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Mark R. Stoneman

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (German to English). Longtime resident of Washington, DC, now in Conway, NH, as a caregiver (he/him).

  2025

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    There will be a nation-wide protest on April 5 called Hands Off! Check out the map on handsoff2025.com for a town or city near you. I’m excited because even my town has one. I’ll get to meet locally engaged people. HT Alexander Kern.

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    Timothy Snyder and the Existential Significance of History

    Timothy Snyder posits an important nexus between our current political moment and how we as a society understand history.1 When communist states proved unable to achieve their Marxist-Leninist ambitions, we did not feel the need to look too closely for an explanation in the histories of these states and their peoples. The communist project didn’t succeed because it was wrongheaded. Its failure lay in its problematic view of human development, that is, in its false, teleological philosophy of history.2

    We didn’t see a problem with teleological thinking as such, despite historians' emphasis on provable historical causality over imagined directions that history is somehow destined to take. Instead, we assumed that the failure of their philosophy of history proved that our own was right. The world was on an inexorable path toward mutually reinforcing free trade and free societies. Why sweat the details?

    Writing at the beginning of the first Trump administration, Snyder argued the need for a genuine historicization of our world.

    The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.…

    The acceptance of inevitability stilted the way we talked about politics in the twenty-first century. It stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, while the other proposed total negation. We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things…3

    Our tunnel vision, our focus on everything supposedly going the way it was supposed to, left us complacent. Trump’s 2016 election blindsided us, and the contingency of history continues to punch us in the face.

    The enemies of democracy are guided by an equally ahistorical or “antihistorical” notion of human development. Snyder uses “eternity” to describe their image of history and politics.

    Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.…4

    Of course, this view includes enemies and grievances, which can make nostalgia and an antihistorical worldview of unending merit dangerously aggressive. Consider the Lost Cause interpretation of the American Civil War, the poisonous stab-in-the-back myth in Weimar Germany, or the giant chip on Putin’s shoulder left by the USSR’s dissolution.

    In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate?

    The stakes of such a worldview for our culture and our development are existential.

    If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.5

    What we need, argues Snyder, is to be better grounded in history so that we can understand what was and what is. In resisting the coma and the trance, we might imagine other futures and look for opportunities to shape the way history develops.

    Historicizing our world includes applying historical analysis to our immediate past. Snyder’s 2018 The Road to Unfreedom considers a period less than a decade old at the time.

    As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair.…6

    The project of this contemporary historian is as urgent as it is ambitious.

    1. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (Tim Duggan Books, 2017), chap. 20; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), prologue. ↩︎

    2. Marxism is nothing if not a philosophy of history itself, a scientific description of how and why human societies develop as they do. It also propagates worker consciousness, worker knowledge of their historical role. See, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Lenin, impatient to move things along, developed the notion of a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Revolution and communism wouldn’t just happen. They had to be wrought from above. See V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902). ↩︎

    3. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    4. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    5. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    6. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, prologue. ↩︎

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    It did not hurt my feelings to see reports of a Putin limo going up in flames. I also enjoyed seeing how scared the president is of his own honor guard. See commentary on Silicon Bites #119, March 29, 2025. youtu.be… (6 min.)

    #ПутінХуйло #RussiaIsATerroristState

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    Operator Starsky (@starskyua.bsky.social) talks with Ben Hodges about the current strategic situation in and around Ukraine. youtu.be… (19.5 min.) 🇺🇦

    #СлаваУкраїні #RussiaIsATerroristState #ПутінХуйло

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    Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 19.

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    Committing war crimes against Ukrainian POWs trains perpetrators to abuse their fellow citizens in custody back in the motherland. See “How Russian prison officers are ‘honing their cruelty’ on Ukrainian POWs,” meduza.io/en…. 🇷🇺

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    Micro.blog's European Server Option

    The IndieWeb blogging platform Micro.blog recently added an option to use a server in the European Union (Germany) instead of the United States. They began with the blogs themselves and then added images and other files. These changes comport with a broader movement to reduce exposure to services hosted in the United States, especially those dominated by or entangled with big tech, which has shown itself eager to cooperate with the lawless impulses of the Trump administration.

    I’m not sure if the European option will make much of a practical difference to my particular situation at present. Nonetheless, I’ve made the switch because I like the idea of being more mindful about what services I use and where they are hosted. Doing so matters not only in the current political climate but also given big tech’s longstanding unethical treatment of user data, a circumstance lent more urgency by their development of LLM-based artificial intelligence.

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    Black and whitephoto of a young woman teacher and six children of varying ages, four of them girls and two of them boys. More details in the caption.

    New York World-Telegram photograph by Fred Palumbo, 1964:

    Miss April Lou, teacher at PS 1, Manhattan, with six Chinese children, recent arrivals from Hong Kong and Formosa [aka Taiwan], who are holding up placards giving his or her Chinese name (both in ideographs and in transliteration) and the [American English] name to be entered upon the official school records.

    Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/94512334/.

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    When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 18.

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    “A lonely Ukrainian stork is waiting for his girlfriend and thousands of people are watching live” https://kyivindependent.com…. 🇺🇦

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    When we take an active interest in matters of doubtful relevance at moments that are chosen by tyrants and spooks, we participate in the demolition of our own political order.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 14.

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    You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 10.

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    I’ve heard historian Timothy Snyder a lot in the past several years thanks to his fantastic public speaking, captured in freely available videos and podcasts. Today, I’ve finally begun reading him. First up: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017).

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    Yellow poster with blue and black text showing a young woman in white with a blue cap reaching out from a blue triangle, symbol of War Work Council relief efforts. The text reads 'REMEMBER THE GIRL BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN' and 'Y.W.C.A.' At the very bottom in small letters: 'WAR WORK COUNCIL'.

    YWCA War Work Council poster, ca. 1917 (United States)

     

    Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002707403

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    Institute for the Study of War: “US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff uncritically amplified a number of Russian demands, claims, and justifications regarding the war in Ukraine during an interview on March 21.…” www.understandingwar.org…
    #RussiaIsATerroristState #Disinformation #СлаваУкраїні

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    Just arrived from Berlin to an empty Dulles airport in DC. Assumed because Heathrow outage. “No,” says my WashFlyer cabbie, the past month has been super slow. “Fewer tourists, fewer business people. This is not normal, believe me.” Says he’s looking for a new job because he needs to pay his bills.

    – Thomas Rid on Bluesky, March 21, 2025

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    I heard the term deadcatting for the first time today.1 It means employing a shocking distraction to pull peoples' eyes away from what matters. Why a dead cat? Imagine throwing one on a table at which people are engaged in a heated discussion. Their focus will be pulled to the cat instead of lingering on whatever difficulty is before them. This dead cat strategy can overlap with scapegoating and the politics of division, as when Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors' cats and dogs.2

    1. Jason Pack uses it on the Disorder podcast, late in ep. 107, March 18, 2025. ↩︎

    2. See Heather Digby Parton, “Donald Trump’s Dead Cat Strategy Puts the Pressure on JD Vance,” Salon, September 16, 2024. ↩︎

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    It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose—blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

    – Masha Gessen, quoted in Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality, (Workman Publishing, 2017), chap. 3.

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    “If it’s good, let it be killed.” – Trump’s Insecure Ego

    Example no. 100,001: “Is planting trees ‘DEI’? Trump administration cuts nationwide tree-planting effort” by Eva Tesfaye, www.npr.org/2025/03/21….

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    Trump’s supporters, who felt increasingly anxious or displaced in the prevailing consensus reality, could see what was happening. But those of us who were relatively at ease—our field of vision was obstructed. So we scoffed and mocked as Trump put a half nelson choke hold on reality.

    – Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman Publishing, 2017).

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    Color print of a stylish African American woman with blue hair, a small hat, and blue accents on her clothing. Her partial shadow on the brown striped wallpaper is also blue.

    "Girl with Blue Hair" by Blanche Grambs. Lithograph signed by artist, ca. 1935–43.

    Works Progress Administration (WPA) Art Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image id 5181000.

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