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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).

  Politics & Rule

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    I’ve been watching a lot of Cory Booker on the Senate floor since yesterday evening (but getting some sleep myself). Good to see the fire in him. I needed this. 🇺🇸🗽

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    Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!…

    Galileo: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.

    – Bertolt Brecht, “Life of Galileo,” in Collected Plays: Five, trans. John Willet (Bloomsbury, 1995), scene 13.

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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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    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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    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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    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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    “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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    Putin Playing Trump for a Fool Again

    The 30-day partial cease fire that Putin and Trump agreed to is a one-sided joke.

    Russia probably needs relief from strikes on its energy infrastructure more than Ukraine does because the former depends on energy to finance its war. Ukraine, at least, has made it through another winter, when attacks on its energy infrastructure hurt the worst. Moreover, its air defenses seem to be more effective than Russia’s.

    The real kicker, though, are the accompanying demands and threats, which continue to assert Russia’s maximalist aim of destroying Ukrainian sovereignty by demanding it do nothing to improve its defense posture. Meanwhile, the White House and Kremlin “agreed to set up Russian and American expert groups to ‘resolve the war bilaterally,'” i.e., without Ukraine or the rest of Europe. Of course, the Kremlin issued yet another tired threat of “escalation.”

    Will the White House side with Russia again, despite the Kremlin playing Trump for a fool? It wouldn’t surprise me, given that Trump has no advisors who will tell him what he needs to hear. I hope I’m wrong.

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    I do not understand Democratic caucus politics in the U.S. Senate, but it seems to me that if Sen. Schumer lost the majority of his caucus on the cloture vote today, that ought to have consequences for his leadership position. Are there any rumblings of this sort in the Democratic caucus?

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    Deeply disappointed in the votes of my two senators for cloture and for submitting to a GOP budget that will harm New Hampshire’s residents. Yes, we’re a purple state. No, they should not be putting their jobs ahead of the state’s residents, let alone democracy. #NH #Shaheen #Hassan

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    Sometimes I hate my state: “NH’s new ID requirements send some would-be voters home to grab passports, birth certificates,” www.nhpr.org….

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    Ukraine has been proving the value of U.S. arms these past three years. Now Trump is using Ukraine to demonstrate the achilles heel of high-end American arms. Their effective use depends on the U.S. political system, which is proving vulnerable to malign domestic and foreign actors.

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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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    Orange, white, black, brown, and tan poster depicting nine women of various backgrounds engaged in different activities, including arts, activism, and blue-collar work. The accompanying text reads: 'Radical Women Annual Conference – 1976'. 'A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians': 'Women in the Labor Movement', 'Feminism and the Minority Woman', 'Gays and the Class Struggle.' 'Panels; Workshops; Role Playing; Dinner & Party, Saturday.' Held on Sat. and Sun., October 9–10, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, along with addresses, phone numbers, and a few more details.

    A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians. 1976 poster by a Seattle organization called Radical Women.

    Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649885/.

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    Does Felonious Husk even think about the probable consequences of his reliance on self-dealt government contracts come the midterm elections? Do his investors and boards? Add to that the destruction of his cars' reputation, and he is poised to fail hard.

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    French Senator Claude Malhuret describes what’s happening in the United States in stark terms and explains the consequences of Frump’s traitorous behavior for Europe: youtu.be….

    #MoscovianCandidate #RussiaIsATerroristState

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    Conflating Business Acumen, Reality TV Stardom, Electoral Politics, and Governance

    For a so-called businessman, His Magnificent Bigly Orangeness seems to know precious little about the relative predictability that businesses need in order to make informed decisions. For reality TV or the kind of show Jerry Springer had, however, constant chaos can increase viewership. Orangeman’s style of television was successful because many people enjoyed his schtick.

    The move from television to politics was natural. As long as he didn’t have to know things or govern, he could apply the same loud-mouthed, made-for-TV nonsense to the United States as a whole. NBC having already marketed him for years, it was easy to get his fans to jump on this new bandwagon.

    His politics of unrelenting chaos, finger-pointing, scapegoating, grievance rhetoric, and race-baiting has brought him to the White House twice. But achieving such success is not the same as getting the nation’s work done. His style of politics is no way to conduct international relations or basic governance at home.

    I know that he likes to have all cameras on him, but the United States has a wealth of experienced and talented people who could do the necessary work and give him all the credit. I’m sure they could also help him produce “must watch” TV moments with himself at the center.

    Unfortunately, no people with adequate knowledge and experience are in his administration. He has purposefully insulated himself from alternative viewpoints, while cowardly and venal Republican senators enable the practice. In this way, we get a common-law presidential spouse, First Gentleman Felonious Husk, in addition to the president’s legal spouse, First Lady Trump.

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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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    Not looking forward to higher fuel and food prices here in Northern New England just because Orange Turd doesn’t understand how regional markets work among friends and allies. #TrumpsEconomy #MoscovianCandidate

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