War & Society
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This and all other quotes by Dorothy Thompson: “Political Dictionary” (March 19, 1936), in Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), 17–20. ↩︎
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Erich Ludendorff, Der totaler Krieg (Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935). ↩︎
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Good historical background: Geoffrey Best, Honour among Men and Nations: Transformations of an Idea (University of Toronto Press, 1981). ↩︎
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Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). ↩︎
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Caption from Catalogue of Official A.E.F. photographs taken by the Signal Corps, U.S.A., 1919. ↩︎
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Photo by the United States Army Signal Corps, November 11, 1918, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017666571/. ↩︎
“Russia is executing more and more Ukrainian prisoners of war” (December 21, 2024), www.bbc.com…
I enjoyed rewatching “The More the Merrier,” dir. George Stevens (Columbia Pictures 1944). Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn star in this delightful comedy. Part of its charm for me is the setting itself, wartime Washington, DC. We do not see the halls of power but instead the streets, a hotel and restaurant, office buildings, a small apartment, and the shared roof of a row of houses filled with apartment dwellers.
We sometimes describe aggressors as “brainwashed” by propaganda that dehumanizes their victims, so much so they are “hypnotized” into committing atrocities. But what if the “dehumanising” propaganda rather legitimizes cruelty, makes it ordinary, and the aggressor sees the victims' humanity all too clearly?
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.
Did the [Ukrainians'] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.
I watched “Passage to Marseille,” dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros., 1944), this evening.
I forgot about the shocking scene in which Humphrey Bogart’s character machine-guns the surviving crew of the German plane he’d just downed at sea. The audience in 1944 was meant to sympathize with this act. After all, that crew had just tried to bomb the small civilian freighter. I don’t know if such a scene would have worked in a Hollywood film much earlier, but it did in 1944. Was this fictional atrocity an indication of American popular culture’s brutalization in World War II?
Movie poster image source: “Warner Bros. Pressbook” (1944), Internet Archive.
U.S. Government Caricature of Nazi Propaganda
This 1942 poster was designed to counter the effects of Nazi propaganda in the United States. It is fascinating in its own right, but parts of the text reveal startling similarities to Russian disinformation in our own time.
Accessibility: Description and full transcription of poster.
Adieu Assad
Oh dictator, take note –
when you order your image hung all over,
you offer an attractive target
for the hatred of everyone you wrong,
you offer a practical object
for the people to trample, shred, and burn.
Started reading Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024).
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
🇵🇸🇮🇱 Here’s a gruesome report of the dire conditions in northern Gaza at +972 Magazine, “an independent, online, nonprofit” publication “run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.”
We Need a New Political Translation Dictionary (English–English)
In 1936, Dorothy Thompson observed in her newspaper column that “dictatorships often have quite different interpretations of words from liberal democracies. . . . In the dictionary of democracies,” for example, “peace is a desirably permanent condition of amicable relations with other nations. In the dictionary of dictatorships peace means: a quiet undisturbed period in which to prepare for war . . ."1
The phrase “between nations” excluded asymmetric colonial conflicts, so the difference Thompson painted was quite real. In fact, it was the entire argument of Erich Ludendorff’s 1935 screed Der totale Krieg (Total War). In that book, Ludendorff flipped Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum on its head. Instead of understanding war as the pursuit of political aims by other means, states had to understand war as the driving force behind all politics.2
Regarding “nonaggression” in international relations, Thompson wrote,
liberal democracies mean . . . simply the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Both Russian and German dictatorships mean by it the substitution of revolution for other weapons. Neither Russia nor Germany considers the fomenting of internal strife in countries which they want to bring under their influence to be aggression.
In our own time, Russia, now a different creature, is playing a similar game inside NATO countries. Observers in these democracies refer to Russia’s current suite of activities as “hybrid warfare,” although their governments often play down these activities. Thompson’s discussion of “war” itself can help to explain why, provided we keep the “between nations” qualification in mind. “For the democracies war is armed conflict between nations, to be avoided as an unmitigated catastrophe. Above all, war is regarded as an abnormal condition. In the Russian dictionary,” on the other hand, “war is either an inevitable byproduct of the struggle of capitalist countries for markets, or the permanent, unremitting and inevitable struggle between classes for power.” The first theory of war came from Lenin’s interpretation of imperialism and the World War (1914–18). The second was the basic dialectical understanding of history as class conflict posited by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the USSR’s take on war, “in the Fascist dictionary it is the necessary and normal condition in which heroic nations and personalities reach their highest potential. . . .” Such thinking could be found in the democracies, too, especially in the two decades or so before the First World War. After all, the educated learned Latin everywhere in the west, including the Roman poet Horace’s phrase, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.) During that war, Winfred Own referred to that sentiment as “the old Lie." And many politicians did everything they could to avoid the next war, leading to the catastrophic extreme of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, while the United States pursued an isolationist foreign policy.
Two related terms for Thompson were “honor” and “dishonor.” We do not consciously use them much in twenty-first-century international relations, but Thompson’s explanation is not hard to understand.3
Honor in England means allegiance to accepted standards of conduct. Honor in Germany and Italy means prestige. Dishonor in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary is a crime which one commits against oneself; in the Fascist dictionary it means a crime which is committed against one.
Following this logic, the U.S. dishonored itself when it turned to torture in Iraq. Similarly, our former and next president dishonored our country, our military, and his office by pardoning American war criminals. In the process, he didn’t honor international treaty obligations either. That is because his understanding of honor is more like that of the fascists of the 1930s. Anyone who takes him down a peg has injured him and faces retribution, much like a gang member who can’t afford to lose face. Looking weak is unbearable to this man, whereas conventional rules and fair play are for suckers. The current Russian president follows a similar gangland code, restoring his injured honor by having opponents poisoned or fall out of windows. There might well be a sense of injured honor involved in his attempt to destroy Ukraine.
Thompson’s column underlined something with which we are all too familiar these days. We speak the same language as our enemies. We use the same words. But our common language both obscures and fosters different perceptions of reality that leave us at cross purposes. The Russians talk about “information war."4 And Alex Jones spread disinformation in the United States with a profitable website called InfoWars. Perhaps the problem goes even deeper, and individual words themselves have become players in our fight for the soul and honor of this nation. Maybe we need a comparative political dictionary to bridge the gap or at least bring the conflict into sharper focus.
Japanese-American Internment as 'Evacuation' and 'Relocation'
These photos of Japanese-Americans and a few resident aliens on their way to internment for the duration of World War II are accompanied by captions that avoid the language of imprisonment or confinement. Instead of internment, there is talk of “evacuation” and the War Relocation Authority.
These pictures also suggest what a rupture the location of their internment would represent. It is hard to imagine these urbanites stepping out into the barely settled terrain they were headed to, even if an advanced party of men without dependents was sent out a few weeks in advance to prepare for the others' arrival.
"Los Angeles, California. The evacuation of the Japanese-Americans from West Coast areas under U.S. Army war emergency order. Japanese-American children waiting for a train to take them and their parents to Owens Valley." Photo taken in April 1942 by Russell Lee.
“Los Angeles, California. The evacuation of the Japanese-Americans from West Coast areas under U.S. Army war emergency order. Japanese-Americans and a few alien Japanese waiting for a train which will take them to Owens Valley.” Photo taken in April 1942 by Russell Lee.
“Los Angeles, California. The evacuation of Japanese-Americans from West coast areas under United States Army war emergency order. The Japanese referred to in this sign were an advance group going to Owens Valley for construction work.” Photo taken in April 1942 by Russell Lee.
“Manzanar, Calif. Apr. 1942. Construction beginning at the War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry, in Owens Valley. Mt. Whitney, loftiest peak in the United States, appears in the background.” Photo by Clem Albers.
Source: Library of Congress: Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Photograph Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017744879, …/2017744872, …/2017817916, and …/2021647198.
A threat to the U.S. military’s morale, cohesion, and effectiveness: "‘Profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform’: Pentagon reacts to sex assault allegations against Hegseth", Politico, November 22, 2024. 🪖
An Old Putin Meme – 'Weaponizing Ridicule'
Here is a once popular meme in Russia that the thin-skinned Putin banned, thereby making it more popular (artist unknown). This is one of the examples that J. Michael Waller offers in “Weaponizing Ridicule” (Military Review, Sept.–Oct. 2017). His findings, it seems to me, are relevant to how we could deal with the big orange lump.
🇺🇦 “How Russian Forces Hunted People in The Bucha Massacre,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, YouTube, Nov 19, 2024 (29 min)—compelling reporting based on a thorough look at diverse sources.
This is the exclusive story of Oleksiy Pobihay, a Ukrainian territorial defense fighter whose body was discovered at the site of an abandoned Russian military headquarters in Bucha. With his hands bound and a bullet wound in his head, Pobihay was among hundreds murdered during the Bucha massacre. This atrocity, which unfolded during the Russian military occupation in April 2022, has become emblematic of the war and the brutal killings perpetrated by Russian forces.
Through phone intercepts, previously unpublished videos, documents, and witness statements, @RadioSvobodaUkraine has pieced together the chilling story of what happened in Bucha.
1,000 Days 🇺🇦
One thousand days since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One thousand days, and we still have our heads in our duffle bags. No efforts to lead public opinion on why higher levels of support are necessary. No significant build-up of our industrial base to put paid to Putin’s ambitions. And we’re still hamstringing Ukraine in its ability to strike the Russian war machine where it needs striking.
“One Against All” (animation) by Фріоніс with English subtitles (2:20), youtu.be/8LXEG1mhg… 🇺🇦
Informative piece, reported from Ukraine: “A war-weary Ukraine warily eyes a Trump presidency” by Fabrice Deprez, The Boston Globe, November 8, 2024.
The principle that a commander has an obligation to punish war crimes by his subordinates is not a progressive development of the law promoted by the advocacy community. Instead, the duty to punish stands out as an ancient legal norm interwoven into the domestic law of the United States and which the United States has incorporated into international legal instruments.
Photo from the first Armistice Day in Paris
“When the news became generally known that the armistice had been signed, the crowd went wild . . ."1
“Paris. Impromptu parades took place in Paris on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918. Here are American soldiers pushing their way through the great crowds at the Church of the Madeleine, Paris. They are forcing their way towards Place de la Concorde down Rue Royale."2
Halya Coynash, “Russians Execute Wounded Ukrainian POW amid Mounting Evidence of Russia’s Policy and Incitement to Kill,” Human Rights in Ukraine, Nov. 11, 2024.
Does Putin understand the United States? I'm inclined to think not, even if he's got Trump as a person pretty well sized up.
I can’t help but think that the Kremlin once again misunderstands the situation, as they did in February 2022. Sure, the next U.S. president likes rubbing elbows with “tough guy” dictators, and the guardrails of expertise and institutions mean nothing to him; nevertheless, he won’t be completely free to do as he pleases. Think of the old guard Republicans who know what’s at stake in Europe. Enough of them were able to convince the guy in Mar-a-Lago to tell Mike Johnson to finally approve funds for Ukraine earlier this year. More importantly, even if his supporters are gung-ho America Firsters, they feel threatened by China, Putin’s close ally. If they haven’t put two and two together about the global ramifications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, their obsession with tariffs has everything to do with China, Russia’s closest supporter.
In fact, will the jumping, hooting, squealing Mr. Cybertruck’s interests in China throw a spanner in his current machinations to treat our government like an extension of his personal business interests? Mr. Orange-in-a-Suit’s supporters are expecting action on China, and their guy with the tie needs their adulation—not to mention their votes in the 2026 midterms. Besides, how open will his oil guys be to welcoming Russia back to legitimate global oil and natural gas markets while prices are low? I can’t claim to know all the variables, and I know the occupant of the White House matters a great deal. Still, as unpredictable, unscrupulous, inhumane, and disloyal as Mr. Bad Hairpiece is, he will not be operating in a vacuum free from the influence of powerful players calling in their chits.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the Russian terrorist-in-chief and his security apparatus have already proven how blinkered they were about Ukraine, not to mention the unity NATO has projected. It is equally nonsensical for the Kremlin to think of NATO as a collection of American-led satellite states, pace Russia’s rabid propagandists Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Soloviev. Why should the Kremlin understand the United States any better, if it can’t even acknowledge Ukrainian agency? And just how well would the next U.S. president respond to threats, when Putin realizes that flattery won’t get him what he wants in Ukraine.
Worried about Mr. Orange Face's Effect on The Military
How effective will the American military be after the next administration wreaks havoc on the Pentagon so that the president might have the loyalists he needs in order to command them as he sees fit, including even direct them against the American people? How much material and moral corruption will these measures lead to? May the military’s talent pool be deep and ethical enough to survive the corrupting onslaught of what’s coming. Mr. Huge Crowd’s pardoning of war criminals last time round suggests how little he understands military morale and discipline. We know what he thinks of expertise, and he paid no price for disrespecting our fallen.