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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).

  Past & Present

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    Regarding our past:

    Americans would experience moments of unity … but its distinction has been its ability to withstand division …

    – David M. Shribman, “History Lends Context to Contemporary Conflicts,” Conway Daily Sun, April 11, 2025

    Shribman’s hope is necessary, even as the U.S. history he musters does little to banish the very real specter of fascism we know from Europe.

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    Killing and Fueling Hatred

    We Germans refuse to believe that people want to be free.… All we’re good at is killing, killing, killing! We’ve strewn all of Europe with corpses, and from their graves rises up an unquenchable hatred. Hatred… hatred everywhere! That hatred will devour us.

    These words are the subtitle translations of lines spoken in the famous early postwar film, “Rome Open City,” dir. Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1945). They issue from the mouth of a drunk German officer to his Gestapo commander, who was sure he could make a staunch Italian partisan talk that same night.

    The scene reminds me of assertions by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince (1532): It is better to be feared than loved because fear is something the ruler can control. But the ruler should avoid awaking the hatred of his subjects because that emotion could prove fatal to him (chaps. 17 and 19).

    For Machiavelli, hatred resulted from a ruler taking the property and women of his subjects. For the drunk officer in “Rome Open City,” the German masters' attacks on honor, dignity, and human life inspired deep hatred, but the Gestapo officer denied that emotion’s power.

    In our own time, Putin seems to appreciate the personal danger that he is in. He likely doesn’t blame himself for this circumstance, but he knows that his system of rule will continue to demand political assassinations, the ruthless suppression of free speech, and predatory corruption.

    His war against Ukraine helps him legitimize his tyranny inside Russia, but he seems incapable of grasping that he will never bend Ukraine itself to his will. No matter how much property he destroys, no matter how many bodies and lives he disfigures or ends, Ukrainians refuse to surrender their personhood, nationhood, and dignity. If anything, Putin has turned this European neighbor into a formidable enemy. The hatred he fuels as he robs Ukrainians of their children and other loved ones cannot be overstated.

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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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    “After Trump DEI Order, Navajo Code Talkers Disappear From Military Websites,” www.axios.com….

    From 1942 to 1945, the Navajo code talkers were instrumental in every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

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    “JACL condemns Trump erasure of 442nd and 100th Infantry Battalion,” asnews.com….

    “The 100th and 442nd remain the most decorated military units in U.S. history for their size and length of service,” the Japanese American Citizens League said in a statement. “Their heroism, despite the racism and incarceration their families faced at home, is a testament to their loyalty and sacrifice, as is their unit motto, ‘Go For Broke.'”

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    This change says a lot about the ambitions and delusions of the current Trumpy regime:

    Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of an effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.

    –WaPo on Bluesky

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    Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs

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    Cover of latest Stern magazine shows Trump and Putin bowing to each other over the corps of Ukraine. German text is discussed in main post.

    The title of this cover from a prominent German news weekly borrows from a famous Ronald Reagan quote: “Axis of Evil” (Die Achse der Bösen). Only this time a Republican president is casting the United States on the side of evil. The remaining text points to the “danger of war in Europe” and asks “what Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine means for us."1 The cover also mentions a statement by Joschka Fischer in an interview: “Germany needs conscription again."2

    POSTSCRIPT: See comments for connection to 1939

    1. “Us” could refer to Germany, given the magazine, but note the European flag that the two bowing men are standing on—with the corpse of Ukraine laid out face down between them. If the corpse is hyperbole, the betrayal and its geopolitical consequences are very real, ↩︎

    2. Fischer was a politician in the Greens who served as Germany’s popular foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005. ↩︎

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    Conscription, Industrial Mobilization, and the Russo-Ukrainian War

    Russia’s war against Ukraine has been marked by an effort to avoid universal (manhood) conscription. It is the regime’s war, so to speak (a “special military operation”), not a people’s war.

    On the other side, Ukraine uses conscription because it is indeed a national or people’s war for them. It is a fight for their very survival. Russia is even treating each and every Ukrainian as a “legitimate” target. But even Ukraine has avoided calling up younger men. It seems they lack the political consensus to do so.

    I thought about this again when Vance made his historically ignorant accusation in the White House that Ukraine’s military manpower situation was so bad that they had to force men into the army. It’s as if Vance had never heard of the draft in the United States. Or he doesn’t know that “conscription” means “draft” in modern U.S. military history. Regardless, conscription is what countries do when they believe the national stakes are extremely high. If Vance had read any histories of war over the past couple centuries, he would know this.

    One notable exception to conscription in national or total wars: Britain tried to fight the First World War with only volunteers, and they succeeded up to a point. By 1916, however, they had to institute conscription as well (“Military Service”). Little wonder. That war in particular had a ravenous appetite for men.

    I’ve been thinking about the issue of conscription for another reason. Western leaders have spent the first three years of the Russo-Ukrainian War trying to prevent average citizens from feeling any pain. They’ve avoided spending the money necessary to mobilize our defense industries sufficiently to support a Ukrainian victory and form a credible deterrent to Russia (and China).

    This avoidance points to one or all of the following developments in democracies and authoritarian kleptocracies alike:

    1. The relationship between nation states and their peoples has changed substantially. Are people less patriotic? Maybe they are less willing to follow their leaders’s calls to war?
    2. Do nation states care more about consent than they used to? Or have they grown more timid? Perhaps they are acting on an everyday awareness of popular opinion gleaned from social media, for example.
    3. Are contemporary leaders more likely to follow popular opinion than lead it? Even Putin and Trump are hardly leading, unless one thinks gaslighting their nations and the world counts.

    I have no answer here. It just feels like the post–Cold War era of increasingly volunteer armies and neoliberal economic policies is being challenged by the demands of Mars and his acolytes, even if few have come to accept the consequences of this shift.

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    Knock-Out Blow to the Russian Bear: Postcard from 1904–05

    Man in a red Japanese outfit talking to the Russian Bear in green army trousers and brown army boots as he sits on the ground and holds his head. Stars over his head indicate the hits he took. There is ocean behind them and then the sun, indicating the far east. On the horizon, four warships have been blown into the sky.

    “Your size and weight don’t count in my style of wrestling.”

    This was the last in a series of six postcards that marked the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05).1 I chose it because its caption speaks to Russia’s current war against Ukraine. The Russian Bear’s smaller opponent says, “Your size and weight don’t count in my style of wrestling.” Unlike today, Japan, not Russia, began this war with a surprise attack. Still, observers assumed the Russian Bear would prevail. It did not, and the Tsar faced revolution at home. The bigger the beast, the harder the fall.

    The war in Ukraine is different, but there, too, Russia is running up against the limits of its strength. It is facing economic collapse and worse. Rather strangely, the new-old U.S. president wants to throw his weight behind the corrupt old Russian Bear. Doing so will cost more Ukrainian lives and the United States its reputation and influence. But Ukraine will come up with new ways to stop Russia. Meanwhile, the political cartoonists will continue to do their thing, if not on postcards.

    1. Written in ink partly over the English caption are some words in French I can’t quite make out. Source: The Newberry Library, John I. Monroe collection of artist-signed postcards, https://collections.newberry.org/asset-management/2KXJ8ZS64D8UI. ↩︎

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    “U.S. military removes words ‘history,’ ‘respect,’ ‘dignity’ from digital presence as part of DEI review” by Gabriella Alcorta-Solorio, Texas Public Radio, February 28, 2025, www.tpr.org…. #NotTheOnion #MoscovianCandidate #FuckTrump

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    Italian fascist propaganda poster depicting Churchill and Roosevelt, both holding pistols, over a city in ruins and dead children, with a pirate flag in the background. A caption at the bottom reads 'Su loro ricade la colpa!'(On them rests the blame!)

    This Italian fascist poster prefigures the disgusting rhetoric of Putin and Trump: “On them rests the blame!” by Gino Boccasile, ca. 1942–45.

    Via David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bp0064p.

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    📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.

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    'The Iron Curtain' (1948 Spy Film)

    📽️ Tonight I watched “The Iron Curtain,” dir. William A. Wellman (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948). The film was based on Igor Gouzenko’s memoir of his time working as a military cypher expert in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” Hearst’s International–Cosmopolitan (February–May 1947).

    The excerpt below from a news item in a trade journal uses the term “appeasement” to describe attempts to block the film’s release. And it recalls accusations “of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films” before the U.S. entry into World War Two. Disinformation campaigns by hostile governments are nothing new, it seems.

    MPAA Pins Red Label on “Curtain” Protest

    Reaffirming his continued resistance to any attempts to dictate what appears or does not appear on the screen, Eric A. Johnston, MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] president, has rejected the protest of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship against release of 20th-Fox’s forthcoming “The Iron Curtain.” At the same time Johnston questioned the motives of the National Council and coneluded that “the purpose of your organization is to create in this country an atmosphere of appeasement and acceptance of Russia’s policy of aggression and expansion."…

    Johnston pointed out … that the issue of free speech in relation to the screen was challenged seven years ago before a Senate committee, when the producers were accused of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films. “Producers then insisted upon and maintained their constitutional right to make films on any subject, free from dictation,” Johnston reminded. “Their position was vindicated. They stand on that right today, and I back them up."…

    Source: The Film Daily February 3, 1948, p. 5.

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    The federal government is now using force to suppress knowledge of the history of violence against Black people. Remembering the past is too painful for these weak tyrants, so they tyrannize the brave who would teach or learn it.

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    It’s hard to look at the coming constitutional crisis and not think of Prussia’s constitutional crisis of 1858–64. But instead of Bismarck, we’ve got Boris and Natasha role-playing leaders.

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    A black man's left forearm and fist and a white man's left forearm and fist shown striking a big swaztika. The black man has a broken chain dangling from his wrist. The text reads, 'Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!'

    Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis, not bondage!

    World War Two poster – The word "bonds" can work three ways here: the bonds or chains pictured here as broken, the bonds that unite us, and U.S. war bonds. The second of these offers the most powerful contrast to "bondage."

    Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_065.

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    Inspiring Photo from 1971 for Our Troubled Times

    Black and white photo of men and women conference goers in a social situation of some kind, standing. The women described in the caption are in the foreground. They are the focal point.

    “Isabel Miller and Barbara Gittings hugging librarians” in 1971 at the American Library Association Conference in Dallas, Texas. (Miller is on the left. Gittings is on the right in the floral sleeveless dress.)

    Librarians can be central in the fight against bigotry and for equal rights, which might explain why some gay rights activists were there. (An important example: early professional Black librarians.)

    Photo by Kay Tobin, via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1606079. 🏳️‍🌈

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    Photo of Joy and Love, 1962

    Her head, one shoulder, and one hand is visible. Soap in hair and forehead. In a shower, the rest of her behind the plastic shower curtain. But all one sees are her radiant eyes and face, the big spontaneous smile or laugh. So much joy.

    So much joy in this photo, so much love: “Barbara Gittings in shower, circa 1962” by Kay Tobin. 🏳️‍🌈

    Via Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1605708.

    Postscript

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