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alexdeltufo

Republicans ignore the lessons of World War II - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • President Obama addressed the nation Sunday night from the Oval Office, a rare use of the sacred symbols of the presidency to reassure Americans about their security while steeling them for a long and complex struggle against the Islamic State.
  • Donald Trump answered Obama’s call for tolerance by declaring that no Muslims should be permitted to enter the United States:
  • “Repackaged half measures . . . Tone deaf . . . sales pitch for the status quo . . . President Obama is riding the bench at T-ball today.
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  • But the only thing this reflexive complaining does is divide the country further and make a coherent response to Islamic State more difficult.
  • There, I met Dale “Red” Robinson, a Pearl Harbor survivor and a staff sergeant in the infantry who was later part of the Normandy landing. He recalled the national unity of that war
  • “Nothing like this, these days. It’s sad, kind of sad, my friend.”
  • Robinson said he feels “sorry for all of the soldiers” serving today, let down by their political leaders.
  • That’s what Monday afternoon’s ceremony was about. A sailor rang a bell at 1:57 p.m. Eastern time, the moment 74 years earlier when Japanese planes struck
  • ater, while the band played “America the Beautiful,” the veterans, some wheeled, some walking with support, made a slow procession around the memorial’s pool to place wreaths
  • We live all of us today with the prosperity and the security built on the shoulders of these heroes,”
  • That’s our challenge — and we’re failing.
  • “The difference is the uncertainty of today, and it’s a big difference,”
  • “I thought they were more loyal, more concerned about the nation than their position,” he said.
  • Mays complained about the sharp partisan divisions in Congress. “How can we bring unity when you have that?”
  • Now, our representatives can’t even manage to come up with a resolution authorizing the use of military force against the Islamic State — and they’ve been at it for a year.
  • “just a half-hearted attempt to defend and distract from a failing policy.” Ryan said we are “one step behind our enemy.”
  • and the constant sniping at each other does nothing to defeat the Islamic State. As those old soldiers on the Mall taught us, victory comes from unity.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Dana Milbank
alexdeltufo

Fascism's nascent comeback in Europe - The Boston Globe - 0 views

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  • Katidis is a reflection of a troubling global trend: the rise of neo-fascist politics amid the economic tumult in Europe.
  • The austerity measures enacted in response to the Greek economic crisis have propelled the rise of right-wing politics; nationalist groups are gaining footholds throughout the country.
  • While political distress causes people to leave their homelands, economic distress causes them to turn their frustration on their newest neighbors.
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  • and shares a porous border with Turkey. The mass migration of refugees from Africa and the Middle East
  • Greece’s soccer federation declared in announcing the end of his career.
  • Economists tend to view Europe’s woes solely in fiscal terms, which means they too easily ignore the social impact of austerity measures. And nothing is more social than sports.
  • The far-right parties prey (as they always do) on young people, unemployed and energetic, who are convinced that their societies are collapsing at just the moment that they themselves are reaching maturity
  • Katidis now claims that he is just a stupid kid and that he had no idea what, in fact, he was doing.
  • shirtless and covered in tattoos, delivers the fascist salute while an older gentleman tries to bring his hand down.
  • Back in 2005, an Italian player was banned for only one game after delivering a similar salute.
  • The traditional notion of sports as a safe haven for people of all backgrounds, a level playing field, is lost if there is any institutional tolerance of racism.
  • The most recognized game in the world is struggling under a corrosive narrative.
  • It can’t stop the Syrian civil war or Africa’s poverty. But in one swift and conclusive move, it took a stand against glorifying the worst of mankind.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Juliette Kayyem 
alexdeltufo

Paris attacks | Andrew J. Bacevich: A war the West cannot win - The Boston Globe - 0 views

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  • “We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,” he vowed.
  • Greater Middle East and periodically spilling into the outside world.
  • The Soviet Union spent all of the 1980s attempting to pacify Afghanistan and succeeded only in killing a million or so Afghans while creating an incubator for Islamic radicalism.
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  • By the time US troops withdrew in 2011, something like 200,000 Iraqis had died, most of the them civilians.
  • Collectively they find themselves locked in a protracted conflict with Islamic radicalism, with ISIS but one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon
  • few Americans retain any appetite for undertaking further large-scale hostilities in the Islamic world.
  • Their reluctance to do so is understandable and appropriate.
  • Yet that qualifies as a theoretical possibility at best. Years of fighting in Afghanistan exhausted the Soviet Union and contributed directly to its subsequent collapse. Years of fighting in Iraq used up whatever “Let’s roll!”
  • Our arsenals are bigger, our weapons more sophisticated, our generals better educated in the art of war, our fighters better trained at waging it.
  • Even where armed intervention has achieved a semblance of tactical success — the ousting of some unsavory dictator, for example — it has yielded neither reconciliation nor willing submission nor even sullen compliance.
  • In proposing to pour yet more fuel on that fire, Hollande demonstrates a crippling absence of imagination,
  • It’s past time for the West, and above all for the United States as the West’s primary military power, to consider trying something different.
  • Instead of attempting to impose its will on the Greater Middle East, it should erect barriers to protect itself from the violence emanating from that quarter.
  • Such an approach posits that, confronted with the responsibility to do so, the peoples of the Greater Middle East will prove better equipped to solve their problems than are policy makers back in Washington, London, or Paris.
  • It rests on this core principle: Do no (further) harm.
  • The rest of us would do well to see it as a moment to reexamine the assumptions that have enmeshed the West in a war that it cannot win and should not perpetuate.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Andrew J. Bacevich 
alexdeltufo

The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntal-changes-to-the-world.html

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  • World War I, which began 100 years ago, has moved from memory to history
  • In Europe’s first total war, called the Great War until the second one came along, seven million civilians also died.
  • World War I also began a tradition of memorializing ordinary soldiers by name and burying them alongside their officers
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  • World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia.
  • It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new
  • Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia
  • For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion.
  • while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army.
  • he memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed
  • “The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,”
  • The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they
  • Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939,
  • Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East,
  • Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917.
  • If Tyne Cot is the largest military cemetery for the Commonwealth, this is the smallest American military cemetery.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Steven Erlanger 
alexdeltufo

Militarism and Humiliation Cast Shadow on Germany - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rld-war-i-still-resonates.html

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  • under Otto von Bismarck and then the kaiser. Numbers alone tell a story: In 1870, as Bismarck unified Germany, Kiel had around 30,000 inhabitants.
  • Paradoxically, it was development on land that helped bolster the importance of this natural deep-sea port.
  • Always calm, she brooked little criticism and brushed aside anti-German sentiment as she pushed to impose austerity on supposedly profligate European neighbors.
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  • When he learned of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, he hastened to Berlin.
  • Wilhelm poured torrents of money into the German Navy. In 1906, Britain’s Royal Navy took delivery of H.M.S. Dreadnought, with its groundbreaking armament of big guns. Wilhelm
  • Britain and France were alarmed by Wilhelm’s ambition. Britain’s determination to keep its navy supreme only heightened German anxieties, already running high because the kaiser felt beleaguered on two fronts.
  • Naval historians, however, tend to accord more significance to Germany’s U-boats, which were responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, for instance, eventually helping to draw the United States into Europe’s Great War.
  • Wilhelm’s proud Naval Academy, for instance, is now the parliamentary seat of Schleswig-Holstein, the state of which Kiel is the capital.
  • The other is the Flandernbunker, or Flanders bunker, built outside the main surviving military base here. Its name stems from a Nazi campaign to
  • The location was the memorial built for the World War I sailors. It is a tower and flamelike structure of reinforced concrete with an outer layer of north German brick, soaring nearly 300 feet above the coast at Laboe, where
  • there are 200,000 a year — confront a 1936 glass tableau of sailors’ lives on ship and shore, in which a still-discernible swastika has replaced the sun.
  • Mr. Witt and his associates believe that the memorial can carry a message of peace. Standing in a hall that shows every German ship lost in the two world wars, the 35,000 German sailors lost in World War I a
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Alison Smale
alexdeltufo

In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...incip-set-off-world-war-i.html

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  • firing the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and setting off World War I.
  • But for all the excited chatter among the tourists on the sidewalk where the 19-year-old Princip fired his Browning semiautomatic pistol, killing the 50-year-old heir to the Hapsburg throne
  • As Europe diligently promotes an ideology of harmony, broad areas of the continent, the Middle East and elsewhere continue to struggle
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  • The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,
  • Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.
  • The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.
  • He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope
  • presenting Princip his victims at close range.
  • on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,
  • As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.
  • So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992
  • in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,
  • which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.
  • Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.
  • Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense
  • Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.
  • After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union
  • To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are
  • ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,
  • Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.
  • Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.
  • “Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    John F. Burns 
alexdeltufo

The Enduring Impact of World War I - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day
  • but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness.
  • “the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer.
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  • novel form of organized mass death.
  • filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.
  • tablished a pattern that would continue to hold, consciously and not, for much of the 20th century.
  • a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s
  • That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony.
  • This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else.
  • The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam,
  • “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
  • has remained in effect even as the geography has changed.
  • arkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime
  • arkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands
  • whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.
  • last few centuries conquering most of the rest of the globe are another story. Photo
  • To imply that Britain (or for that matter any other combatant nation)
  • Another, favored at the time by a handful of vanguard intellectuals (notably the Italian Futurists)
  • ccounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures.
  • A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”
  • chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny
  • argely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”
  • After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the
  • detachment and personal whimsy” would give way to an ethic of seriousness and sincerity.
  • Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view.
  • But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing,
  • The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”
  • “The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names,
  • who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    A.O. Scott
alexdeltufo

When the Americans Turned the Tide - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • First, though, they had to cross a ribbon of green water known as the Marne. And traverse a small forest known as Belleau Wood.
  • But French commanders were uncertain how these raw soldiers, many arriving without weapons, would fare against a German Army that had fought in bloody trenches for four years.
  • Their orders at the Marne were straightforward: Hold the line. Stop them.
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  • They did. Today, a century after the outbreak of World War I, the Second Battle of the Marne is considered the pivotal battle of the First World War,
  • hape the legend and character of the modern American military, especially the Marines, and signaled the arrival of the United States as a modern military power.
  • It marked the start of an era in which the United States would become the guarantor of security in Western Europe
  • A century after a series of interlocking alliances plunged Europe into a war that drew in the United States,
  • Obama is seeking to define a less interventionist foreign policy, but often finds, as President Woodrow Wilson did 100 years ago,
  • The battlefield on which the American Century arguably began is bucolic today.
  • It is hard to imagine that nearly 300,000 men died or were wounded here almost a century ago.
alexdeltufo

At Gallipoli, a Campaign That Laid Ground for National Identities - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The trenches are still there, carved in the green hills of the slim Gallipoli Peninsula just across the Dardanelles,
  • It is hallowed ground for battlefield tourists, mostly Turks and Australians
  • “I’ve got to show this to the chief.” B
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  • Gallipoli campaign has taken on an outsize importance as the bloody event that became the foundation of a modern national identity.
  • In September 1915, with the slaughter unfolding on Gallipoli but news limited in Australia because of military censorship
  • Australian prime minister authorizing him to look into the postal service for the soldiers.
  • were needlessly being sent to slaughter by incompetent British officers, he agreed to
  • When the commanding general at Gallipoli, Sir Ian Hamilton, learned of Keith Murdoch’s plan to evade the censorship rules, he had him detained at a port in France and the letter was destroyed.
  • “As he was writing his letter, the editor of The Times looked in and said, ‘What are you doing, young man?’ ”
  • Almost a hundred years ago, it was the place where World War I was supposed to turn in the Allies’ favor, but instead it became one of the great slaughters of the Great War.
  • The 8,000-word letter, detailing what Keith Murdoch called “one of the most terrible chapters in our history,”
  • Keith Murdoch later came under sharp criticism in Britain for breaking the censorship rules, and many in the British establishment, including Churchill, never forgave him,
  • He had a perfectly clear conscience,”
  • The Australian government recently selected 8,000 people from a lottery to attend anniversary commemorations next year at the beaches in Turkey.
  • In those days, people believed that nations were born in blood,” he said.
  • named for the acronym of the force that landed there, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, just as thousands of his fellow Australians do each year.
  • “My grandfather fought here,” he said. “But he never talked about it.”
  • “Our kids, our grandkids, want to come here more than us or our parents did,” he said.
  • “Gallipoli is the place that for the first time, after a century of defeats, the Turks were successful,”
  • The Islamists say, ‘We defeated the infidels,'”
  • Many conservative Turkish municipal governments have been organizing free battlefield tours, with a message delivered
  • “They don’t have much education. They’ll believe in anything.”
  • In 1934, Ataturk famously wrote a letter to Australian mothers, saying, “having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”
  • The truth is, they just wanted to kill one another and win the war, something evident in the letters from the front.
  • “Everything is so quiet and still one would never dream that two opposing forces, each eager for the other’s blood, were separated by only a few yards – and in places only a few feet.”
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Tim Arango 
alexdeltufo

Is Donald Trump a Fascist? - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • you usually hear liberals sling against the right: That the real estate magnate turned populist is actually a fascist.
  • The hook for this charge was Trump’s illiberal musings about Muslims and databases and his lies — or, to be charitable, false memories
  • argued that Trumpism, however ideologically inchoate, manifests at least seven of the hallmarks of fascism identified by the Italian polymath Umberto Eco.
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  • a celebration of aggressive masculinity,
  • the best people of the world.”
  • “beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists”
  • One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
  • as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking.
  • that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.
  • nd while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace,
  • e fascist temptations can creep in.
  • He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.
  • Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted
  • Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump:
  • he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce
  • “proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative
  • Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a
  • Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-
  • He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!)
  • still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move,
  • precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him
  • but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who
  • Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far —
  • the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration
  • then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step
  • The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Ross Douthat
alexdeltufo

In Search of American Fascism - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • he is more fascistic, at least, than most of the populist candidates (Wallace, Perot, Buchanan) to whom he’s reasonably been compared.
  • genuine-article fascism, it seems worth digging a little bit into the ways in which Trump doesn’t deserve the fascist label,
  • hich riffed on Umberto Eco’s famous essay laying out various hallmarks of the fascist style. As Bouie noted
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  • Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution
  • his revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages
  • founding boast that ours is a novus ordo seclorum, and assumes that any pre-18th century wisdom cannot fully match the glories of our brave new republican experiment.
  • incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically,
  • … If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know
  • However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface
  • In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
  • But that’s a digression: My main purpose in quoting Eco is to point out how poorly these two descriptions fit Trump,
  • But then, of course, these two descriptions make a poor fit for nearly every American political tradition,
  • Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”;
  • Whether or not a conservative tradition is possible in this landscape, a traditionalist tradition does seem well-nigh-impossible.
  • but then the South’s Protestant/agrarian/localist distinctives cut against fascism in all sorts of other ways.)
  • Nor does a mere politics of nostalgia, of the kind that both right and left can manifest, really resemble the kind of traditionalism
  • But what he’s nostalgic for is not some sort of deep, pre-modern antiquity or a pre-1789 ancien regime.
  • co himself might say yes, since his essay suggests that just one hallmark of fascism in a political movement or culture suffices “to allow fascism to coagulate around it,”
  • And if we want to actually place fascism somewhere on the political spectrum,
  • contretemps this was one of the assumptions held by a number of Jonah Goldberg’s critics, and one of the major claims lodged against his thesis
  • This argument wasn’t completely persuasive: As Goldberg countered — and as Eco’s line about Saint Augustine and Stonehenge suggests
  • was a bastion of a certain kind of syncretistic traditionalism.)
  • American conservatism as well. If fascism is ultimately defined by a cult of tradition, t
  • Which means in turn that whether the figure being accused of fascist tendencies is Woodrow Wilson or Donald Trump, t
  • approaching and approaching and approaching, but because of our shared American-ness, never quite getting all the way.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Ross Douthat 
alexdeltufo

Whose Fascism Is This, Anyway? - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • “Trump is a fascist,”
  • “We are here faced by fascists,” Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, declares to the House of Commons,
  • That was George Orwell, in 1944. He had heard the epithet “fascist” applied, he said, to fox-hunting, Kipling, Gandhi, homosexuality, “astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
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  • “And what we know about fascists,” he went on, “is that they need to be defeated.”
  • “the word ‘fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” So has it acquired any more useful meaning in the 70 years since? The latest
  • with a rather confused etymology, from armed gangs in Sicily called fasci, but also invoking “fasces,”
  • As the symbol of Mussolini’s regime, it was emblazoned on flags and military aircraft, although its recognizable silhouette
  • When the word was first coined, fascism was a rather incoherent ideology, a response to — though bred out of
  • Hitler called himself a National Socialist, and Mussolini had in fact been a socialist of the extreme left.
  • by 1945 the ideology lay shredded on the battlefield, apart from a few holdovers in Spain and Latin America.
  • ut is your fascism my fascism, or his or her fascism?
  • ome years ago he was writing with perplexity about the political situation he found in his native England, where “dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries” were warning against American hubris,
  • anti-fascist tradition.”
  • Since then we have been warned about “Islamofascism,” and Al Qaeda and ISIS are denounced by Western politicians and commentators as “fascists.”
  • but something pan-Islamic, entirely unlike the central European definition of fascism as ultranationalism.
  • from France to Poland and Hungary, where far-right governments tinged with xenophobia are already in power.
  • they only want Christian refugees, not Muslims.
  • But the whole Islamic world is in the throes of a vast crisis quite unlike anything Europe underwent in the past century.
  • American tradition of know-nothing bigotry and nativism that Mr. Trump adorns
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Geoffrey Wheatcroft
alexdeltufo

Syrians weep as first aid in months reaches Madaya - CNN.com - 1 views

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

shared by alexdeltufo on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday
  • Syria's state news agency, 65 trucks loaded with aid supplies entered Madaya and two other besieged towns, Foua and Kefraya.
  • It's heartbreaking to see so many hungry people," said Sajjad Malik, the UNHCR representative in Syria. "
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "Syrians are suffering and dying across the country because starvation is being used as a weapon of war by both the Syrian government and armed groups."
  • An activist described scenes of chaos at the school as he arrived after the strike, about 8 a.m. local time Monday.
  • "Everyone was trying to find his children."
  • Um Sultan said she hears every day of someone too sick to leave the bed.
  • "My husband is now one of them,
  • "Grass for the old man," she replies.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Nick Paton Walsh - CNN
alexdeltufo

A Belief System That Once Laid the Groundwork for Fascism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aid-the-groundwork-for-fascism

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s candidacy is truly exceptional in the history of American politics. But what is unique is neither the authoritarian character of Mr. Trump nor his histrionic and xenophobic campaign
  • With the hope of alarming these voters, commentators and politicians have accused Trump of sounding like a fascist.
  • Mexicans with the ideas of Nazism, most of his supporters would not think Trump is a fascist.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • They support his statements not only for their contents but also because of their populist style.
  • Their dislike for existing politics fuels their apathy toward Trump’s extremism.
  • his is certainly not new or original. In a context very different to our own, fascists used this sense to provide an authoritarian answer to collective concerns.
  • He was followed because he was believed to represent what an entire people wanted.
  • economic improvement and national uniformity.
  • Surely, Trump voters would not identify with fascism but they share with the early supporters of fascism a deep suspicion of the other
  • Trump’s followers want a country that looks, believes, talks, eats and drinks the same.
  • Against a meaningful democracy where all people who are living in the country can participate, Trump’s supporters want a similarly reduced version of America.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Federico Finchelstein 
alexdeltufo

What does World War I mean? A century of answers - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • England, France, and Russia blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary, while the latter blamed the former.
  • A century later, the guns have long been silenced, but the war over the war continues. To an extent that seems amazing for a modern conflict, there is still no consensus over who was responsible for World War I,
  • influencing US foreign policy in different ways with each generation.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • it’s World War II, Vietnam, or Iraq that tend to be invoked more often—it remains a point of contention among academic
  • Six months after Wilson was reelected, he asked Congress to declare war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy.”
  • He Kept Us Out of War.” Two years after shooting began, the prevailing American sentiment was that the war was an uncivilized exercise conducted by savages
  • part of its mission was to stay free of such senseless carnage, which it did—until 1917.
  • American story of WWI may not always tell us much about the war itself, but offers an excellent window into the outlook of the nation at any given time.
  • The 1920s also saw the beginnings of a cultural revolution: flappers, bootleggers, and jazz. There was enough change at home
  • an emerging continental power with a new sense of its role in the world.
  • ith the aftermath of WWI would be an understatement. Immediately following the war, the Versailles Peace Treaty swiftly disintegrated
  • -turn, the idea behind it wasn’t. Europe was still barbaric—but instead of hiding from the old continent, America needed to redeem it
  • America returned to “normalcy,” a word Warren Harding coined in his successful presidential campaign.
  • From this, he drew many lessons, among them that simply showing up and winning isn’t enough:
  • He cultivated Republicans to ensure continued US engagement, acceded to the reality of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe
  • That’s what President Clinton meant when in 1995, making the case for intervening in the former Yugoslavia,
  • “The Guns of August.” A history of WWI’s origins, the book argued that none of the combatants wanted a war—
  • ‘The Missiles of October,’” JFK told his brother.) Tuchman’s view would become the most popular one among an American public scarred by the futile-seeming war in Vietnam,
  • This wasn’t initially an American idea, however: It came from a 1961 book by the German historian Fritz Fischer, whose work blaming his own country rocked the nation.
  • Fischer’s argument found a sympathetic audience in America, reassuring doubters that US participation in the war, and its ultimate role in stopping Germany, hadn’t been futile after all.
  • In 2011 Sean McMeekin, an American historian who works at a Turkish university, released a book in which he pointed to a new culprit: Russia,
  • raming the war as an Eastern land grab that just happened to lead to the deaths of millions of Europeans might not ever become the standard narrative,
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Jordan Michael Smith 
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