2024
- “Get away from the window! Curiosity is death!” The sketch shows a terror- or awe-stricken family looking out, many mouths wide open. Instead of gawking, the poster commands readers, “Stand individually behind pillars!”
- “Never remain standing on an exposed road!” “Always seek cover!”
- “Don’t stand behind the door!” This is followed by more advice about strong pillars or load-bearing sections of the wall.
- “Panic is worse than an air raid!” Pictured are people hurrying down the stairs, one person holding a candle, another an oil lamp. Underfoot is a small child who has fallen down, and ahead of these residents is an old man with a cane, about to be trampled. Instead of panicking, the readers are told, “Don’t worry about an attack at night!” Pictured is a man under a duvet sleeping soundly.
- “Never stand in the middle of the room!” The picture below this final warning shows a domestic space in which a man in bare feet and a nightshirt has behaved correctly: He is standing in a corner, an empty bed nearby, but the middle of his floor has disappeared.
“Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested." by Jordan Green, Raw Story, July 10, 2024. – Surreal report. The big orange ass attracts the freakiest henchmen.
“How Charles Holman discovered the Bushes’ ancestors had enslaved his family” (Washington Post) archive.ph/zx17m.
“Scientists identify victim of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in mass grave” (Washington Post) archive.ph/DPC5e.
Delirious Television Propaganda
“Forms of Delirium” is the third act of Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014). Now deep in the section titled “A Brief History of Sects in Post-Soviet Russia,” it dawns on me that this material provides useful context for the bizarre, messianic, wartime rhetoric I’ve heard come out of Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s mouth in the television clips that Julia Davis translates for English-speaking audiences.
This is not to say that Solovyov necessarily believes all the poison he spews. The first act of the same book, “Reality Show Russia,” provides plenty of background on that subject, even if it is based on prewar Russia. Still, the combination of mysticism, religion, ethnic Russian nationalism, and ostensibly anti-imperialist imperialism dripping from parts of the final act of this excellent book offers at least some reason for not dismissing a talking head like Solovyov out of hand. He may use the privilege of the fool to say extreme things, but he knows his words are landing.
Russian Hybrid Warfare
“How disinformation from a Russian AI spam farm ended up on top of Google search results” by David Gilbert, Wired.com, via ArsTechnica, July 10, 2024.
In the space of 24 hours, a piece of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti car with American aid money traveled at warp speed across the internet. Though it originated from an unknown French website, it quickly became a trending topic on X and the top result on Google. . . .
According to the Frankfurter Rundschau today, Russian food producers are adding banned “meat glue” (transglutaminase) to products to increase their volume in the face of the inflation that Putin’s illegal war is bringing them. HT @GianlucaColani@bildung.social
“We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”
This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, section: “The Call of the Void”.
My Micro.blog-hosted website is not working this evening. Seems to be another SSL connection issue on the server’s end. At least I found the status page and know that it’s not specific to my blog.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
Got to see a niece today who I hadn’t seen since 2017. She got to meet a niece of her own, my granddaughter.
From a walk on the beach with pleasant cloud cover this afternoon: Nauset Light Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore. This is the colder side of the Cape. Sometimes there are seals, we were told. When that happens, avoid the water because great white sharks might be hunting.
Something I blogged 16 years ago on the basis of documents I frequently taught undergraduates: Received Rights versus Human Rights in the ‘Declaration of Independence’
Important historical context for this week’s unconscionable immunity ruling: Sean Wilentz, “The Dred Scott of Our Time”, NYRB, July 4, 2024, archive.ph/qJ1xx (archived version so anyone can read about this vital topic)
It’s amazing how much hair a bald man can still grow on his head. Beard and hair trimmer died before I was quite done. Fortunately, my better half was able to finish what I had started with a pair of scissors.
The drive down to DC last weekend threw out my back, so I haven’t been able to do anything down here. At least the great nephew I brought with me got a lot out of the trip. Tomorrow, three of us head to Cape Cod to see a younger generation of Stonemans, one not yet 3, and other extended family.
If the Supreme Court’s rulings are clearly at odds with our history, our constitution, and American jurisprudence, are they even binding? Can’t the other two branches of government check the rogue one? Are there no Republicans still in office with sufficient moral fibre to join this fight?
The current moment reminds me of how desperately we need to teach the contested and often fraught history of human rights. We need better literacy on the subject. I’ve done this in a required Western Civ course at GMU.
SCOTUS would do well to remember what revolutions tend to do: they eat their own.
“Like ‘Being Friends with a Hurricane’": Fintan O’Toole looks at DJT and those who surround him through the unlikely, but illuminating lens of friendship and love. NYRB, 7/18/2024, archive.ph/KIRhG.
Stunned but not surprised by SCOTUS’s DJT immunity ruling. Do these people really think that breaking the Constitution is going to make any of their “achievements” lasting?
Reading about Israel's Inequitable Application of Military Conscription
In Thursday’s Hareetz, Ofer Aderet offers some useful background on the exemption of yeshiva students from military service. In 1948, there were only some 400 yeshiva students. Preserving their schools seemed a priority in the wake of the destruction of so much Jewish learning. The exemption was supposed to be temporary, but it still exists. Nowadays, there are more than 60,000 yeshiva students, and the religious and cultural situation of 1948 improved decades ago. Given Israel’s current security situation, there is enormous societal pressure to make the burden of mandatory military service equitable. The current government, which includes ultra-Orthodox Jews, has avoided doing so, but the High Court of Justice ruled it has to. John Strawson talks about what this means for Netanyahu in a question-and-answer piece in The Conversation. This second piece assumes less background knowledge on the part of the reader, while also going a bit deeper into the current political context.
Links to developments closer to home: Conscription, what Americans call “the draft,” is a powerful tool for war, but it requires a broad political consensus about the justness of the war and a sense that conscription’s implementation is fair. The U.S. Army and its political masters learned this lesson the hard way during the Vietnam War, after which the country moved to a volunteer force. By contrast, the Federal Republic of Germany held onto conscription until 2011 because its political leadership valued the link between military service and citizenship, a liberal tradition with roots in nineteenth-century political, military, and constitutional developments. Conscription is still in the country’s Basic Law, but the number of people being called up made conscription inequitable and therefore untenable, at least during a time when a major war in Europe no longer seemed likely.
World War I Poster: How to Act during an Air Raid
Air raids were a new danger in the Great War, and people within range of enemy aircraft needed to know what to do. The main caption of this related instructional poster reads, “How should I behave during an air raid?” Five captioned cartoons in the top row show what not to do. Below each of these is the recommended life-saving response.
The apparent repetition and contradiction in this anonymously produced poster suggest that the poster was less a product of foresight and more an ad hoc response to recent events or rumors.
Source: “Wie verhalte ich mich bei Fliegergefahr?,” poster from the Kriegsbilder exhibit of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/kriegsbilder/items/show/28. Physical object: Hessisches Landesarchiv. License: CC BY 4.0 Attribution.