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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).

  Authoritarianism

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    Shit is Getting Conspiratorially Dark

    “Senior U.S. Official to Exit After Rift With Musk Allies Over Payment System” (Wasington Post) https://archive.ph/omS67

    Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide.… The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies…

    This Musk business is getting increasingly dark. Democrats and Republicans should fight this, except there aren’t any Republicans in government anymore.

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    “Air Force says recruits will again learn about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express-News, January 26, 2025.

    The head of the service’s San Antonio-based training command said a video about the famed Black aviators would remain in the Air Force basic training curriculum. The course had been shut down in response to President Trump’s DEI ban.

    Apparently overly zealous interpretations of executive orders can be turned back in some cases. It’s a small win for military training and tradition building, but it also suggests that military professionals can get through, at least on something like this. Trump’s pardon of war criminals in his first term tell a different story, however.

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    Finished reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020). Highly recommended. Good antidote to feelings of confusion and helplessness in these troubled times.📚

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    Valuing loyalty over expertise and allowing violence to become an end in itself can result in a deprofessionalized and demoralized military, especially if misguided wars end in defeat.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (Norton, 2020), concl.

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    “Heeding Trump, Air Force won’t teach recruits about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express News, January 24, 2025, expressnews.com….

    A video describing the exploits of the groundbreaking African American airmen, who flew combat sorties during World War II, has been removed from the instructional curriculum for new recruits at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, the hub of Air Force basic training.

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    Sherrilyn Ifill, “It Is MLK Day. Do Not Despair. This Year Especially, We Have Work To Do.” sherrilyn.substack.com…

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    Democratic heads of state often see their departures from office as an opportunity to build on their leadership legacy. The authoritarian regards the end of being adulated by followers and controlling everything and everyone as an existential threat.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (Norton, 2020), chap. 10.

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    “Proposed Legislation Threatens a Backslide on U.S. Democracy” by Samantha Karlin, newlinesmag.com…, January 16, 2025.

    Lede: “A new House bill purports to counter terror financing, but it reads a lot like the ‘foreign agent’ laws used to quash dissent in Russia and Hungary.”

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    A book that manages to historicize a century of strongman regimes in an accessible and readable way while maintaining intellectual and scholarly rigor is a helluva thing. If you haven’t yet read Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020), I highly recommend it.

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    Strongman regimes … turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture, or sexual assault.…

    Rulers who come into office with a criminal record … have a head start. They know that making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the ‘contagion effect.’ So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals, and murderers available for service.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 7.

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    Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

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    🎙️ “Netanyahu and Trump’s ‘Creeping Authoritarianism’: ‘It Always Begins and Ends with Women’" – Allison Kaplan Sommer with Dahlia Lithwick and Yofi Tirosh (Haaretz) 43 min.

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    🎙️ “Timothy Snyder in Kharkiv: A Conversation about Freedom – with Volodymyr Yermolenko” (Explaining Ukraine / UkraineWorld) 54 min.

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    “Minneapolis Assault on Transgender Women Sparks Rally,” Transvitae, November 20, 2024. 🏳️‍⚧️

    In Minneapolis, two transgender women were violently attacked, prompting a rally and raising fears within the trans community amid President Trump’s re-election. As concerns over rising transphobia grow, community leaders emphasize solidarity, self-defense, and advocacy to protect the rights and safety of transgender individuals.

    HT @transworld.bsky.social

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    'Digital Vampires': Four-Part Podcast Series

    I highly recommend the following series from Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us. It underlines the stakes of the podcast’s overarching theme and even sheds light on the extreme right-wing turn among some of Silicon Valley’s ultra wealthy.

    Tech Won’t Save Us challenges the notion that tech alone can drive our world forward by showing that tech is inherently political and ignoring that has serious consequences.

    1. Data Vampires: Going Hyperscale (October 7, 2024)
    2. Data Vampires: Opposing Data Centers (October 14, 2024)
    3. Data Vampires: Sacrificing for AI (October 21, 2024)
    4. Data Vampires: Fighting for Control (October 28, 2024)
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    A remarkable indictment: “We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’" by John D Miller (head of marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal for some 25 years), U.S. News, Oct. 16, 2024.

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    Reading about Israel's Universities during War

     "Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown", The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2024.

    Teaser: “Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists.”

    Takeaway: This piece shows just how far academic institutions in Israel have been willing to go in order to serve the state’s goals at the expense of academic freedom, free speech, and the rule of law.

    Question: How are universities governed in Israel? How vulnerable are they to outside political pressure under less fraught conditions? I am wondering about the political effects of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, on one hand, and the broad effects of the current wartime climate, on the other.

     Articles behind paywalls can often be found cached on archive.today.
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    Links: Russo-Ukrainian War

    Here are some worthwhile articles related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. No paywalls – all links lead to freely available texts.

    Under Cover of War: The Kremlin’s Fascist Project" by Nancy Ries, Today’s Totalitarianism, August 2022.

    The war is a profound turning point, ending any pretense of “soft” authoritarianism with its modicum of space for resistance. The Kremlin’s fascist project may not succeed in the end, but it is crucial to see its effects within Russia as a fundamental component of the 2022 attack on Ukraine…. The Kremlin structures its war-making machine in ways that deliberately produce atrocity…. [And on TV, there is] a “pedagogy” of exterminist consciousness and practice, a key tool of the fascist project unfolding within and beyond Russia.

    In Ukraine, I saw the greatest threat to the Russian world isn’t the west – it’s Putin" by Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, December 17, 2022.

    The Kremlin’s imperial war has made its own culture and language a common enemy for people across its former empire.

    “The Skill Involved in Zelensky’s Congressional Address” by James Fallows, Breaking the News, December 23, 2022.

    The words of the speech were ‘left brain,’ with careful writerly eloquence. The in-person performance was ‘right brain,’ with emotional power beyond the words. The combination was remarkable.

    “Special Issue: Weaponizing History in the Russo-Ukrainian War,” edited by Beatrice de Graaf and Lien Verpoest, Journal of Applied History, December 2022.

    Drawing in black, white, and red. Child in center with broken pieces of their former life around them, Russian rockets sticking tail-first out of the ground, each marked with a big Z and a rashist message. Captions: 'Stolen Childhood' and 'Stop Rashism'

    Art by @neivanmade on Instagram. The term "rashism" is what Ukrainians call Russian fascism.

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    'The American Face of Fascism'

    It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

    – Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest about Trump,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2016

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