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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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    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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    Turning up the heat in Iran?

    Now things really seem to be getting crazy: “In Iran: A Call For Arrest Of Mousavi & Khatami," reports NPR blogger Mark Memmott. Once you make protest illegal, though, and put people on show trials for participating in it, such a move would be a logical next step. Will they really go there? It seems possible, after more incremental steps in weakening the opposition, assuming that weakening is what is actually happening, which might not be the case at all. Or it could be that such a statement is more a sign of frustration over divisions within Iran’s leadership. Hard to say.

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    Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

    So Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is standing by the highly improbable fiction that the election was a fair one. It seems to me that he and his supporters are playing a dangerous game. Sure, Khamenei has the instruments of oppression at his disposal. He can use the state and vigilante citizens to crack down on the protesters, and he might even win the day. In the end, however, he has made all too clear that the democratic elements of the system are no more than window dressing. Instead of sacrificing his preferred candidate, he is now risking the entire system. How can it now escape the opposition that the president is not the problem, but the entire system itself?

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    The Fast Pace of Time in Iran

    It seems to me that Iran’s clerical leadership is playing a dangerous game. The main opposition candidate is a conservative political insider who supports the current system, but who looks moderate in an Iranian context. His supporters are not demanding a change to the system either. They too just want the system to live up to its own official standards. But as time passes, expectations and goals might very easily expand to a vision that is even more at odds with what Iran’s clerical leadership wants for the country. Shouldn’t they concede before this happens?

    One problem is that the opposition wants a new election, because the one they just had is tainted. But what would a new election mean? Among other things, more national discourse on the future of the country, and I suspect such a conversation would lead people to probe even deeper into the country’s problems, perhaps even to their systemic foundation, even if politicians are not allowed to question the country’s political system.

    Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s supporters could become increasingly insistent about their desires, and that could easily undermine Iran’s social stability still further. Time is not on the side of those who support the status quo. Unfortunately, that does not mean it is on the side of the opposition.

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    Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

    The jury is still out on whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really won the election and, if so, to what extent. How this will play out is also anybody’s guess. One thing I already find worrying, however, is Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, which talks about freedom and bipartisanship, on one hand, and delegitimizes legitimate political opposition, on the other. The following combination of quotes from today’s Washington Post is chilling:

    This election was so free that you could say it was complete freedom. . . . The election is gone and done. It is time for friendship, coalition and building the country. . . . [Reporters should talk to] true Iranians . . . Like the people you meet at my rallies. . . . [As for the opposition,] There is no other choice than to surrender. . . You think you are of the elite? That you are above the people? . . . The society must be purified of these people. . . . They will try to stop me, but I will expose them to the great nation of Iran.

    The first statement rings hollow. What is “complete freedom,” especially in the Iranian system where unelected religious leaders determines who may run for office? The second statement sounds eminently reasonable, something like a well-wishing plea for bipartisanship in the United States. Then things get spooky. It is one thing to demonize the other side as not truly patriotic. We experienced that last fall with Sarah Palin’s rhetoric of “real America,” the “media elite,” and so on. While I find such rhetoric reprehensible, at least it did not come right out and say that the other side had no right to exist. It understood the concept of a loyal opposition, even if that opposition supposedly loves America less than Palin’s and McCain’s supporters do.

    If Ahmadinejad’s legitimately won the election, which is far from clear, his rhetoric shows that he has no respect for democratic processes. Elections without the concept of a loyal opposition are meaningless. Here’s hoping that Iran’s Supreme Leader gets that.

    Perhaps it will. After all, the oppositional candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was screened and approved by religious authorities. We are talking about opposition that is legitimate within the narrow confines of Iran’s political system, not our own. If even that is not acceptable, then what will be left of Iran’s revolution? Iranian independence, to be sure, as well as clerical rule and possibly the more extensive subjugation of women, but what about the semi-democratic elements of its constitution? The campaign, polling, and post-election protests suggest that they matter to Iranians. And well they should. The legitimacy of Iran’s post-1979 system depends on them.

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