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Opinion | Yes, There Is a Clash of Civilizations - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • In 1996 the political scientist Samuel Huntington offered several strong claims about the post-Cold War world.
  • Global politics was becoming not just “multipolar” but “multicivilizational,” he argued, with competing powers modernizing along different cultural lines, not simply converging with the liberal West.
  • “The balance of power among civilizations” was shifting, and the West was entering a period of relative decline.
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  • A “civilization-based world order” was emerging, in which societies “sharing cultural affinities” were more likely to group themselves into alliances or blocs.
  • And the would-be universalism of the West was setting the stage for sustained conflict with rival civilizations, most notably with China and the Islamic world.
  • These claims were the backbone of Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was seen as a sweeping interpretive alternative to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, with its vision of liberal democracy as the horizon toward which post-Cold War societies were likely to converge.
  • often lately Huntington has been invoked either warily, on the grounds that Putin wants a clash of civilizations and we shouldn’t give it to him, or in dismissal or critique, with the idea being that his theory of world politics has actually been disproved by Putin’s attempt to restore a Greater Russia.
  • Christopher Caldwell also invokes Huntington’s seemingly falsified predictions about Orthodox Christian unity. But then he also offers a different reason to reject Huntington’s application to our moment, suggesting that the civilizational model has been a useful framework for understanding events over the last 20 years, but lately we have been moving back to a world of explicitly ideological conflict — one defined by a Western elite preaching a universal gospel of “neoliberalism” and “wokeness,” and various regimes and movements that are trying to resist it.
  • Caldwell’s analysis resembles the popular liberal argument that the world is increasingly divided between liberalism and authoritarianism, democracy and autocracy, rather than being divided into multiple poles and competing civilizations.
  • if you want to understand the direction of global politics right now, the Huntington thesis is more relevant than ever.
  • The first years of the 21st century, in other words, provided a fair amount of evidence for the universal appeal of Western capitalism, liberalism and democracy, with outright opposition to those values confined to the margins — Islamists, far-left critics of globalization, the government of North Korea.
  • American power has obviously declined relative to our rivals and competitors, or that our post-9/11 efforts to spread Western values by force of arms so often came to grief.
  • The specific divergences between the world’s major powers have also followed, in general ways, the civilizational patterns Huntington sketched out.
  • None of the emerging non-Western great powers have yet built grand alliances based on civilizational affinities, meaning that the third of the four big Huntingtonian predictions looks like the weakest one tod
  • wherever smaller countries are somehow “torn,” in his language, between some other civilization and the liberal West, they usually prefer an American alliance to an alignment with Moscow or Beijing.
  • This speaks to the West’s resilient appeal, to enduring American advantages even in a multipolar world. But it doesn’t mean that liberalism is poised for some sweeping return to the position it occupied when American strength was at its height.
  • while aspects of Fukuyama’s end of history have clearly spread beyond the liberal West, it’s as often the shadow side of his vision — consumerism and childless anomie — as the idealism of democracy and human rights.
  • Still less does the conflict in Ukraine mean that the export of American-style “wokeness,”
  • Quite the reverse: Most of wokeness feels inward-looking and parochial, a specifically Western and especially Anglo-American response to disappointments with the neoliberal period
  • the current culture war may actually be reducing ethnic polarization in our political parties — drawing some racial minorities rightward, for instance — while resurfacing some of the oldest divides in Anglo-American politics.
  • The woke often seem like heirs of the New England Puritans and the utopian zeal of Yankeedom; their foes are often Southern evangelicals and conservative Catholics and the libertarian descendants of the Scots-Irish; and the stakes in the debates are competing interpretations of the American founding, the Constitution, the Civil War and the settlement of the frontier.
  • if there’s going to be a clash of civilizations, the clash inside America is over what kind of civilization ours should be.
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Why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ccepted-ukrainian-independence politics history crisis
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  • Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
  • That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
  • if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.
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  • It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
  • The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
  • For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith.
  • Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European.
  • Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
  • The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
  • The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
  • The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
  • disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
  • “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
  • When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
  • Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.
  • His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a transition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
  • Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problem with a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’s democratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself, took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that which puts Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
  • But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,
  • “A strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding, organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putin restored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to central planning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state was back. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It did not have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the “geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the Soviet Union.
  • The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
  • And the West, spooked by the increased belligerence Russia had shown in Georgia, was taking a keen interest in Ukraine. The EU offered the country an association agreement which would allow Ukrainians to enjoy the benefits of a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement and free travel across Europe.
  • Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.
  • Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote. Viktor Yushchenko, pro-Western and Ukrainian-speaking, beat Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt thug from Donbas (the easternmost part of the country and, save Crimea, the most ethnically Russian) who had claimed victory the first time round. The “Orange revolution”, as the protest came to be known, was a serious setback for Mr Putin—all the more so when a similar uprising in Georgia, the Rose revolution, put another pro-Western state on his borders.
  • Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.
  • The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.
  • A year earlier a group of economists had told Mr Putin that a customs union with Ukraine would be a smart move. What was more, such a deal would preclude Ukraine’s association with the EU. Pursuing it was thus a way for Mr Putin to achieve three things at once: push back against the West; give Russia a victory that would prove its importance; and help the economy.
  • Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.
  • This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
  • According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured
  • the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.
  • tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
  • All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to protect his own rule; the history is window-dressing. At the same time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be something other than a democracy it has to at least be able to think of itself as an empire. And in Russia, empire requires Ukraine—now more deeply opposed to union with Russia than ever before.
  • “The Russian state, with its severe and inflexible interior, survived exclusively because of its tireless expansion beyond its borders. It has long lost the knowledge [of]—how to survive otherwise.”
  • The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.
  • What he did not say was that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has severed the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
  • Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.
  • Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings. But the idea of something better had taken hold.
  • But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
  • That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.
  • Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within. They cannot do that in a forest retreat, or with a few phone calls. But only through such change will they become truly independent of the Soviet Union.
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Jon Gruden Resigns as Raiders HC After Racist, Sexist, Anti-Gay Emails | Bleacher Repor... - 0 views

bleacherreport.com/...after-racist-homophobic-emails sports
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  • Gruden announced his resignation in a statement Monday night after emails uncovered from his past included racist, anti-gay and misogynistic language
  • Suzy Kolber of ESPN (via Adam Schefter of ESPN) reported assistant head coach and special teams coach Rich Bisaccia will be the interim head coach
  • Gruden "denounced the emergence of women as referees, the drafting of a gay player and the tolerance of players protesting during the playing of the national anthem."
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  • He also "exchanged emails with [former Washington Football Team president Bruce Allen] and other men that included photos of women wearing only bikini bottoms, including one photo of two Washington team cheerleaders."
  • He also used racist tropes to describe NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith.
  • Gruden's tenure offered more bad than good.
  • the 2018 campaign that included trading away Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper, things started to turn for the better in recent years, as the Raiders became more competitive.
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Deal With Ted Cruz Sets Stage for Russia Pipeline Fight in Early 2022 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ted-cruz-biden-ukraine.html
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  • A Senate deal has set the stage for a January vote on whether to sanction the company behind a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, complicating the Biden administration’s efforts to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
  • the new year in Congress will begin in part with a contentious debate about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which the Biden administration opposes but has not used all its powers to stop, for fear of damaging vital relations with Germany.
  • The $11 billion pipeline was completed in September but is awaiting certification to become operational.
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  • The Senate deal, which was reached late Friday night, was a grudging concession by Democrats to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has delayed the confirmation of dozens of President Biden’s nominees to protest what he called Mr. Biden’s weak opposition to the pipeline.
  • Mr. Cruz and others insist that Nord Stream 2 will provide Russia with a cash infusion and dangerous control over Europe’s energy supplies, while potentially costing Ukraine’s government around $3 billion in annual transit fees from a similar pipeline through its territory that Russia could circumvent.
  • “When the Senate reconvenes, we’ll finally have a vote on sanctioning Putin’s pipeline.”
  • It is a vote the Biden administration hoped to avoid. But in exchange, Mr. Cruz agreed to step aside and allow the confirmation of 36 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees, including 28 ambassadors
  • Biden officials said at the time that while they opposed construction of the pipeline, which will pump gas from the Russian Arctic to Germany through the Baltic Sea, the project was nearly complete by the time Mr. Biden took office and virtually impossible to stop. At this point, White House officials say, the cost of friction with the German government outweighs any potential loss to Mr. Putin.
  • some analysts say the pipeline may be less important to Mr. Putin than his longtime designs on Ukrainian territory.
  • A Dec. 7 call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin has done little to soothe the situation, and last week the Kremlin issued a set of demands that Biden officials called largely unacceptable.
  • Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close Biden ally who helped to negotiate the deal, said he would wait to see the final language in the measure and confer with Biden officials before deciding how he will vote. A State Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMr. Coons said he recently met in Berlin with Olaf Sholz, who succeeded Angela Merkel this month as Germany’s chancellor. He noted the new German government’s pledge not to certify the pipeline until well into 2022.
  • “Imposing sanctions on a close ally like Germany when they are moving in the right direction is something that I would not do lightly,” Mr. Coons said.
  • “We need a fully staffed senior team at the State Department and at the United Nations, and ambassadors around the world,” Mr. Coons said. “And while I respect that senators of both parties have the right to use the occasional hold to force a policy discussion, I think this has gotten way out of hand.”
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Associated Press News - 0 views

apnews.com/...7084f4e606c10a33a15384fbe05967
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  • Bob Dole, who overcame disabling war wounds to become a sharp-tongued Senate leader from Kansas, a Republican presidential candidate and then a symbol and celebrant of his dwindling generation of World War II veterans, died Sunday. He was 98.
  • His wife, Elizabeth Dole, said in an announcement posted on social media that he died in his sleep.
  • He shaped tax policy, foreign policy, farm and nutrition programs and rights for the disabled, enshrining protections against discrimination in employment, education and public services in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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  • Dole announced in February 2021 that he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. During his 36-year career on Capitol Hill, Dole became one of the most influential legislators and party leaders in the Senate
  • Dole could be merciless with his rivals, whether Democrat or Republican.
  • Long gone from Kansas, Dole made his life in the capital, at the center of power and then in its shadow upon his retirement, living all the while at the storied Watergate complex.
  • He tried three times to become president. The last was in 1996, when he won the Republican nomination only to see President Bill Clinton reelected.
  • He sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1980 and 1988 and was the 1976 GOP vice presidential candidate on the losing ticket with President Gerald Ford.
  • Today’s accessible government offices and national parks, sidewalk ramps and the sign-language interpreters at official local events are just some of the more visible hallmarks of his legacy and that of the fellow lawmakers he rounded up for that sweeping civil rights legislation 30 years ago.
  • But when Bush died in December 2018, old rivalries were forgotten as Dole appeared before Bush’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda. As an aide lifted him from his wheelchair, Dole slowly steadied himself and saluted his one-time nemesis with his left hand, his chin quivering.
  • For all of his bare-knuckle ways, he was a deep believer in the Senate as an institution and commanded respect and even affection from many Democrats. Just days after Dole announced his dire cancer diagnosis, President Joe Biden visited him at his home to wish him well. The White House said the two were close friends from their days in the Senate.
  • Biden ordered that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff at the White House and all public buildings and grounds until sunset Thursday.
  • He served as a committee chairman, majority leader and minority leader in the Senate during the 1980s and ’90s. Altogether, he was the Republicans’ leader in the Senate for nearly 11½ years, a record until Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell broke it in 2018.
  • After Republicans won Senate control, Dole became chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee and won acclaim from deficit hawks and others for his handling of a 1982 tax bill, in which he persuaded Ronald Reagan’s White House to go along with increasing revenues by $100 billion to ease the federal budget deficit.
  • Relegated to private life, Dole became an elder statesman who helped Clinton get a chemical-weapons treaty passed.
  • He also tended his wife’s political ambitions. Elizabeth Dole ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, then served a term as senator from North Carolina.
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Nigeria Lifts Twitter Ban - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The Nigerian government restored access in the country to Twitter on Thursday after a seven-month suspension that was imposed after the social media site deleted a post by Nigeria’s president that threatened a violent crackdown on secessionist groups.
  • The government blocked access to the site in June, but reversed course on Wednesday after Twitter agreed to several demands. Twitter will establish an office in the country, pay taxes there, appoint a representative and “act with a respectful acknowledgment of Nigerian laws and the national culture and history,”
  • Nigerians have been able to access the service only using a virtual private network.
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  • it was because it had been used “for subversive purposes and criminal activities.”
  • In the now-deleted tweet, which was aimed at “those misbehaving,” Mr. Buhari said that the government would “treat them in the language they understand,” a message that was widely read as being a reference to the deadly Nigerian civil war. Some interpreted it as a threat of genocide.
  • In recent years Nigerian lawmakers have introduced several bills that, if passed, would regulate social media, arguing for them on the grounds of security or national unity. Rights groups say these measures — none of which have been approved — could violate international laws protecting freedom of speech.
  • “Our mission in Nigeria & around the world, is to serve the public conversation,” the post read. “We are deeply committed to Nigeria, where Twitter is used by people for commerce, cultural engagement, and civic participation.”
  • Twitter is far from the most popular social media platform in Nigeria — it is thought to have around three million users there and is ranked behind WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
  • Many Nigerians who used Twitter to promote their businesses have lost revenue.
  • Beyond the economic consequences, there were also profound societal ones,
  • The Nigeria Center for Disease Control had been using Twitter to disseminate information about the spread of the coronavirus, she said. It was a go-to source for Nigerians seeking information about reported cases, deaths and tests. During the ban, the organization’s Twitter account was inactive. Its last tweet was a breakdown of cases by state from June 4.
  • The organization disseminated information through Facebook, but many Nigerians did not know this, even as the Delta variant was spreading.
  • “A lot of people didn’t fully get the impact of the Delta variant,” Ms. Adamolekun said, “because they weren’t getting the updates.”
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6 Scandals That Rocked the Winter Olympics - HISTORY - 0 views

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  • The Winter Olympics have been marked by controversy and scandal since the first Games in 1924. From cheating by East German lugers to the sordid Tonya Harding figure skating fiasco, here are six events that made headlines:
  • At the Games in Chamonix, France, Norwegians contended the 500-meter speedskating final had been mistimed in favor of American Charles Jewtraw, a heavy underdog who won the gold.
  • Jewtraw's win, by 1/5 of a second, stunned him. too. In a 1983 interview with Sports Illustrated, Jewtraw said he had never competed in the 500 prior to the gold-medal race and hadn't even trained for the Games.
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  • Schranz’s supporters contended the mystery man had been a French policeman or soldier who had purposely interfered with the run to ensure Killy’s victory. The French hinted Schranz had made up the story."I was descending and I saw a dark shadow ahead of me," Schranz said at a news conference. "I wanted to avoid it, and I stopped. It was apparently a ski policeman."
  • The women's luge competition at the Grenoble Games was all but a lock for East Germany. Defending champ and gold-medal favorite Ortrun Enderlein stood in first; teammates Anna-Maria Müller and Angela Knösel were second and fourth. 
  • “A jury member acted immediately,” International Luge Federation president Bert Isatitsch said, according to UPI. "He went to the starting line and put his hands on the runners. They were warm."Isatitsch said East German officials used "foul language" when notified of the disqualification. “One waved his arms around, shouting and screaming," he told UPI. 
  • A month before the 1994 Winter Games, a man wielding a metal baton attacked gold- medal favorite Kerrigan during a practice at the U.S. Nationals, paving the way for Harding to win the event and to qualify for the Olympics. Soon afterward, however, it was discovered that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, had planned the attack. With Kerrigan recovered—and Harding allowed to compete despite her not-yet-confirmed connection to the crime—the women’s figure skating competition became the hottest event at the Olympics. TV ratings soared.
  • Ice dancing got a dose of spy games in Nagano, Japan, when a Canadian judge secretly taped a conversation with another judge about picking winners before the competition.After her complaints to officials had been brushed aside, Jean Senft recorded Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov discussing skater placements as proof of her accusations. During the call, Balkov said he would vote for Canadians if Senft voted for a Ukrainian pair."The athletes are not competing on a fair playing field," Senft later told CBC News. "This isn't sport. Somebody had to get proof."
  • were made. (Ice dancing was not removed from Olympic competition.) "If [cheating] happens at the world championships in some small town, nobody notices," Pound said, according to The New York Times. "But in the Olympics, hundreds of millions of people are watching."
  • The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze edged Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier for the gold medal. But Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French judge, came forward, saying she was pressured by the French ice sports federation to put the Russians first. “I knew very well who would vote in favor of the Russians and who would vote in favor of the Canadians," she told Reuters. "I was almost certain that I was the one who would award the Olympic title. What I feared would happen really did.”
  • Le Gougne was suspended from judging for three years and banned from the 2006 Winter Games. The scandal led to sweeping judging reforms in the sport. 
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Khazar | Origin, History, Religion, & Facts | Britannica - 0 views

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  • Khazar, member of a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes that in the late 6th century ce established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia.
  • the Khazars were originally located in the northern Caucasus region and were part of the western Turkic empire (in Turkistan)
  • y the beginning of the 7th century, the Khazars had become independent of the Turkic empire to the east.
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  • Although basically Turkic, the Khazar state bore little resemblance to the other Turkic empires of central Eurasia. It was headed by a secluded supreme ruler of semireligious character called a khagan—who wielded little real power—and by tribal chieftains, each known as a beg.
  • The state’s military organization also seems to have lacked the forcefulness of those of the greater Turkic-Mongol empires. The Khazars seem to have been more inclined to a sedentary way of life, building towns and fortresses, tilling the soil, and planting gardens and vineyards.
  • Whatever the case may be, religious tolerance was practiced in the Khazar empire, and paganism continued to flourish among the population.
  • The prominence and influence of the Khazar state was reflected in its close relations with the Byzantine emperors: Justinian II (704) and Constantine V (732) each had a Khazar wife. The main source of revenue for the empire stemmed from commerce and particularly from Khazar control of the east-west trade route that linked the Far East with Byzantium and the north-south route linking the Arab empire with northern Slavic lands.
  • Despite the relatively high level of Khazar civilization and the wealth of data about the Khazars that is preserved in Byzantine and Arab sources, not a single line of the Khazar language has survived.
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One of the Last Slave Ship Survivors Describes His Ordeal in a 1930s Interview - HISTORY - 0 views

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  • Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis), but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they were only released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that came out in May of 2018.
  • Hurston’s book tells the story of Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin. A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.
  • in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.
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  • To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).
  • Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different owners.
  • Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”
  • “We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”
  • As for the Civil War, Lewis said he wasn’t aware of it when it first started. But part-way through, he began to hear that the North had started a war to free enslaved people like him. A few days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.
  • Lewis expected to receive compensation for being kidnapped and forced into slavery, and was angry to discover that emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Frustrated by the refusal of the government to provide him with land to live on after stealing him away from his homeland, he and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.
  • Many decades later, her principled stance means that modern readers get to hear Lewis’ story the way that he told it.
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How America's Realtors Repurposed Freedom to Defend Segregation - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.
  • The right to be treated equally, to not be discriminated against, to choose where to live, was not part of American freedom but a special privilege.
  • The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s
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  • conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests
  • Realtors had big incentives for maintaining segregation. Having invented it in the early 1900s as a marketing tool for selling homes, they had made segregation central to their business practices. They created racial covenants to exclude members of minority groups from new developments, existing neighborhoods, and entire cities and shaped federal redlining maps, all premised on the idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors.
  • Despite the Supreme Court outlawing court enforcement of racial covenants in 1948, Realtors used racial steering—such as lying to minority prospective buyers that a home had just been sold and controlling newspaper real-estate listings—so effectively that by the early ’60s, Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.
  • in asking voters to constitutionally authorize residential discrimination in Proposition 14, Realtors had a fundamental problem. How, at the height of the civil-rights movement, could they publicly campaign for sanctioning discrimination in California?
  • Victory would depend, realized Spike Wilson, the president of the California Real Estate Association, on convincing the large majority of white voters—who did not want to see themselves as racially prejudiced in any way—that the Realtors were campaigning not for discrimination but for American freedom.
  • Realtors would need to secretly and systematically redefine American freedom as the freedom to discriminate—to challenge the idea at the heart of the civil-rights movement itself.
  • the national Realtors’ organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere.
  • The kit’s detailed scripts instructed Realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.”
  • Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owner’s right to discriminate, and Realtors were in favor of “freedom for all”: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.
  • Wilson drafted a Property Owners’ Bill of Rights that Realtors advertised in newspapers nationwide, emphasizing owners’ absolute right to dispose of their property—never mentioning anyone’s right to buy or rent a home in the first place
  • This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.
  • Realtors thus made government the enemy, not minority groups
  • Thus, the more disparate the issues on which this idea of freedom was invoked—abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, climate change—the more powerful the message became.
  • By making state bureaucrats the enemy, Realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Proposition 14, Realtors claimed, was not about race but about “the rights of the individual.”
  • To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.
  • To be in favor of Proposition 14, to limit where millions of fellow Americans could live, did not mean that you were prejudiced but that you believed in individual freedom.
  • Wilson cited Abraham Lincoln: “We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.”
  • King’s terms evoked his speech at the March on Washington, but he was now defending shared freedom not against southern diehards but against northern salesmen promoting color-blind “freedom of choice.”
  • Proposition 14’s sweeping passage stunned politicians in both parties. The Realtors’ victory was overwhelming, with 65 percent of the total votes in favor, including 75 percent of the white vote and 80 percent of the white union vote.
  • Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.
  • Reagan and other conservatives saw that the Realtors had zeroed in on something extremely powerful—something whose full force would not be limited to housing segregation but could be used on virtually any issue.
  • Realtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.
  • though Realtors have disavowed their past arguments, the vision of freedom they created has had lasting effects on American politics as a whole.
  • This vision of freedom proved so enduring because it solved three structural problems for American conservatism.
  • First, Realtors used the language of individual freedom, of libertarianism, to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity.
  • Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in defense of American freedom—and create the way many, if not most, Americans understand freedom today.
  • Reagan, running for governor, adopted the Realtors’ cause and their message as his own: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”
  • a unifying idea: freedom of choice.
  • Second, by defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from “ordinary Americans,” Realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in our politics
  • This picture of government taking away your rights would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white Americans who had long been part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.
  • Timeliest of all, the Realtors’ redefinition of freedom offered a common ideology for something new in modern America: a national conservative political party
  • The Realtors’ color-blind freedom, which had proved so successful in California, could unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party—one very different from the Republican Party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
  • Over time, the internal dynamics of a national conservative party would only push it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced the Realtors’ vision of freedom as the only meaning of American freedom. This dynamic has produced today’s Republican Party.
  • Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing one’s own absolute rights over those of others.
  • To go against that credo, to view freedom as belonging to the country itself and, as such, to everyone equally, threatens the party’s most basic tenet.
  • This idea of freedom is based on a technique that the Realtors perfected. They identified a single, narrow, obscure right, an owner’s right to choose a buyer—which Realtors themselves had restricted for decades with racial covenants—as American freedom itself.
  • Elevating as absolute a right rarely mentioned before, so government cannot limit it or protect the rights of others, became the model for the conservative movement
  • The concept can be and has been used regarding virtually any issue.
  • Everything that is not one of these carefully selected rights becomes, by definition, a privilege that government cannot protect, no matter how fundamental.
  • Since January 6, two-thirds of Republicans—more than 40 percent of all Americans—now see voting not as a basic right, an essential part of our freedom, but as a privilege for those who deserve it.
  • This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so
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Opinion | What Europe Can Teach Us About Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Americans have a hard time learning from foreign experience. Our size and the role of English as an international language (which reduces our incentive to learn other tongues) conspire to make us oblivious to alternative ways of living and the possibilities of change.
  • Unfortunately, any suggestion that Europe does something we might want to emulate tends to be shouted down with cries of “socialism.”
  • an under-discussed aspect of the current economic scene: Europe’s comparative success in getting workers idled by the pandemic back into the labor force.
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  • the Great Resignation, it turns out, is largely an American phenomenon. European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels. What explains this difference?
  • Europe, on the other hand, mainly relied on job retention schemes — government aid intended to keep people on employer payrolls even if they weren’t working at the moment.
  • where European labor support helped keep workers linked to their old jobs, facilitating a rapid return, U.S. policy allowed many of those links to be severed, making an employment recovery harder.
  • Perhaps one reason Europeans aren’t engaging in an American-style Great Resignation is that they don’t hate their jobs quite as much.
  • a significant number may have realized that low-paying jobs with lousy working conditions weren’t worth having
  • some jobs that are grueling and poorly paid here are less awful on the other side of the Atlantic. Famously, in Denmark McDonald’s pays more than $20 an hour and offers six weeks of paid vacation each year
  • the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time and for failing to offer parental and sick leave
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Opinion | Vaccine Hesitancy Is About Trust and Class - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”
  • For the past five years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups abroad and interviewed residents of the Bronx to better understand vaccine avoidance.
  • We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.
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  • Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health
  • First, people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them.
  • second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves.
  • an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.
  • “People are thinking, ‘If the government isn’t going to do anything for us,’” said Elden, “‘then why should we participate in vaccines?’”
  • Since the spring, when most American adults became eligible for Covid vaccines, the racial gap in vaccination rates between Black and white people has been halved. In September, a national survey found that vaccination rates among Black and white Americans were almost identical.
  • Other surveys have determined that a much more significant factor was college attendance: Those without a college degree were the most likely to go unvaccinated.
  • Education is a reliable predictor of socioeconomic status, and other studies have similarly found a link between income and vaccination.
  • It turns out that the real vaccination divide is class.
  • compared with white Americans, communities of color do experience the American health care system differently. But a closer look at the data reveals a more complicated picture.
  • during the 1950s polio campaigns, for example, most people saw vaccination as a civic duty.
  • But as the public purse shrunk in the 1980s, politicians insisted that it’s no longer the government’s job to ensure people’s well-being; instead, Americans were to be responsible only for themselves and their own bodies
  • Entire industries, such as self-help and health foods, have sprung up on the principle that the key to good health lies in individuals making the right choices.
  • Without an idea of the common good, health is often discussed using the language of “choice.”
  • there are problems with reducing public health to a matter of choice. It gives the impression that individuals are wholly responsible for their own health.
  • This is despite growing evidence that health is deeply influenced by factors outside our control; public health experts now talk about the “social determinants of health,” the idea that personal health is never simply just a reflection of individual lifestyle choices, but also the class people are born into, the neighborhood they grew up in and the race they belong to.
  • food deserts and squalor are not easy problems to solve — certainly not by individuals or charities — and they require substantial government action.
  • Many medical schools teach “motivational interviewing,”
  • the deeper problem:
  • Being healthy is not cheap. Studies indicate that energy-dense foods with less nutritious value are more affordable, and low-cost diets are linked to obesity and insulin resistance.
  • This isn’t surprising, since we shop for doctors and insurance plans the way we do all other goods and services
  • Another problem with reducing well-being to personal choice is that this treats health as a commodity.
  • mothers devoted many hours to “researching” vaccines, soaking up parental advice books and quizzing doctors. In other words, they act like savvy consumers
  • When thinking as a consumer, people tend to downplay social obligations in favor of a narrow pursuit of self-interest. As one parent told Reich, “I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”
  • Such risk-benefit assessments for vaccines are an essential part of parents’ consumer research.
  • Vaccine uptake is so high among wealthy people because Covid is one of the gravest threats they face. In some wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods, for example, vaccination rates run north of 90 percent.
  • For poorer and working-class people, though, the calculus is different: Covid-19 is only one of multiple grave threats.
  • When viewed in the context of the other threats they face, Covid no longer seems uniquely scary.
  • Most of the people we interviewed in the Bronx say they are skeptical of the institutions that claim to serve the poor but in fact have abandoned them.
  • he and his friends find reason to view the government’s sudden interest in their well-being with suspicion. “They are over here shoving money at us,” a woman told us, referring to a New York City offer to pay a $500 bonus to municipal workers to get vaccinated. “And I’m asking, why are you so eager, when you don’t give us money for anything else?”
  • These views reinforce the work of social scientists who find a link between a lack of trust and inequality. And without trust, there is no mutual obligation, no sense of a common good.
  • The experience of the 1960s suggests that when people feel supported through social programs, they’re more likely to trust institutions and believe they have a stake in society’s health.
  • Research shows that private systems not only tend to produce worse health outcomes than public ones, but privatization creates what public health experts call “segregated care,” which can undermine the feelings of social solidarity that are critical for successful vaccination drives
  • In one Syrian city, for example, the health care system now consists of one public hospital so underfunded that it is notorious for poor care, a few private hospitals offering high-quality care that are unaffordable to most of the population, and many unlicensed and unregulated private clinics — some even without medical doctors — known to offer misguided health advice. Under such conditions, conspiracy theories can flourish; many of the city’s residents believe Covid vaccines are a foreign plot.
  • In many developing nations, international aid organizations are stepping in to offer vaccines. These institutions are sometimes more equitable than governments, but they are often oriented to donor priorities, not community needs.
  • “We have starvation and women die in childbirth.” one tribal elder told us, “Why do they care so much about polio? What do they really want?”
  • In America, anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines themselves; efforts to immunize people against smallpox prompted bitter opposition in the turn of the last century. But after World War II, these attitudes disappeared. In the 1950s, demand for the polio vaccine often outstripped supply, and by the late 1970s, nearly every state had laws mandating vaccinations for school with hardly any public opposition.
  • What changed? This was the era of large, ambitious government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
  • The anti-measles policy, for example, was an outgrowth of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives.
  • While the reasons vary by country, the underlying causes are the same: a deep mistrust in local and international institutions, in a context in which governments worldwide have cut social services.
  • Only then do the ideas of social solidarity and mutual obligation begin to make sense.
  • The types of social programs that best promote this way of thinking are universal ones, like Social Security and universal health care.
  • If the world is going to beat the pandemic, countries need policies that promote a basic, but increasingly forgotten, idea: that our individual flourishing is bound up in collective well-being.
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Modern War for Romantics: Ferdinand Foch and the Principles of War - War on the Rocks - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Second, the disastrous losses that Americans too often associate with the French military and that encourage them to dismiss the French should do the opposite; the failures make the French worth reading.
  • The first is that the French military has an intellectual tradition that stretches back at least to the 18th century
  • Their work is sophisticated, and they write well
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  • Third, relatedly, the French view everything from the perspective of scarcity, meaning they assume they have to compensate for a lack of resources with smarts and courage, and by making the most of what they have.
  • It is true that at the heart of Foch’s thinking about war is a Romantic interpretation of “modern” warfare that owes a lot to Clausewitz as well as ambient French Romanticism, which encouraged rejection of materialist or positivist philosophies and valorized spirit and will.
  • Wars for Foch were contests between wills; the most obstinate wins. But they were also fundamentally about aggression. If you want to push your enemy back, “hit him, otherwise nothing is done, and to that end there is only one means: battle.”
  • Foch believed that strategy boiled down to maneuver. But the maneuvering had to be for the sake of setting up the decisive attack.
  • Napoleon maneuvered to kill. Foch believed he could teach the art of maneuvering to kill by studying not formulae for victory but rather fundamental “principles of war” that he believed should guide commanders’ analysis of how to proceed.
  • Foch’s catchphrase was said to have been “De quoi s’agit-il?” meaning “What’s it all about?” The idea is to think and adapt rather than do anything mechanically, an imperative that gave commanders full license, for example, to abandon the disastrous tactics of 1914 and try something else.
  • What he actually wrote is this: economy of force, intellectual discipline, liberty of action, security, strategic surprise, and the decisive attack.
  • what most French officers would say if quizzed about Foch: economy of force, concentration of efforts, and liberty of action.
  • “one does not hunt two hares at the same time.” Elaborating on the idea, he defined economy of force as the “art of [dispersing one’s efforts] [ in a profitable manner, of getting the greatest possible benefit out of the resources one has.”
  • Foch argued for what later would be referred to by Americans as mission command, and, in the French army, the principle of “subsidiarity,” which boils down to the idea that an officer should communicate his general intent to his subordinate officers, but leave to them the authority and autonomy to figure out the best way to fulfill it.
  • Intellectual Discipline and Liberty of Action
  • Just as when one walks through a dark house one extends one’s arm in front to guard against walking into obstacles, Foch wrote, an army must deploy a force ahead as well as to the sides and rear. The objective is to protect the major portion of the force, the gros, from being forced to react and thereby losing its liberty of action
  • Security
  • Though Foch spoke of the need for decisive battles with language that evoked the physical destruction of the adversary’s armies, he was really interested in imposing upon the enemy a psychological effect that was analogous to the effect ideally brought about by a surprise: namely, a combination of terror and paralysis.
  • Strategic Surprise and Decisive Attack
  • the French army today recognizes five principles of war. The first three are straight Foch: liberty of action, economy of means, and concentration of efforts. To these the French have added two more, reportedly derived from the 1992 book on strategy by Adm. Guy Labouérie (1933–2016). These are “uncertainty” and foudroyance.
  • Uncertainty quite simply is something one most go to great lengths to cultivate among one’s adversaries: uncertainty about what one is doing and going to do, where, when, and why
  • Foudroyance, derived from the word for thunder (foudre), means a sudden crippling shock. In truth, it amounts to a rephrasing of Foch’s principle of strategic surprise
  • At the 2019 “Principles of War in 2035” conference, participants discussed whether or not new technologies, new forms of conflict, and new contextual realities (such as new political landscapes, the role of the media, and the much smaller size of most militaries) had changed or would in the foreseeable future change warfare so significantly as to make Foch finally useless. In essence, the answer was no,
  • Foch’s principles also make particular sense given the French army’s lack of resources, compared not just to the U.S. military but even the French army of Foch’s day. Economy of means when means are limited is not a thought exercise
  • Foch above all counseled fighting smart, and trying always to answer “de quoi s’agit-il?” even if this amounts to nothing more than the imperative to take a moment and think through what one is trying to achieve. This seems self-evident, but recent American military history suggests civilian and military leaders could benefit from the reminder.
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'Appeasement' of Putin Isn't So Easy to Denounce on Ukraine | Asharq AL-awsat - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • he great liberal commentator Walter Lippmann wrote at the height of the Cold War: “You can’t decide these questions of life and death for the world by epithets like appeasement. I don’t agree with the people who think we have to go out and shed a little blood to prove we’re virile men.”
  • Lippmann also wrote, in September 1961: “This being the nuclear age, it is the paramount rule of international politics that a great nuclear power should not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between suicide and surrender.”
  • The West was obliged to watch in impotent horror as the Russians crushed the anticommunist Poles in 1945, then the Hungarian rebels in 1956, then the Czechs of the 1968 “Prague Spring.” There was also the 1959 Chinese seizure of Tibet. The list is a long one.
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  • The message is not that we should expect to bow to every misdeed or atrocity. It is that the “good guys” — granted the impossibility that we can ever reach global consensus about who these are — cannot and should not intervene militarily whenever they see bad stuff happen.
  • I am just completing a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of its most important lessons is that while Kennedy played a masterly diplomatic hand, it is most unlikely that America’s will could have prevailed — the Soviet nuclear weapons withdrawn from Cuba — without the underpinning threat of American force.
  • Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and even his most hawkish generals knew that America possessed an overwhelming superiority, both of conventional weapons in the Caribbean region and nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Soviet Union. US superiority of the latter was on the order of 17 to 1. And thanks to the intelligence officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who slipped his nation’s secrets to the West, the Americans knew that the Soviets recognized their own weakness.
  • Moreover, the will and solidarity of the US and its allies to confront the Soviets remained strong in the Cold War. American presidents often found themselves having to restrain the eagerness not only of the military brass, but also of some ordinary citizens, to go head to head with “the Russkies.”
  • The bipolar Cold War planet has been replaced by a multipolar one, in which a tenuous American superiority persists, but is no longer unchallengeable.
  • If you think this represents appeasement, watch the new Netflix movie “Munich: The Edge of War,” which stars Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain.
  • A well-briefed military friend of mine believes that the Chinese are not yet quite ready for a showdown over Taiwan, but he thinks they will seek one within a few years, confident of a local victory.
  • Biden deserves more sympathy than he is currently receiving for his vacillation on Ukraine. The old, moth-eaten allegation of appeasement is being levelled by his foes both at home and abroad. Yet the US cannot be expected to face down Putin alone, far less to go to war with him.
  • Today we live in an entirely different strategic environment
  • Thus, the likelihood is that if Putin attacks Ukraine, he can secure the territory he wants without suffering serious military consequences, beyond whatever losses the courageous Ukrainians can inflict on Russian forces.
  • The real challenge for the West is to summon the will to punish Putin and his friends in the language they understand best — that of money. Economic sanctions against Russia as a country are right, but not remotely sufficient. The only meaningful weapon is an assault upon the fortunes and lifestyles of the Kremlin’s gangster clique, held and invested around the world.
  • As for the US, the only party to the confrontation that matters, it seems absolutely right to do everything possible to deter Putin, and to punish him if he goes ahead with his cold-blooded plan to kill thousands of people, to score a victory that shores up his unpopular domestic polity. But one should not resort to threats, nor offer promises to the Ukrainians, that there is no intention of fulfilling.
  • Most of America’s European “allies” — the quotation marks are emphatic — are too fearful that the Kremlin will cut off their gas supplies to provide Washington with meaningful backing. Europe’s attitude to serious foreign policy and security issues is frankly decadent.
  • by cutting his 1938 deal with Hitler, he bought vital time for Britain to re-arm before the war that he recognized was coming.
  • Harris makes a good additional point, that Hitler thought himself cheated out of a military assault on Czechoslovakia that he wanted, and expected to get. In other words, appeasement was clever.
  • As a historian, I do not go all the way with Harris about this. He seems right that Britain could not realistically have fought in 1938.
  • I still think that Chamberlain was a weak, foolish old man who shrank from unwelcome realities.
  • His worst contribution to history is that Munich gave appeasement — which some of us would call a recognition of realities — a bad name. My hero among historical and strategic gurus, the Oxford professor Michael Howard, often said, “If you are dealing with foreign leaders less monstrous than was Hitler, appeasement can be a very sensible policy.”
  • We must reluctantly acknowledge that both Russia’s Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping can commit acts of aggression in their own backyards that we are unable to prevent, and which are not worth a general war.
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Republicans are drifting away from supporting the NATO alliance - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • In early 2019, several months after President Donald Trump threatened to upend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during a trip to Brussels for the alliance’s annual summit, House lawmakers passed the NATO Support Act amid overwhelming bipartisan support, with only 22 Republicans voting against the measure.
  • But this month, when a similar bill in support of NATO during the Russian invasion of Ukraine again faced a vote in the House, the support was far more polarized, with 63 Republicans — 30 percent of the party’s conference — voting against it.
  • The vote underscores the Republican Party’s remarkable drift away from NATO in recent years, as positions once considered part of a libertarian fringe have become doctrine for a growing portion of the party.
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  • Several who switched their vote between 2019 and now objected to measures they said did not specifically address strengthening NATO to help Ukraine. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) found it particularly problematic that the resolution instructed NATO to be involved when a country has “internal threats from proponents on illiberalism,” which he says could be interpreted as conservatism.
  • Similarly, from Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.): “I am wholeheartedly, unequivocally, without reservation, supportive on NATO.”
  • Aderholt said he worried that the resolution “had some language in that I thought went on the political side. And I don’t want to see NATO go political. I want to see NATO stand up for, you know, what’s going on in Ukraine — stand up for Ukraine against Russia.”
  • Another sign of the party’s isolationist wing emerged Thursday, as the House passed an update to a World War II-era military bill creating a lend-lease program intended to make it easier for the United States to supply Ukraine with military aid. Only 10 lawmakers — all Republicans — voted against the measure.
  • For some foreign policy experts and international allies, the mere fact that nearly one-third of the Republican conference voted against a bill that fundamentally seeks to support both NATO and Ukraine highlights a marked foreign policy evolution in the Republican Party.
  • “We now are really seeing the true impact of deep, deep political polarization, where it is better to harm the other side than do what’s right for the country,” said Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund. “This deep domestic polarization has now crept into foreign and security policy. There has always been strong bipartisan support for NATO, but everything now has become polarized and can be weaponized against the other side, even if it supports U.S. national security interests.”
  • The answer, however, is existential in Europe, where the fallout from the war in Ukraine has showcased the importance of the United States and the limits of aspirations for European autonomy on matters of technology and defense, according to lawmakers and diplomats.
  • Flash points are already coming into view. In 2020, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg started a working group aimed at strengthening NATO. The group’s final product, “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” included proposals, such as the creation of a Center for Democratic Resilience, that have been scorned by pro-Trump Republicans, including many of the 63 Republicans who recently voted against the House resolution affirming support for NATO.
  • A diplomat from a Baltic state, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating U.S. partners, called the vote a “Trump effect.”
  • But for some, the changes are not enough. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who voted against the recent resolution, said he objected not to NATO but to its future direction, which in his view places too large a burden on the United States and involves too much promotion of specific values.
  • Disagreements have broken out among member nations over the erosion of democracy within the alliance, with criticism directed in particular at Turkey, Hungary and Poland. A Central European diplomat said objections to the democracy center reflect admiration for the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in other Western nations.
  • De Maizière echoed that view, saying his primary concern about upcoming U.S. elections was that “right-wing Republicans are drifting away from this common path of Western values.”
  • Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish member of the European Parliament who chairs the body’s delegation for relations with the United States, said Ukraine “is the second big issue on which Republicans and Democrats agree, after China.”
  • “Ukraine has given new credibility to the Atlanticist wing of the Republican Party, which I find encouraging,” said Sikorski, a member of his country’s centrist Civic Platform party and a prominent critic of the ruling, right-wing Law and Justice party. “There seems to be competition in being pro-Ukrainian and wanting to stop Putin.”
  • “We’re certainly going to have a lot of these talks with my colleagues, particularly next cycle, if there’s any assault on NATO that is launched,” Fitzpatrick said. “I will tell you that NATO needs to be reformed significantly. But it is absolutely critical that it be maintained because without NATO, dictators are going to, it’s going to be the Wild West internationally.”
  • Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman under Democratic President Barack Obama, said: “It’s a pretty shocking turn.”
  • “There’s an appropriate and important conversation to be had about the history of NATO expansion and whether it was well-thought-through,” said Vietor, now a co-host of “Pod Save America.” “But you didn’t see people in either party really fundamentally questioning the value of the alliance.
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Barbie Is Everything. Ken Is Everything Else. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674852 barbie ken patriarchy movie maturity adolescence male masculinity culture
shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Ken is, by the end of the film, not merely a doll who has known life in the human world; he is also a guy who understands what it’s like to be treated as an extra in someone else’s story
  • Ken is a person who is denied the full dignity of his personhood
  • He has come to embody one of Barbie’s core ideas: that patriarchy is a profound form of immaturity
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  • It causes childishness. It results from it too
  • Another key moment, though, comes from Ken. It’s near the end of the movie, and he’s finally getting the one thing he’s really wanted: Barbie is listening to him. He’s telling her what it’s like to be dimmed so that somebody else might shine. And then he adds the kicker: “It doesn’t feel good, does it?”
  • Like any teenager, Ken is figuring out who he is, and trying the world’s possibilities on for size. But his immaturity is not contained, and this is its problem. His adolescent approach to the world, instead, inflicts itself on everyone else
  • Barbie and Ken on a journey that mimics adolescence: Having left the land of protection and play and easy dreams, they are plunged into the realities of the human world—and the hard transactions of adulthood. The dolls must navigate a place that has no shortage of language for its political condition: patriarchy, marginalization, objectification, oppression.
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Who was Oppenheimer? What you need to know before watching the film - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...film-bomb-uk-release-n8z3nww85 atom bomb development Oppenheimer history
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  • “He’s a genius,” Groves said, untroubled that Oppenheimer’s former girlfriend, wife, brother and sister-in-law had been members of the Communist Party, and that “Oppie” himself was a known sympathiser. “He knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”
  • Virtually none of the politicians born in the 19th century could comprehend the enormity of the Bomb. In 1940, when Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell sought authority to pursue Britain’s nuclear programme, the prime minister responded almost insouciantly that he had no objection to research on improved explosives, although he could see little wrong with those already in service.
  • In 1944 Churchill urged Roosevelt that the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr should be “confined” rather than permitted to vent publicly his revulsion towards Manhattan. After a meeting with Churchill, Bohr said with some bitterness: “We did not speak the same language.”
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  • After Szilard lobbied Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to oppose the use of his terrible creation, he recorded a weird, curiously believable conversation. “Oppie” told the Hungarian enigmatically: “The atomic bomb is shit.” When Szilard asked what he meant by that, Oppenheimer replied: “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang — a very big bang — but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”
  • Richard Rhodes, perhaps the best historian of the Bomb project, wrote in 1986: “Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.” Yet its fulfilment became his obsession.
  • Oppenheimer seemed untroubled by misgivings. He merely drove his team with a brilliance that inspired hero-worship from his colleague Edward Teller. “Oppie knew in detail what was happening in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analysing human as well as technical problems . . . He knew how to organise, cajole, humour, soothe feelings — how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.”
  • it was not him but the brutish Groves who was mandated by the US chiefs of staff to orchestrate the dropping of the two bombs, after the successful Alamogordo test. On August 6 Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington to report the destruction of Hiroshima. The scientist said: “Well, everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.”
  • The general said: “Yes, it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.” Oppenheimer responded: “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”
  • . In the weeks that followed, Oppenheimer became prey to spasms of remorse, although his attitude was always ambiguous, confusing to others and perhaps to himself.
  • When Teller asked him to work on further developments of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer said flatly: “I neither can nor will do so.” He left Los Alamos in October 1945, saying that pride in the laboratory’s achievement must be “tempered with concern . . . The peoples of the world must unite or they will perish.”
  • Curtis LeMay, the US air force chief who directed the firebombing of Japanese cities by B-29 Superfortresses that killed 300,000 Japanese before the first atomic bomb was dropped, said impenitently after the war: “Nothing new about death . . . We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo . . . than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
  • In 1954, amid McCarthyism sweeping the US, Oppenheimer fell victim to a witch-hunt and was stripped of his security clearance. This was later restored, and in the last years before his death from cancer in 1967, aged only 62, he regained a measure of his 1945 giant’s status.
  • Yet some liberals never forgave him for having disclosed the names of left-wing sympathisers and colleagues to the FBI. I met one such victim in 1965, his old friend Haakon Chevalier, a pretty broken man who had just published a book describing his intimate relationship with Oppenheimer. It was followed by profound disillusionment when he discovered that in 1942 “Oppie” had passed information to “the Feds” that later cost Chevalier his professorship at Berkeley.
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