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grayton downing

Nazi-looted Art Shown in Germany after Jewish Group Cries Foul | TIME.com - 0 views

world.time.com/...-victims-claim-nazi-looted-art

art germany culture

shared by grayton downing on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A lifetime ago, in the 1930s and ’40s, the Nazis looted thousands of artworks from Jewish collectors. Many of the original owners perished with their families in the Holocaust, while the survivors have mostly succumbed to old age
  • Since their discovery was first reported on Nov. 3 in the German newsmagazine Focus, a rush of ownership claims has poured in to German authorities, who have stored the works at an undisclosed location. But at a press conference on Nov. 5, Reinhold Nemetz, the chief prosecutor in the German town of Augsburg who is overseeing the case, said that showing the works online could violate the owners’ privacy while attracting dishonest claims of ownership. “It would be counterproductive for us,
  • “We must be careful not to squander the trust built over many generations,” he told the German news agency DPA. “Transparency is of the highest importance right now.”
Javier E

The Tea Party and Himmler's Black Legion - 0 views

www.hnn.us/132462.html

Germany history Nazi US ignorance education genocide

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The revelation that Rich Iott, the Republican candidate for the 9th Congressional District seat in Ohio and a Tea Party favorite, has been in the habit of dressing up as a Waffen-SS soldier, is just one more sign of the heroic ignorance that characterizes large sectors of American politicians, the media that covers them, and the public that votes for them.  Such monumental ignorance, of truly Wagnerian dimensions, is the product of a failed educational system, which has relegated the study of history to a marginal spot in the curriculum and has completely forgotten the dictum that those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat its errors, even if at times such repetitions turn out to be nothing more than farce.
  • Both Reagan (implicitly) and Iott make the same argument, namely, that while the Nazi regime was bad, its soldiers fought heroically for what they believed was a good cause, such as protecting their nation and their families from the really bad guys, whose uniforms no one seems interested in wearing at such infantile reenactments, namely, the troops of the Red Army:  precisely those who in fact defeated Nazi Germany at an extraordinarily high price of blood after a murderous occupation of their country.
Javier E

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

nazi psychology evil wwII

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • He believed that Goering and his cohorts were commonplace people and that their personalities “could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” In the years before and during World War II, the opportunity to obtain power led them to embrace a chilling political philosophy. In other words, the Holocaust and the war’s other heinous crimes were the products of healthy minds.
mollyharper

Kunstmuseum Bern Obtains Trove From Gurlitt Collection - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lius-gurlitt-nazi-era-art.html

culture history

shared by mollyharper on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • mollyharper on 24 Nov 14
     
    BERLIN - The Swiss museum named as the sole heir to a trove of art amassed by a Nazi-era art dealer and kept hidden for decades will accept the bequest, made by the dealer's reclusive son just before he died last May, the museum's director said on Monday. The museum would seek to set a new standard in handling Nazi-looted art, by having a privately funded team of experts comb the history of each piece before it came into the museum's possession. An agreement reached between the museum, the German government and the state of Bavaria pledged to handle the collection with a high level of transparency. The more than 1,000 works have been in the custody of the German authorities since Mr. Gurlitt died at his Munich home in May. Trustees of the museum, which is the oldest in Switzerland and has a permanent collection focused largely on the history of Swiss art, deliberated for half a year before deciding to accept the pieces. Mr. Gurlitt devoted his life to guarding the collection his father had amassed, much of it during World War II when he served as one of four art dealers commissioned to purchase pieces for a Führermuseum envisioned by Hitler.
mollyharper

Old Nazis Never Die - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...old-nazis-never-die.html

shared by mollyharper on 11 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • mollyharper on 11 Jan 15
     
    AS the decades roll by, there are fewer and fewer Nazi war criminals left alive to track down. Which made the recent reports suggesting that Alois Brunner, the top lieutenant to Adolf Eichmann, may have died as recently as a few years ago in his late 90s all the more surprising.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Authors - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates

race racism obama politics crisis violence non-violent property

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
  • But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."
  • What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him.
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  • watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of a man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.
  • Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.
  • As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state.
  • What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.
  • What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.
  • Perhaps one day we won't, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring.
  • And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.
  • The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is "stupid," then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.
  • Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.
  • It is my guiding thesis that people who claim a serious interest in America but consider racism to be a niche topic are divided against themselves. You can't understand American politics, without understanding the Civil War. You can't understand the suburbs, without understanding redlining. You can't understand the constitution, without understanding slavery. In effect if you are an American who avoids understanding the force of racism, you are avoiding an understanding of yourself and your country. 
  • The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.
  • It's easy to consider the reduction of this hemisphere's aboriginal people, the seizure of their land, their enslavement, the importation of African labor, the creation of a "black race," the profitable murder of black families, the perpetual warring against black people, the subsequent campaigns of terrorism which followed, as without analogue or global import. As though the land simply appeared beneath our feet, and by God's decree, delivered onto us its wealth. As though our state was not founded in plunder of land, labor and lives.
  • When Americans complained about Nazi anti-Semitism, party officials rejoined by citing southern racial practices, claiming a kinship. The Völkischer Beobachter, the oldest Nazi Party newspaper, routinely disparaged Africans and African-Americans. Like much of the German press, it frequently printed antiblack cartoons, reminded its readers that southern public accommodations were segregated, and delighted in reporting how blacks, like German Jews, could not sleep in Pullman cars and could not exercise the right to vote. Lynching was a favorite subject. Neues Volk celebrated southern lynching for protecting white women from unrestrained black desire. The Völkischer Beobachter published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal Schwarze Korps exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.” 
  • The desire to put a history of American racism, which is to say a portion of America's roots, in a corner is a kind of wish-fulfillment. It would be so much easier if "black studies" really were niche, if it really weren't that important, if racism really was a minor thread in the history of the West.
Javier E

The Grand Budapest Hotel's Humane Comedy About Tragedy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385264

30s nazi czechoslovak history movie

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • First, its characters are a warm tribute to the three main populations targeted by the Nazis.
  • Second, the film focuses on the Nazis’ motivations, a poisonous cocktail of bias, greed, and disdain for law.
  • Third and most important, the film’s use of comedy turns out to offer a fresh way to talk about the run-up to World War II and the Communist era that followed.
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  • The film succeeded at doing that through a comic lens—the very thing that initially troubled me.
  • Wisely, Anderson avoided the war itself and its mass murder, setting his film in the period before and after instead.
  • A similar subtlety also characterizes the film’s musings about memory and its transmission. Zero flashes back to the 1930s from the vantage point of his 1968 conversation with a writer he meets. But the 1968 meeting is itself a flashback—it's introduced and concluded by the writer, years later, looking at the camera and describing his recollections of the meeting. And that too is a flashback: The movie opens and closes with a student seated before the writer’s memorial bust in the Prague Jewish cemetery reading those very recollections in the writer’s book, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In a month when we all thought a lot about preserving history, that rendering of how stories are passed down resonated deeply.
  • Finally, the film speaks to our heartbreak at the injustice of the Holocaust and our desire for some glimmer of light—but not too much.
  • “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” The Grand Budapest Hotel got that just right too, and that’s no laughing matter.
mollyharper

In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

US history

shared by mollyharper on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • mollyharper on 27 Oct 14
     
    WASHINGTON - In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government's ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
sarahbalick

Auschwitz trial: guard entreated by survivor to reveal role | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-camp-germany-reinhold-hanning

trial guard survivor

shared by sarahbalick on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Auschwitz trial: guard entreated by survivor to reveal role
  • A 94-year-old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard has gone on trial in western Germany accused of being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 victims of the Holocaust.
  • “Mr Hanning, we are more or less the same age, and soon we will both be before the highest court,” he said. “Speak here about what you and your comrades did.” His hands and the paper he was holding trembled as he spoke.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • When first questioned by investigators, Hanning admitted that he had served in the so-called Auschwitz I part of the camp, located in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oświęcim, but denied having spent any time working at the notorious Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million people who lost their lives were slaughtered.
  • The court heard that Hanning had served as a guard in two separate SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) companies in Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. Their specific role had been to guard prisoners who were being deployed as slave labour outside the camp.
  • Hungarian Action” during May and July 1944. Those prisoners were systematically loaded from trains on to a ramp from where they were stripped of their possessions and selected for labour or for the gas chambers. More than 300,000 were gassed on arrival.
  • hey also say he voluntarily joined the Waffen SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party, at the age of 18.
  • Due to Hanning’s age and frailty, doctors have said the daily court sessions should not be longer than two hours.
  • “This trial should have happened 40, 50 years ago,” said 90-year-old Justin Sonder, a German who survived Auschwitz, as reported by Deutsche Welle.
  • “I am not hateful, but it somehow feels like justice to see this man, who was working there [Auschwitz] when my mother died, on trial.”
Javier E

Why Ben Carson's Nazi Analogies Matter - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ons-nazi-analogies-matter.html

conservatism nazi GOP politics culture rhetoric demagogues

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Mr. Carson comes across as calm, reasonable and agreeable. But in fact he is more rhetorically intemperate than even Mr. Trump.
  • rhetorical recklessness damages our political culture as well as conservatism, a philosophy that should be grounded in prudence, moderation and self-restraint.
  • That doesn’t mean that conservatives should not use language that inspires people to act. But they should respect certain rhetorical boundaries. There are some places they shouldn’t go.
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  • Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson provide evidence that, for now at least, a large percentage of Republican voters are in a fiercely anti-political mood. As a result, the usual ways voters judge a candidate — experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues — have been devalued.
  • People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it. Reason has given way to demagogy. In a political context, Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson represent the id rather than the superego, not just in what they say but in how they perceive the world around them.
  • it will also require Republican voters to lift their sights and raise their expectations about the goals of politics, which are to improve the lives of our fellow citizens in concrete ways; to advance, even imperfectly, liberty, opportunity and a more decent and just society.
  • I get that it may be emotionally satisfying to cheer on careless rhetoric, to portray every political difference as a “give me liberty or give me death” moment, and to imply that America under Barack Obama is like Germany under Adolf Hitler. But it is also intellectually discrediting, politically self-defeating and unworthy of those who are citizens of a great republic.
Javier E

Stripping Away Lies to Expose a Painter's Nazi Past - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-exhibition-berlin-merkel.html

nazi art artist

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Mr. Krämer, the art historian who first questioned whether it was appropriate to hang Nolde works in the chancellery, said he thought it was the right decision. “The chancellor’s fast reaction speaks in her favor,” he said in an interview.But Mr. Fulda wasn’t so sure. “If Angela Merkel had a picture of an eagle sitting on a swastika, we would say ‘Whoa, what is going on?’ ” he said. “But with Nolde, it’s very much a case of what you do with it. She could say to visitors, ‘The German past is a complex one. There is guilt, there is complicity, there is looking away, there is beauty.’ ”
malonema1

The Jewish forgers who outwitted the Nazis - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...orgers-who-outwitted-the-nazis

US politics Trump Obama

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Jewish forgers who outwitted the Nazis
  • Now 91 years old, David tells Witness about his wartime exploits and his part in one of the largest rescue operations organised by Jews during the Holocaust.
  • Congressional Republicans have announced parallel inquiries into a uranium deal under President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's emails.One committee will investigate how the Obama administration approved a 2010 acquisition that gave Russia control of 20% of the US uranium supply. Two other panels will scrutinise the FBI decision not to charge Mrs Clinton over her private email server.Democrats pilloried the inquiries as "a massive diversion".
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  • President Trump has sought to draw attention to the story, tweeting last week: "Uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn't want to follow!"
Javier E

German Intel Chief Announces Plan to Surveil Far-Right AfD - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583456

germany AfD constitution

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • at a time when the AfD seeks to informally push the limits of acceptable political speech, where and how should the state draw the legal line between what’s allowed and what’s not, particularly when it comes to a party that sits in Parliament?
  • “It shows you how difficult it is in a democracy … to define very clearly what is beyond the border of what’s acceptable,”
  • It brings up the question, to what extent can an open society actually defend itself against its enemies?”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • After World War II, its constitution and institutions were designed with the underlying goal of preventing the rise of another Nazi regime
  • is just one of many particular aspects of German democracy—some codified in law or in the constitution, others unwritten rules of political engagement—aimed at protecting democracy and combating extremism, particularly on the right.
  • “The basic idea behind [the German political system] is that certain boundaries must be drawn within democracy, that should make it impossible for an antidemocratic force to take over power,”
  • “Whether that is realistic is another question."
  • More than five million people supported the AfD in the 2017 federal elections, earning it 12.6 percent of the vote nationally and more than 90 seats in the German Bundestag. And as of October, the party is represented in all 16 of Germany’s state legislatures.
  • Some of the party’s most visible politicians have promoted a revisionist view of the country’s dark past, most notably Björn Höcke, who leads the “Wing,
  • He has called Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, a collection of thousands of gray concrete pillars down the street from the Bundestag and the Brandenburg Gate, a “monument of shame” and once downplayed and defended a Nazi activist’s Holocaust denial. The party co-leader, Alexander Gauland has also come under fire: He referred to the Nazi era as a mere “speck of bird poop” in the country’s otherwise illustrious history and said that Germany should be proud of its World War II soldiers.
  • "It may be that the majority of the AfD doesn't agree with everything Mr. Höcke says. The decisive thing is that Mr. Höcke isn't marginalized and isn't isolated,”
  • when it comes to involvement in certain topics or committee assignments—intelligence, or the culture committees that oversee museums and memorials, for example—lawmakers have rejected or delayed AfD nominees they find offensive or inappropriate.
  • The AfD “triggers the kind of debate that you want to have in a live democracy, where people have to define the terms on which debate has to be had, again and again,” he told me. “It is also ... a signal that democracy wants to defend itself, no matter how difficult.”
anonymous

Remembering the White Rose - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...white-rose-hitler-protest.html

white rose new york times history

shared by anonymous on 22 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Remembering the White Rose
  • Seventy-five years ago Thursday, a group of young German idealists, students who had dared to speak out against the Nazis, were executed by the regime they had defied.
  • In the summer of 1942, Hans and his friends — inspired by the sermons of the anti-Nazi bishop of Münster — began to distribute typewritten leaflets denouncing the regime. Their language was incandescent. “Every honest German today is ashamed of his government,” Hans wrote, a government that committed “the most horrible of crimes — crimes that indefinitely outdistance every human measure.” The members of the White Rose declared that all those who stood by were complicit and implored all citizens to engage in “passive resistance” to the Nazi state.
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  • All three were found of guilty of high treason and sentenced to death.
  • The story of the White Rose did make it to the front, where it inspired soldiers who were opposed to the regime. But the hope that its members had of inspiring their fellow citizens was not fulfilled. Their call was ignored.
  • We are far from the darkness of fascism, but we do ourselves a service by remembering the sad but noble story of these beautiful souls on the anniversary of their tragic sacrifice.
jayhandwerk

German parties to vote on 'out of date' Nazi-era abortion law | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-of-date-nazi-era-abortion-law

politics policy culture abortion law world

shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A debate over proposals to scrap a Nazi-era law that forbids German doctors from providing information on abortion is expected to set the tone of the new coalition government when it is voted on this week.
  • The FDP has also said it now favours an adjustment rather than the abolition of the clause.
  • Advocates of a change to the law say Germans have only begun to realise how restrictive their abortion laws are due to Hänel’s campaign.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The opposition Greens say they will continue to push for a change to the law which would allow doctors to inform women about legal forms of abortion. They stress there is a significant difference between informing and advertising services.
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy

democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
Javier E

Germany's AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-as-it-embraces-climate-denial

germany denial climate change AfD politics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • While climate change barely got a mention on its social media channels when the AfD was first founded in 2013, it mentioned the topic on its channels about 300 times in 2017-18, and that has tripled over the past year to more than 900, with its main focus on Greta.
  • The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her “psychosis”.
  • It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as “CO2Kult” (CO2 cult), “Klimawandelpanik” (climate change panic) and “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain washing)
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  • Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.
  • “The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”
  • “The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.
  • “We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”
sarahbalick

Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-37595972

putin myth russian film WW2

shared by sarahbalick on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film
  • A new film showing Red Army soldiers outnumbered by invading Germans but battling on heroically has become part of the Kremlin's campaign to restore Russian pride.
  • State television showed Russian President Vladimir Putin watching the film last
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  • week, alongside Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in the Central Asian leader's capital Astana.
  • The Kremlin promotes the idea of World War Two as a heroic victory that united the Soviet state against fascism - and still unites Russia today against a similar threat they say has resurfaced in Ukraine.
  • The 28 were immortalised - posthumously decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union - and Soviet children learnt about their last stand in school.
  • Yet historians say the story is not true.
  • According to the Soviet mythology, 28 soldiers from the Red Army's 316th Rifle Division, mainly recruits from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet republics, stood unflinching against the advancing might of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
  • When, in June last year, Russian State Archive director Sergei Mironenko, citing historical documents, said the story was in fact a myth, he earned a sharp rebuke from Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky.
  • The USSR suffered the heaviest losses in the war - more than 20 million civilians and military - though scholars dispute the exact toll.
  • Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939 - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocol, they agreed to carve up Poland between them.
  • Mr Putin and other officials have repeatedly talked about the need to counter the "falsification of history" or "rewriting history". They oppose interpretations of World War Two or other episodes of Soviet history that deviate from officially approved narratives.
  • Mr Medinsky, the culture minister, defended Panfilov's 28 Men, saying "even if this story was invented from start to finish, if there had been no Panfilov, if there had been nothing, this is a sacred legend that shouldn't be interfered with. People that do that are filthy scum."
  • t was accused of smearing the memory of WW2 veterans by asking whether residents of wartime Leningrad could have been saved by surrendering the city to Nazi forces.
  • Under this law, Vladimir Luzgin, a blogger from Perm region in the Urals, was fined 200,000 roubles ($3,200; £2,500) for reposting an article about the war on the Russian social network VK (VKontakte), the daily Kommersant reported in July.
  • The court said Luzgin had falsified history by stating "that the communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland, unleashing World War Two, or in other words, that Communism and Nazism co-operated honestly".
  • as justified.
  • the punishment of Luzgin w
  • n February 2013, President Putin ordered a single history syllabus for schools, offering a standardised narrative. A new state "History" TV channel was launched that year too.
  • In another incident, last year, the authorities in Sverdlovsk region banned the works of two British historians - Antony Beevor and John Keegan - saying they were imbued with Nazi propaganda. The Vedomosti daily described (in Russian) the order to remove the books from public libraries as "full of nonsense from start to finish".
  • Many Russians may not know how the state embroidered the tale of Panfilov's men - but many may not care either.
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