likely follow or feel pressure from their businesses and constituents to ease up on restrictions.
  • the central question dominating the conversation in Washington, New York and elsewhere was how long would it be until the country could begin to get back to normal.
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  • Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, the hardest hit state, said any easing of restrictions would require widespread testing to cover millions of workers first, while Mr. Trump said that “you don’t need full testing” but instead concentrated screening in th
  • New government projections presented to officials this week concluded that stay-at-home orders, school closures and social distancing have greatly reduced infections, but added that lifting them after only 30 days, as the president is considering, could result in a rash of new illnesses and fatalities that would rival doing nothing to counter the pandemic.
  • if the 30-day stay-at-home guideline is lifted, the death toll could reach 200,000, even if schools remain closed until summer, 25 percent of the country continues to work from home and some social distancing continues.
  • Using the demand for ventilators as a stand-in for serious coronavirus infection rates, the model foresees a modest bump immediately after stay-at-home orders are lifted and a major new increase in infections about 70 days after a shelter order is lifted, peaking after 120 days
  • These numbers fueling the projections may already be out of date. Forecasts accepted by the White House that once estimated at least 100,000 deaths in the United States have now been revised to about 60,000 thanks to aggressive social distancing.
  • Economists say that lifting restrictions, particularly on nonessential businesses, will restore a limited amount of activity to an economy that is currently in a free fall.
  • “It’s enough to say that if we were to stop at the national level May 1, we’re seeing a return to almost where we are now sometime in July,”
  • The government models show a rise in demand for ventilators 120 days after lifting stay-at-home restrictions that would be more severe than if the United States had never issued such orders in the first plac
  • Five administration officials said it was highly unlikely that Mr. Trump would extend the guidelines beyond April 30,
  • he would be more likely to find a way to announce some lifting of quarantine measures, even if it might not be a full flip-the-lightswitch reopening of the country.
  • Jacob Wintersteen, a real estate developer in Texas and the finance chairman for the Houston area for the state’s Republican Party, said businesses should have the right to operate if they see fit despite the risks. “People in front of my face are watching their businesses be destroyed by our choice of the cure,” he said.
  • The president’s economic advisers have been laying the groundwork for reopening the economy. Larry Kudlow, the chairman of the National Economic Council, said this week on the Fox Business Network that he could envision returning to work on a rolling basis within the next four to eight weeks. Mr. Mnuchin said on CNBC that it could happen as soon as May 1.
  • “As encouraging as they are, we have not reached the peak,” Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House pandemic coordinator, said of the latest figures. She noted that without universal testing, experts were seeing only the most serious cases. “Is this the tip of the iceberg, or is this half the iceberg or three-quarters of the iceberg that we’ve seen to date?”
  • ultimately, business leaders will not wait for health professionals or administration officials once new infections and deaths start to decrease and may simply reopen their firms.
  • Many experts caution that growth will be slow when it returns because people will be wary of resuming normal activities before the country has far more extensive testing.
  • A quick restart, though, could carry risks for the economy. If the government tells Americans to return to normal life and infections rise again, that could wipe out consumer optimism and lead to a longer, more damaging recession.
  • “Even after official restrictions are lifted, lots of people may be uncertain about jumping back into ordinary life. Companies may be uncertain about putting their workers at risk.”
Javier E

Coronavirus in San Francisco: How City Flattened the Curve - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609808

pandemic response san francisco

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February
  • Nearly a month after those initial orders to enforce social distancing, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area have emerged as a national model for how early and aggressive action can prevent the explosive rise in cases that has overwhelmed hospitals in New York, where leaders were slower to respond
  • San Francisco’s case count of 857 as of April 10—with just 13 recorded deaths due to the coronavirus—is much lower than that in metropolises of comparable size such as New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The city’s curve is low and flattening, and patients are not flooding into its emergency rooms.
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  • “All evidence suggests that they are doing much better, and the simplest explanation for that is that they did take social-distancing measures very seriously and they did it early,
  • while positive cases are surely being undercounted—as they are across the country—San Francisco’s stable public-health system and low death count offer validation of its success so far.
  • “Deaths are hard to hide,”
  • Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases.
  • By the time New York City fully shut down on March 22, more than 10,000 cases were reported across its five boroughs.
  • “She took incredible political heat and criticism,” Harris said, “and she had the courage to make a decision that she in her gut, based on science and the research she did, told her this was the right thing to do for her people, even when other people couldn’t see it yet.”
  • “Hindsight these days is not years later; it’s weeks later,” the senator said. “So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart. She did the right thing at the right time, even though it’s not what people wanted to hear.”
  • Epidemiologists told me that San Francisco and other West Coast cities likely benefited from the Trump administration’s late-January restrictions on travel from China, while the president’s delay in banning flights from Europe, which he didn’t do until mid-March, hit New York hard.
  • “New York was like Italy, and San Francisco and Washington State are more like, not necessarily the South Koreans, but some of the Asian countries that have had slower growth rates,
  • “Really, it’s about early identification of a problem, saying, ‘We’re going to be more proactive than reactive.’”
  • It’s that difference in decision making—proactive versus reactive—that has separated leaders at all levels of government during this crisis.
  • Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. The mayor has since relocated the command post to the Moscone Center, a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing. Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.Breed told me that what got her a
  • “A picture’s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity to handle this situation,” the mayor said, recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail. “We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco. What do you mean we don’t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity?” Breed recalled thinking. “That’s when I was just like, Oh my goodness, this is serious
  • In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.
  • “I think they remember how hard it was when we didn’t close down the bathhouses and saw what happened to the epidemic at that point,” said Maldonado, the Stanford epidemiologist.
Javier E

Warnings Ignored: A Timeline of Trump's COVID-19 Response - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/ne-of-trumps-covid-19-response

timeline trump response pandemic history policy politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the White House is trying to establish an alternate reality in which Trump was a competent, focused leader who saved American people from the coronavirus.
  • it highlights just how asleep Trump was at the switch, despite warnings from experts within his own government and from former Trump administration officials pleading with him from the outside.
  • Most prominent among them were former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, and Director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council Dr. Luciana Borio who beginning in early January used op-eds, television appearances, social media posts, and private entreaties to try to spur the administration into action.
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  • what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.
  • She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational
  • The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.
  • What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.
  • The Early Years: Warnings Ignored
  • 2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic
  • February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”
  • May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.
  • One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded
  • Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not
  • January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:
  • A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
  • Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
  • September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.
  • 2020: COVID-19 Arrives
  • anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China
  • January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus
  • Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.
  • January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”
  • January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 
  • January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”
  • January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”
  • January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:
  • (1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.
  • (3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.
  • January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
  • January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”
  • January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.
  • Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
  • Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.
  • January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.
  • February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.
  • Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.
  • February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.
  • February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”
  • February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
  • February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.
  • the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.
  • February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”
  • February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.
  • February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance
  • February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.
  • Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”
  • February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.
  • February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
  • March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”
  • March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”
  • March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis
  • March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.
  • Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.
  • March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment
  • March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it
  • At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.
  • March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th
  • March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”
  • March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)
  • As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.
katherineharron

Governors reopening their states are endangering American lives (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • How do you explain the utter idiocy of what we're seeing in the US? While the Covid-19 pandemic has ripped through country after country, the United States government stands out for seeming one of the least interested in actually fighting it -- particularly during the critical first few weeks of its spread.
  • Any promise of putting "America First" has turned into a laughable punchline -- we are first, yes, in coronavirus infections and deaths. We're No. 1!
  • Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida -- all states with Republican governors -- have announced plans to roll back social distancing measures over the next few weeks. According to public health experts and institutions, including the WHO and CDC, social distancing is already the absolute baseline when it comes to facing down a deadly and highly contagious disease. We really need the mass manufacture of tests and the attendant supplies necessary to test, not to mention adequate tracking and treatment. Plus, of course, actual widespread testing.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The United States has tested about 4 million people over several months. A new Harvard report says we need to be testing more like 5 million every day. But because our federal government is failing so miserably in that effort, the rest of us are left to do what we can to at least try not to get this thing in the first place. That means staying away from other people. And it means hoping our states, cities and municipalities will step up and fill the leadership vacuum left by the White House. Because this is less a problem of people than leadership: Overwhelming majorities of Americans under lockdown orders are complying with them. Overwhelming majorities of Americans support the restrictions. But we know that many people will, understandably, trust what our leaders tell us -- and too many of our conservative leaders are not earning that trust.
  • Especially in times of crisis, civilians need intelligent, thoughtful leadership. We need leaders who understand they are not experts on everything under the sun, and that leading with a narrow and reactionary ideology is no way to govern. We need leaders who will take pains to understand the scientific consensus, make difficult choices when necessary and lead with the truth. Unfortunately, the US doesn't have that at a federal level -- and several red states don't have it at a state level, either. And we're all paying the price for this long-time GOP malfeasance.
Javier E

The Dying Art of Disagreement - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dying-art-of-disagreement.html

disagreement liberal arts conversation civics journalism identity

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.
  • To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.
  • But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.
  • The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.
  • Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy
  • the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.
  • “The Closing of the American Mind.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.
  • What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?
  • As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
  • To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.
  • It’s what used to be called a liberal education.
  • The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
  • These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.
  • I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.
  • In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.
  • Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.
  • He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.
  • According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.
  • What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.
  • Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.
  • In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.
  • Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.
  • The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.
  • One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.
  • One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.
  • So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.
  • Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.
  • Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves
  • The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.
  • Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.
  • Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test
  • I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens
  • Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.
  • But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.
  • In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.
  • that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.
  • Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.
  • This is journalism in defense of liberalism
clairemann

Ted Cruz Falsely Suggests CDC Guidelines Are Why He Won't Wear A Mask On TV | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...nes_n_605ba894c5b67ad3871c4770

Politics policy US trump

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Were you worried that Sen. Ted Cruz might run out of new ways to act like a jerk?Never fear. He always comes through in the clutch.
  • “Uh, when I’m talking to the TV camera I’m not going to wear a mask,” Cruz said, adding that all his Senate colleagues have been immunized.
  • Cruz then snidely suggested that going maskless was “the whole point of a vaccine,” and implied he was following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance by not practicing social distancing or wearing a mask in public.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • There are quite a few problems with Cruz’s comments. For starters, CDC guidelines recommend that people who’ve been vaccinated should still wear masks and practice social distancing when in public.
  • “For now, fully vaccinated people should continue to [...] take precautions in public like wearing a well-fitted mask and physical distancing,” reads a March 8 post on the CDC website.
aidenborst

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: The slow road back to normal starts with a first step - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US crisis Culture policy Pandemic history vaccine covid-19 pandemic-recovery

shared by aidenborst on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • One of the biggest sources of stress -- other than the very real fear of having someone we love get sick with Covid-19, or coming down with it ourselves -- is keeping our distance from friends and loved ones. It's becoming increasingly clear that the isolation we have all endured has taken a remarkable toll.
  • It's a theme I hear from CNN readers, viewers and listeners all the time: When am I going to be able to see my grandchildren, my elderly father, my sister and her family? Most everybody has somebody they long to hug, to hold close and see in person.
  • Even after talking to the brightest epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease experts all over the world, I wasn't 100% sure on where the line in the sand for acceptable level of risk was drawn. And so we held off -- but still, I daydreamed of the day.
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  • And on Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought that moment into clearer focus. The agency came out with its first set of guidance about what fully vaccinated people can now do.
  • My parents had a significant emotional burden lifted after they were vaccinated, because they are now approximately 95% protected against getting severely ill from Covid-19. But like the rest of the country, they are restless and want to do something with their newly vaccinated status. That is why they called me right after they saw the news report about new recommendations from the CDC to ask me what it all meant. I laid out the good news for them, and the caveats as well.
  • In a major step, the CDC said people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely visit with other fully vaccinated people in private settings without masks, without social distancing and without having to be outdoors.
  • Additionally, however, the CDC guidance now allows for fully vaccinated people to visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease. That last part is important.
  • This was starting to sound like it was going to work, and that my parents should be able to safely visit, even though my kids or wife haven't been vaccinated. They meet the age requirements and would be considered low risk, both in terms of health and their very limited exposures.
  • As I kept digging into the guidelines and speaking with members of the Biden administration's Covid-19 task force, it became increasingly clear that a visit was looking possible, but with a few strings attached.
  • And, perhaps most notably, fully vaccinated people are also still being discouraged from traveling, something that throws a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an imminent family reunion.
  • "I think the guidelines are in a good middle ground," she said. "We're starting to go back to normal now, but it's not going to be flipping a switch... We will make that journey towards normalcy, or at least a new normal, as more people get vaccinated."
  • At 10% vaccinations we have this guidance. At 20-30%, we will have new guidance," he said, noting that there's going to be a distinct shift in the messaging of what people can and cannot do -- moving away from more binary messaging to one that describes activities as a range of low, medium and high risk.
  • Even as Walensky delivered the hopeful new guidance, she also noted the country still stands at a seven-day average of about 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day -- a rate that has leveled off somewhat, instead of continuing to steadily decline. And there are close to 2,000 deaths per day. So, she and other experts warn, any easing of restrictions is going to have to be gradual.
  • So where does that leave my family reunion plan? Unless my parents make the long drive to see us, we are going to hold off on a visit for now. With more than 2 million people getting vaccinated a day, however, another 20% of the country could be vaccinated by the end of the month. And, that will probably lead to a further relaxing of CDC guidelines and maybe allow my parents a plane ride instead, which means a possible visit to celebrate their wedding anniversary this spring!
mattrenz16

Vaccinated Americans, Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin (but Start Small) - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cdc-vaccinated-guidelines.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Federal health officials on Monday told millions of Americans now vaccinated against the coronavirus that they could again embrace a few long-denied freedoms, like gathering in small groups at home without masks or social distancing, offering a hopeful glimpse at the next phase of the pandemic.
  • Now the agency has good news for long-separated families and individuals struggling with pandemic isolation: Vaccinated grandparents can once again visit adult children and grandchildren under certain circumstances, even if they remain unvaccinated. Vaccinated adults may begin to plan mask-free dinners with vaccinated friends.
  • The new recommendations are intended to nudge Americans onto a more cautious path with clear boundaries for safe behavior, while acknowledging that most of the country remains vulnerable and many scientific questions remain unanswered.
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  • On Thursday, President Biden will make his first prime-time television address, noting the first anniversary of the pandemic’s onset and highlighting “the role that Americans will play” in getting the country “back to normal,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday.
  • Mr. Biden has promised that there will be enough doses for every American adult by the end of May. C.D.C. officials on Monday encouraged people to be inoculated with the first vaccine available to them, emphasizing that the vaccines are highly effective at preventing “serious Covid-19 illness, hospitalization and death.”
  • Even so, “it’s welcome news,” he added. “It’s the first time they are saying you can do something, as opposed to saying everything you can’t do. It’s huge.”
  • For example, vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren without masks or physical distancing.
  • In public areas and in places like restaurants or gyms, vaccinated people should continue to wear masks, maintain social distance and take other precautions, such as avoiding poorly ventilated spaces, covering coughs and sneezes, and often washing their hands, C.D.C. officials said.
carolinehayter

Masks, distancing still important even with vaccination, study suggests - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics us Pandemic Culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Vaccination alone might not be enough to end the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers reported Tuesday.
  • Even with a majority of the population vaccinated, the removal of pandemic precautions could lead to an increase in virus spread,
  • They found that coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths would continue to rise if pandemic precautions such as quarantine, school closures, social distancing and mask-wearing were lifted while vaccines were being rolled out.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • for a population of 10.5 million, approximately 1.8 million infections and 8,000 deaths could be prevented during 11 months with more efficacious COVID-19 vaccines, higher vaccination coverage, and maintaining NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions), such as distancing and use of face masks," they wrote.
  • It would be better to give lower-efficacy vaccines to more people, they calculated. That would reduce the risk of virus spread more than giving higher efficacy vaccines to fewer people.
  • In keeping with other research, the model showed a greater risk for Covid-19 hospitalization and death among Black people and those living in rural communities. The team noted that combining vaccination with pandemic precautions would lead to reduced infections, hospitalizations and deaths across all groups.
  • The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last month that in most cases, it's safe for vaccinated people to go maskless outdoors and indoors. The guidance was met with mixed reviews, with some public health experts arguing that the US is not far enough along in its Covid-19 vaccination effort to relax pandemic precautions.
  • Just over half of the adult population in the US and about 40% of the total population has been fully vaccinated, according to the latest CDC data.
  • As Covid-19 vaccination coverage increases, many states are dropping pandemic precautions.
  • Patel and colleagues say their findings suggest it will take a coordinated effort of maximizing vaccine coverage and practicing pandemic precautions "to reduce COVID-19 burden to a level that could safely allow a resumption of many economic, educational, and social activities."
anonymous

An Enormous Rainbow Mural Graces The National Building Museum Lawn During Pride Month :... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ding-museum-lawn-during-pride-

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The wide lawn of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., has taken on a riot of rainbow hues in a geometric mural designed by artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer.The installation, titled Equilateral Network, was designed to create spaces for social distancing with its triangular grid. Unpainted sections of lawn provide walking paths, and equilateral triangles lined in pink define spaces for people to sit, separated by six feet of distance.
  • Thalhammer designed the work in the fall of 2020, when social distancing was a pressing concern. Its opening now coincides with Pride month, creating a colorful new space for gatherings in the newly reopened city.
  • To create her design, Thalhammer took inspiration from Pierre L'Enfant, the French-American engineer and city planner who was tasked by George Washington with creating a plan for a new federal district along the Potomac. L'Enfant's design endures in modern D.C., where wide avenues cut angles across the city's grid.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Thalhammer was fond of L'Enfant's use of stars and triangles in his plan for the city – and found herself particularly drawn to the equilateral triangles that took shape in his designs."I really love the equilateral triangle as a symbol of justice, as a symbol of balance as it relates to our three bodies of government and how they're equal," she says.
  • The pink triangles in her design have particular meaning, she explains. "Some of it goes back to the Holocaust, of gay people being identified with the pink triangle. And then it was also used in ACT UP in the '80s when people were protesting against AIDS and not having a vaccine for AIDS. So the use of the pink triangle in this piece, for me, it's a bit of a reference to that historic identity of justice."
  • Then there are the rainbows – a symbol of identity for LGBTQ people, as well as a symbol of diversity. Thalhammer's palette is a 12-color spectrum, which she says represents the intersection of people's lived identities."We're very rarely just one thing as people, as humans. We're normally a variety of different identities that all come together and I think they're all beautiful," says Thalhammer, who identifies as pansexual.
  • Thalhammer hopes that people will walk through the space, work out, do yoga and meditate there. And she wants it to be a place where people can gather, in a year when many of the typical Pride events are canceled.
rerobinson03

Joe Biden's 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...020-presidential-campaign.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr. began his 2020 presidential campaign by losing, and then losing some more
  • Mr. Biden is now facing President Trump in a contest dominated by a global pandemic and a summer of unrest over police killings of Black Americans.
  • Mr. Biden’s year got off to a rocky start. In February, Iowans dealt him his first setback with a fourth-place finish in the state’s caucuses, and New Hampshire’s primary a week later went even worse. He finished in fifth place — and fled the state before the results came in.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Then came South Carolina. It was the first early contest where a large number of Black voters would register their preferences, and Mr. Biden enjoyed good will with those voters, stemming from his loyal service at the side of President Barack Obama.
  • When the results came in, he had won — and he had done so decisively, with more than twice as many votes as his closest rival, Mr. Sanders.
  • On Super Tuesday, Mr. Biden won 10 of 14 states, including some that he never campaigned in. His former rivals continued to coalesce around him over the next week. Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey endorsed Mr. Biden before Michigan’s primary a week later.
  • Mr. Biden re-emerged on Memorial Day, placing a wreath at a veterans memorial in Wilmington, Del., and wearing a mask, in contrast to how Mr. Trump had been appearing.
  • The next week, he met with community leaders at a Black church in Wilmington following the death of George Floyd in police custody
  • His campaign organized occasional in-person events in Delaware and neighboring Pennsylvania that were designed with safety in mind, with large white circles on the ground ensuring social distancing among reporters who attended.
  • After months of suspense, he selected Ms. Harris, a former rival, to join the Democratic ticket.
  • Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris accepted their nominations in front of socially distanced reporters at an event center in Wilmington — a far cry from the packed arena that was supposed to have cheered them on. On the convention’s final night, supporters gathered in their cars as if at a drive-in theater, and the new Democratic ticket joined them for a fireworks display.
  • Once again, his campaign held carefully arranged events with social distancing and mask wearing, a stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s crowded rallies.
  • Mr. Biden was returning from a campaign trip to Minnesota when the news broke: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans moved quickly to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett in her place.
  • Mr. Biden tried to frame the court fight as a battle over the future of health care in America, warning about Mr. Trump’s desire for the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act.
  • The first debate was the subject of great anticipation, presenting Mr. Trump with a chance to change a race that was unfolding in Mr. Biden’s favor. It also put a spotlight on Mr. Biden after Mr. Trump had spent months portraying him as a senile old man.
  • The meeting, however, was remembered not for Mr. Biden’s performance but for Mr. Trump’s constant interruptions.
  • Later that week came another seismic development: Mr. Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. Within two weeks, he had recovered and returned to the campaign trail with large rallies that flouted public health guidance.
  • Mr. Biden stuck to his approach. He made more visits to battleground states but refrained from holding crowded events.
  • In the final weeks, Mr. Biden pioneered a pandemic-appropriate substitute for traditional events: drive-in campaign rallies.His speeches quickly took on a new soundtrack, with applause lines punctuated by the beeping of car horns.
  • On the last weekend before Election Day, Mr. Biden campaigned with former President Barack Obama in Michigan, a state their ticket won twice. With coronavirus cases surging in many places, they condemned Mr. Trump over his handling of the pandemic.
  • Mr. Biden finished the campaign much the way he had started, presenting himself as a unifying figure who would work to repair the damage inflicted by Mr. Trump’s presidency.
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