Author: Batocchio

What’s to Be Done About Conservatives?
by Batocchio

What’s to be done about American conservatives and the Republican Party? For decades, they’ve stood for plutocracy and bigotry, and using the latter to achieve the former. Almost none of their policies help Americans as a whole; instead, their policies benefit a select few, most often those who are already rich and powerful. Conservatives and Republicans serve their donors, not the majority of their constituents. On the merits, their policies are awful, so they lie about them constantly. About their only true principle is acquiring more power and keeping it, by almost any means necessary – norms of governance, democratic representation and fair play be damned.

Their supporters come in different flavors, mostly unsavory. Many simply seek short-term personal gain, ignoring long-term harm, to their descendants if not themselves. Others, the dark money crowd and their eager servants, truly wish to further entrench the powerful as a ruling class. The most rabid members of the conservative base are frightening, cherishing spite more than their own children. (Who needs a decent wage when you can ‘own the libs’? Who needs bread when you have the Fox News circus?) The remainder are mostly loyal Republican voters – “nearly 90 per cent of self-described Republicans voted for Trump, very similar to the proportion in previous elections.” None of the horrible things Trump said or did prior to the 2016 election were dealbreakers for them. They rationalized that Hillary Clinton was worse or simply voted their true values instead of their stated ones. To use the terms of an old post, conservatives are a mix of reckless addicts, stealthy extremists and proud zealots, with far too few sober adults to be found.

As for the media, good journalists still exist and always deserve support, but many corporate media outlets aren’t truly focused on creating a more informed citizenry. Instead, they churn out a thin, news-like substance to try to fill their never-ending news cycle – they need volume, and high quality isn’t cost-effective. Conscientious citizens might want good, better government, and the fact-checking and other essential information to help achieve that – and some journalists really do work hard to provide it – but media company owners need sales and profits. Stories deemed too complex aren’t covered – for example, explaining the abuse of Senate procedures and contextualizing them. More importantly, calling out one political side is simply not good business, especially when one side is consistently worse about lying, violating political norms and screwing over the citizenry. One of our national political discourse’s key scourges is false equivalence, or “both siderism,” claiming both sides are just as bad even when evidence to the contrary stands overwhelming. (For much more on this, see the archives of Digby, driftglass, alicublog, Balloon Juice, LGM or my own archives.)

Related to this, in our current mainstream national political discourse, we generally do not discuss policy in any meaningful way. That’s not to say everyone needs to read policy papers, which will always be done by a more niche group – but we do not discuss policies and their proven or likely effects. We do not talk about their effect on actual human beings and their lives. We do not accurately assign praise or blame to politicians and political parties, or engage in more nuanced analysis and discussion. For instance, who did this tax bill benefit, and who did it benefit the most? How successful was this antipoverty measure? What effects did providing more health care have on this community? Maybe we could provide some statistics, but also talk to some people, and put a human face on these issues? Coverage on the 2016 presidential race almost entirely ignored policy issues and focused on shallow issues with false balance. Obviously, this approach gives a tremendous, unfair advantage to the candidates with worse policies, nebulous positions or a vaguer grasp of important issues. It makes it much easier for them to bullshit, which really doesn’t help for the whole informed citizenry, better government thing.

For all their faults, though, mainstream corporate media outlets normally get basic facts correct. Some media outlets are little more than propaganda operations. Dodgy left-leaning outlets do exist, but don’t have nearly the influence of conservative outlets, most of all Fox News. Rank-and-file conservatives believe false things and are fearful in part because they have been lied to and fed fear. Several studies have shown that Fox News viewers score less accurately on basic news tests than people who don’t watch the news, yet Fox News viewers are also more likely to believe that they’re better-informed than their fellow citizens. Stewing in Fox News makes them both less informed and more certain. (That’s a feature, not a bug, of course.)

Ideally, policies would be discussed on their merits, and praise and blame (or measured, nuanced assessments) would be accurately assigned. In actual practice, due to all the factors discussed above, conservatives and Republicans are rarely held accountable for their policies and decisions. The conservative movement works to prevent any such reckoning.

(It might help to look at some specific policies. but before that, a brief segue.)

Conservative Versus Republican

Anyone’s who criticized conservatives in some depth has probably encountered pushback that, for example, George W. Bush wasn’t a true conservative, or Trump isn’t, or neither of them is emblematic of the true Republican Party (never mind those pesky votes and other support).

It’s true that “conservative” and “Republican” aren’t always synonymous, but since the two major political parties realigned in the 1960s, the Republican Party has been more conservative on almost every issue, and the majority of Republicans consistently identify themselves as conservative. As Digby’s observed, conservatives like to pretend that conservatism cannot fail; it can only be failed. (Self-described libertarians love this “no true Scotsman” game, too.) Every time conservatives are discredited, it’s common to see a disowning of key figures, plus conservative rebranding efforts. We’ll also see pundits yearning for the more reasonable, decent conservatives and Republicans of yesteryear, and not just for, say, Eisenhower (for whom some good arguments can be made), but Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes, among others. Although those individuals may indeed have been better than the current crop in some particulars, an honest, fair assessment would judge that many of their policies stunk and quite a few of them had pretty crazy views. The Democratic Party has become more liberal over time, and the Republican Party more conservative, but the Republican drift has been more extreme. The Republican Party Platform of 1956 would be denounced as socialist by the conservatives and Republicans of today. In contrast, the Democratic Party Platform of 1972 is quite similar to recent platforms on many issues, except that contemporary platforms are much stronger on LGBT rights and other social issues. The Democratic Party does have an establishmentarian, corporatist faction, but also a more liberal one. The Republican Party is not a mirror image; it’s purged almost all nonconservatives from office. Republican officials are more conservative and extreme than many members of their own party, and much more conservative and extreme than their constituents as a whole. Voters may have more variety, but when it comes to political figures, for practical purposes, “conservative” and “Republican” are generally effectively the same. Accordingly, in this piece I’m using the terms fairly interchangeably unless the distinction matters (for instance, discussing conservative Democrats).

As for Trump specifically, occasionally, we’ll see some bullshit arguments that he’s some sort of aberration, but some style differences aside, Trump is firmly in the conservative tradition. Some conservatives effectively admit this – they might criticize Trump’s style, but support his policies nonetheless. Neither major political party is entirely pure or evil, but comparisons are both possible and essential. The truth is, Republicans are primarily to blame for the political problems in Washington, D.C. and the nation, and that definitely includes the rise of Trump.

Conservative Policies

Conservative policies almost always benefit the rich and powerful – the donor class – rather than average constituents and the country. That’s no accident. Although sincerely held ideology might drive some conservatives and Republicans, in many cases, their motivation amounts to simple corruption. For the horrendous Republican tax bill of December 2017, Republican representative Chris Collins flat-out admitted, “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’ ” (And sure enough, after the bill passed, the donors were pleased.) Let’s take a look at some policies.

Inequality: Wealth and income inequality in the U.S. are at their worst since the gilded age, and are likely to become more extreme. This neofeudal model stands in sharp contrast to the New Deal and post-WWII policies aimed at helping the nation as a whole. Those policies gave the U.S. the “great compression,” a period of enormous economic growth, decreased inequality, an expansion of the middle class and shared prosperity (with some important caveats about denied opportunities based on race, gender, etc.). A model of hoarding power and prosperity versus sharing it is probably the defining difference between conservatives and nonconservatives (liberals and so-called moderates). The aforementioned 2017 Republican tax bill was designed – like Reagan’s and all major Republican tax proposals since Bush’s twin tax cuts – to massively benefit the already wealthy. It remains bad fiscal, economic and social policy. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summarizes, “The major tax legislation enacted last December will cost approximately $1.5 trillion over the next decade and deliver windfall gains to wealthy households and profitable corporations, further widening the gap between those at the top of the income ladder and the rest of the nation.” (As the report continues, wage stagnation certainly doesn’t help.) Those are features, not bugs, as are decades of conservatives yelling that any effort to lessen massive inequality is communism. Americans as a whole want a more fair system, but Republicans are more likely to think the current system is already fair and that poverty is due a lack of effort instead of circumstances beyond one’s control. (They are wrong.) However, Americans really have no idea how bad inequality is, and even rank-and-file Republicans favor a more equitable distribution when it’s presented as a choice. Inequality remains a major issue beyond economic matters – conservatives and Republicans stand for acquiring more power and keeping it, even if it hurts the country at large.

Climate Change: The Trump administration, true to Republican form, has decided to ignore climate change, including the government’s own National Climate Assessment. Meanwhile, an alarming new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of potentially terrible consequences as soon as 2040. Some Democrats are also beholden to the fossil fuel industry, but industry donations heavily favor Republicans, and conservative Republicans are the group most opposed to acknowledging climate change and to doing anything about it. That position is one of many conservative shibboleths to affirm tribal identity. Climate change is arguably the single most important issue we face, because human life on the planet could significantly, negatively change if it’s not addressed. Yet the Republican Party is just about the only major political party in the world to deny climate change and oppose universal health care. Speaking of which…

Health Care: The Affordable Care Act is about the most conservative health care plan possible that can actually work – it doesn’t dismantle private, for-profit health insurance, and uses that mechanism to provide health care for the majority of Americans. It’s a far cry from the better, universal health care systems that most other industrialized nations have, and that liberals favor, but the ACA has had a positive effect: “In 2016, there were 28.6 million Americans without health insurance, down from more than 48 million in 2010.” Rather than addressing that remaining gap, Republicans voted to repeal the ACA over 70 times as of July 2017. Republicans had promised for several years to produce an alternative to the ACA, but never offered a coherent, workable plan. When Republicans finally did produce something, their plan allowed states to waive the provision that prevents insurance companies from refusing to cover or to charge more to people with pre-existing conditions. Such a move would save for-profit insurance companies money, of course, but would be absolutely horrible for citizens. Naturally, conservatives lied about this. It’s important to note how much bad faith has featured in conservative arguments about health care, captured by Jonathan Chait’s

The War to End All Wars
by Batocchio

Today, 11/11/18, marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the Great War, the supposed War to End All Wars that unfortunately didn’t. I’ve always been struck by how eager nations were to go to war at the start and how horrific the reality often was. By the end, by most estimates, about 8.5 million soldiers were dead and the total casualty count was about 37.5 million. Add in a couple million civilian deaths from fighting and several million more indirectly from disease and hunger, and the toll is just staggering. The death count would be exceeded in World War II, but it’s hard to overstate how devastating the “Great War” was to the world, especially Europe.

The Imperial War Museums (a set of five museums in Britain) has posted an excellent collection of first-hand British accounts on the armistice 100 years ago. Follow the link for the audio, but I’ve copied some key accounts below. Not everyone got the news about the armistice, and even for those who did, the final hours could be tense:

The news travelled at different speeds, and was delayed in getting to some places. George Jameson’s unit read about it.

When the war actually ended, we didn’t even know about it. We knew that things were getting pretty critical, we knew that we were doing well and nobody wanted to cop out on one when the war might be ending tomorrow, sort of thing. It was the wrong time to get wounded or hit or anything, you see! So we were pretty careful. But we were moving forward with the idea of taking another position when one of the drivers shouted up to somebody, ‘There’s a sign on that,’ it was an entrance to some house. He said, ‘There’s a sign on that thing marking somebody’s headquarters and it says the wars over.’ Don’t believe it. Nobody would believe it. The war couldn’t be over; it had been on for years, nobody would believe it could finish! It’s a fact; it says there the war was over. So somebody rode back and read this thing that said, as from 11 o’clock this morning, hostilities have ceased. And we then realised the war was over.

Fighting continued in some places as the news made its way along the Western Front, and men still lost their lives on the final day of the war. Jim Fox of the Durham Light Infantry remembered one such incident.

Of course, when the armistice was to be signed at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November, as from 6 o’clock that morning there was only the occasional shell that was sent either by us over the German lines or the German over at our lines. Maybe there was one an hour. And then, about 10am, one came down and killed a sergeant of ours who’d been out since 1915. He was killed with shrapnel, you know. Thought that was very unlucky. To think he’d served since 1915, three years until 1918, nearly four years and then to be killed within an hour of armistice…

William Collins clearly remembered conditions on the morning of the 11 November, and noted the significance of where he was that day.

On armistice morning, I remember the fog was – it was a Monday morning, November the 11th. The fog was so thick that visibility was down to 10 yards. And as we moved and moved on, we found ourselves at about 10 o’clock that morning we were up with the infantry patrols. And of course, when we found out that they were the closest to the Germans, we stopped and we stood in that place until… must have been oh, half past 12, one o’clock before the order was given to retire. A silence came over the whole place that you could almost feel, you know, after four and a half years of war, not a shot was being fired, not a sound was heard because the fog blanketed everything, you see, and hung really thickly over… We were north-east of Mons, whereas I’d started the battle four and a half years before, south-east of Mons. So there I was, back where the war started after nearly four and a half years of it.

For an exhibit, the Imperial War Museum in London recreated “the last few minutes of World War I when the guns finally fell silent at the River Moselle on the American Front” using WWI seismic data that the Smithsonian explains well. Take a listen:

(It seems the birds were added as an artistic choice, and I think they come in too early and too loudly, but it’s still a fascinating piece.)

( Paris.)

In the field, some soldiers celebrated the armistice with gusto, while others were simply exhausted:

Charles Wilson of the Gloucestershire Regiment was delighted when he heard of the armistice.

Well of course there was tremendous jubilation, I can remember. We had just come out of this battle and the armistice was on the 11th of November. We were doing battalion drill back in some village in France when we formed up and the commanding officer made the announcement: an armistice was signed at 11 o’clock today. Of course there was a swell of excitement amongst the men and our only interest then was to find something to drink to celebrate it and there was nothing to be had, not a bottle of wine or anything else! However we soon put that right…

But Clifford Lane was just too physically and mentally shattered to celebrate.

Then as far as the armistice itself was concerned, it was an anti-climax. We were too far gone, too exhausted, really to enjoy it. All we could do was just go back to our billets; there was no cheering, no singing, we had no alcohol – that particular day we had no alcohol at all – and we simply celebrated the armistice in silence and thankfulness that it was all over. And I believe that happened quite a lot in France. There was such a sense of anti-climax; there was such a… We were drained of all emotion really – that’s what it amounted to, you see. Then it was a question of when we were going to get home…

( Trafalgar Square, London.)

More reactions:

Mary Lees, who worked for the Air Ministry, was caught up in the scenes of jubilation that day.

But of course, I mean, Armistice Day was fantastic. You see, you visualise every single office in Kingsway pouring down the Strand. I should think there must have been about 10,000 people. There was no traffic of course. It was solid, like that. And you see, when they got to the end of the Strand of course it opened up, like that, into Trafalgar Square. And still Trafalgar Square was packed. Well, we didn’t get back to the office, to our work, till about half past three, four. And, when I came to get my bus back in the evening, the people had been careering all round London on the buses. But nobody would go inside because they all wanted to go on top and cheer. I forget how many it was in the papers the next morning, fifty or sixty buses had all their railings broken, going up the stairs on the top.

For many, the moment of the armistice was a time to reflect on all the lives that had been lost during the war. Ruby Ord was serving in France with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

I think it was a bit of an anti-climax. Suddenly you thought about, you see, all the people you had known who were killed, etc. They were just in the war zone, and they could come home in your imagination. But the Armistice brought the realisation to you that they weren’t coming back, that it was the end. I think that it was not such a time of rejoicing as it might have been. You were glad the fighting was over and that not more men would be killed. But I do think it was dampened down very much, in France. I think they had all the enthusiasm probably in England, but I think we were too near reality to feel that way. I didn’t, certainly. I did not go out of camp on Armistice Day.

This remembrance seems the best to end on:

After the long years of hardship, suffering and loss, it was no surprise that the news the war had finally ended was received with such a mixture of emotions by those who were immediately affected by it. From shock and disbelief, to relief and jubilation, men and women around the world had their own reactions to the armistice. Basil Farrer served on the Western Front during the war. He was in Nottingham on 11 November 1918 but found he couldn’t join the cheering crowds in the city that day.

I remember Armistice Day and I didn’t know at the time but in every city, everybody went mad. In London, they were dancing in the streets, the crowds, in all the cities, in Paris and in Nottingham too. In Market Square, it was one mass of people dancing and singing. I did not go there. I do remember – for some reason or other – inexplicable, especially in so young a chap as myself, I felt sad. I did – I had a feeling of sadness. And I did remember all those chaps who’d never come back, because there was quite a lot, nearly a million – not quite a million. As a matter of fact, in Paris I remember the Prince of Wales inaugurating a plaque in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris to the million dead of Great Britain and the British Empire. And I did have a feeling of sadness that day.

Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing, Belgium.)

(Notre Dame de Lorette, also known as Ablain St.-Nazaire French Military Cemetery, France.)

(Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, France.)

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(Poppy on a Canadian grave.)

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Blowing Things Up
By Batocchio

Today is Memorial Day, which is meant for remembering those who died in military service. It’s also a good day to reflect on war in general.

Back in May 2017, John Quiggin of Crooked Timber made a good observation about Trump bombing Syria and the pundits this impressed. Quiggin:

Blowing things and people up is seen as a demonstration of clarity and resolve, unless someone is doing it to us, in which case it’s correctly recognised as cowardly and evil. The most striking recent example (on “our” side) was the instant and near-universal approval of Trump’s bombing of an airfield in Syria, which had no effect at all on events there.

Last month, Quiggin wrote a follow-up about “another round of bombing from Trump, and yet more instant applause.” These dynamics aren’t limited to Trump, of course; they have a long history in the U.S. and other nations.

Some wars may be necessary. Others definitely aren’t. In theory, every pundit or government official and most citizens should have heard the saying that “war is hell” and should know the truth behind it, thanks to schooling, listening to veterans, and all the good documentaries, feature films and books on the subject. Anyone who wants a war is an idiot or a scoundrel. Yet even when military action is pretty clearly a bad idea or at least pointless, some people who should know better will still cheer it. They’ll hail it as a sign of leadership or being decisive or tough or manly, while virtues like wisdom and careful thought are ignored if not vilified. (And many in this crowd will try to claim patriotism while they do it.) Surely one of the points of Memorial Day is that we shouldn’t add to the numbers of the dead unnecessarily. But our national political discourse, on matters of war as with most everything else, is too heavily influenced by idiots and scoundrels.

It makes sense for Memorial Day to be a day of reflection or getting together with friends. But maybe it can also spur some civil engagement later in the year, whether it’s working for veterans or food banks or some other worthy cause, such as registering people to vote and getting them to the polls. It’s relatively easy to blow something up, and generally both harder and more worthwhile to build and sustain something positive with others.

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I’ve had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?…

My parents taught me the value of history. Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn’t talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.
– WWII veteran E.B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge (1923–2001)

Casual Inhumanityby Batocchio

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a date picked because of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. This year, I wanted to look again at the work of Primo Levi and his great Holocaust memoir, If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo), typically known in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz. (A 2010 post featured Levi’s accounts of storytelling, human connection and the dread of an impending “selection” that might lead to execution.)
Chapter 10, “Chemical Examination,” ends with what is probably Levi’s most famous image, but it’s more powerful with greater context. (The book is short and well worth a read.) Some background for those who haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with life in the camps/Lagers: Levi, an Italian Jew, was a chemist, and explains that he was lucky (relatively) to be shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 when the Nazis decided to stop killing as many prisoners because they needed them for labor instead. “Kapos” were prisoners charged with overseeing the other prisoners, and were generally convicted criminals rather than political prisoners; they also tended to be cruel. At this point in the book, Levi has explained that the prisoners’ work is physically grueling, they’re fed far too little and live in horrible conditions. But a new assignment may be possible: certain prisoners will be interviewed to work as chemists’ assistants, which could significantly increase their chances of survival. The key figures in this chapter are Primo Levi, Doktor Pannwitz and Alex the Kapo.

Kommando 98, called the Chemical Kommando, should have been a squad of skilled workers.

The day on which its formation was officially announced a meagre group of fifteen Häftlinge [prisoners] gathered in the grey of dawn around the new Kapo in the roll-call square.

This was the first disillusion: he was a ‘green triangle’, a professional delinquent, the Arbeitsdienst [Reich labor service] had not thought it necessary for the Kapo of the Chemical Kommando to be a chemist. It was pointless wasting one’s breath asking him questions; he would not have replied, or else he would have replied with kicks and shouts. On the other hand, his not very robust appearance and his smaller than average stature were reassuring.

He made a short speech in the foul German of the barracks, and the disillusion was confirmed. So these were the chemists: well, he was Alex, and if they thought they were entering paradise, they were mistaken. In the first place, until the day production began, Kommando 98 would be no more than an ordinary transport-Kommando attached to the magnesium chloride warehouse. Secondly, if they imagined, being Intelligenten, intellectuals, that they could make a fool of him, Alex, a Reichsdeutscher, well, Herrgottsacrament, he would show them, he would… (and with his fist clenched and index finger extended he cut across the air with the menacing gesture of the Germans); and finally, they should not imagine that they would fool anyone, if they had applied for the position without any qualifications – an examination, yes gentlemen, in the very near future; a chemistry examination, before the triumvirate of the Polymerization Department: Doktor Hagen, Doktor Probst and Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz.

And with this, meine Herren, enough time had been lost, Kommandos 96 and 97 had already started, forward march, and to begin with, whosoever failed to walk in line and step would have to deal with him.

He was a Kapo like all the other Kapos.

Alex is established as a bully. Meanwhile, Levi and his fellows are anxious about the coming interview/examination. They’re all underfed and not at their best. And what if this exercise is nothing but false hope?

With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared craniums, with these shameful clothes, to take a chemical examination. And obviously it will be in German; and we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan doctor hoping that we do not have to blow our noses, because perhaps he will not know that we do not have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to him. And we will have our old comrade hunger with us, and we will hardly be able to stand still on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odour, to which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days, the odour of turnips and cabbages, raw, cooked and digested.

Exactly so, Clausner [a fellow prisoner] confirms. But have the Germans such great need of chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new machine ‘pour faire chier les Juifs? Are they aware of the grotesque and absurd test asked of us, of us who are no longer alive, of us who have already gone half-crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing?’

The examinations take place over three days. Levi’s is delayed, until finally (emphasis mine):

Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do with this man Alex? He plants his feet in front of me, he roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, he takes out my beret and slaps it on my head, then he steps backwards, eyes the result with a disgusted air, and turns his back, muttering: ‘Was für ein Muselmann Zugang.’ What a messy recruit! . . .

This time it really is my turn. Alex looks at me blackly on the doorstep; he feels himself in some way responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes me because I am Italian, because I am Jewish and because of all of us, I am the one furthest from his sergeants’ mess ideal of virility. By analogy, without understanding anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he shows a profound disbelief in my chances for the examination.

We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz; Alex, beret in hand, speaks to him in an undertone: ‘…an Italian, has been here only three months, already half kaputt… Er sagt er ist Chemiker…” But he, Alex, apparently has his reservations on the subject.

Alex is briefly dismissed and put aside, and I feel like Oedipus in front of the Sphinx. My ideas are clear, and I am aware even at this moment that the position at stake is important; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear, not to take the test.

Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair and nose as all Germans ought to have them, and sits formidably behind a complicated writing-table. I, Hafding 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched.

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.

One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: ‘This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.’ And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: ‘Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication possible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist…’

Levi does well; his knowledge and intellect have saved him – for the moment, at least – because a man who does not view him as fully human has judged that he can be useful. And then it is time to return to the barracks (emphasis mine):

Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down the stairs: he has leather shoes because he is not a Jew, he is as light on his feet as the devils of Malabolge. At the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk down hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous unpaired wooden shoes, clinging on to the rail like an old man.

It seems to have gone well, but I would be crazy to rely on it. I already know the Lager well enough to realize that one should never anticipate, especially optimistically. What is certain is that I have spent a day without working, so that tonight I will have a little less hunger, and this is a concrete advantage, not to be taken away.

To re-enter Bude, one has to cross a space cluttered up with piles of cross-beams and metal frames. The steel cable of a crane cuts across the road, and Alex catches hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have joined him. Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.

It’s a striking image, all the more so because it’s not intentionally, consciously cruel; Levi suffers this indignity because Alex is thoughtless and views Levi as a lesser being, obviously unworthy of basic respect, and thus can be treated like a disposable rag. It’s a gesture of casual inhumanity. And Alex, brute though he is, is not that different from the educated Pannwitz and his dehumanizing gaze. (Levi’s insights and reflections throughout the book make for memorable reading.)

Few injustices can compete with the Holocaust, but it’s always worth remembering that cruelty and dehumanization exist on a spectrum and manifest in different forms, with varying degrees of toxicity. Most fall far short of genocide or even legalized discrimination, but nonetheless should be questioned and challenged.

Sometimes these impulses erupt as angry demonization and obvious bigotry. Other times it’s as casual inhumanity. I’m reminded of the false belief that most poor people live in poverty because of a lack of moral character instead of misfortune. There’s the self-serving notion that I and others of my chosen political tribe deserve government services but those other people not like us that I don’t like are unworthy moochers. We’ve heard arguments that amount to: feeding children or providing them health care doesn’t directly benefit me, so not only should a miniscule amount of my taxes not pay for such programs, but no one should be able to call me selfish or monstrous. And an entire set of beliefs endures holding that, due to race, gender, sexual orientation or ancestry, certain other people are inherently lesser and not worthy of basic respect or even legal rights. A whole range of cruel, punishment-minded or harmfully indifferent mindsets exist. The good news is their corrosive power can be countered with a little reflection and compassion, by fine teaching, human connection and sharing good stories. “Never forget” is a wise adage applying to the past; in the present, maybe that best translates to “never stop listening and learning.”

The Battle of the Somme
by Batocchio

The eleventh of November is primarily known as Veterans Day in the United States, but it’s also known as Remembrance Day and Armistice Day. These holidays typically dovetail well, but Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the “Great War,” is the part I’ve been pondering most. Veterans Day honors military veterans, which is only right, but Armistice Day seems to ask us to reflect on war and peace.

Americans tend to remember the Second World War much better that the First, and the Second is far more heavily featured in American feature films, TV shows, books and documentaries. The U.S. entered the First World War fairly late, we weren’t directly involved in some of its most horrific events, plus the Second had more moral clarity; we can feel like the good guys. (Stud Terkel’s great oral history of that war is called “The Good War” in quotation marks because although many of the interviewees justifiably feel proud of their service, no war is truly “good.”) I do wish as a country we considered more aspects of the First World War, including the lessons of the Battle of the Somme, which started a little over one hundred and one years ago. As the BBC explains:

The Battle of the Somme, fought in northern France, was one of the bloodiest of World War One. For five months the British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front. The aims of the battle were to relieve the French Army fighting at Verdun and to weaken the German Army. However, the Allies were unable to break through German lines. In total, there were over one million dead and wounded on all sides.

The battle is much more strongly etched into British memories because its start on July 1st, 1916, entailed the highest single-day death count of British soldiers in history. British decisions were criticized at the time (by Winston Churchill, among others) and are still discussed. The British had initiated a massive military recruitment effort, led by Secretary of State of War Lord Kitchener, but because of British losses, the “Kitchener divisions” were rushed to battle with relatively little training and often short on equipment. For the Battle of the Somme, the British plan was basically for artillery to destroy German barbed wire so that British soldiers could advance from their trenches to take over the German ones. British military historian John Keegan sets the scene in his 1976 book, The Face of Battle:

French small-unit tactics, perfected painfully over two years of warfare, laid emphasis on the advance of small groups by rushes, one meanwhile supporting another by fire – the sort of tactics which were to become commonplace in the Second World War. This sophistication of traditional ‘fire and movement’ was known to the British but was thought by the staff to be too difficult to be taught to the Kitchener divisions. They may well have been right. But the alternative tactical order they laid down for them was over-simplified: divisions were to attack on front of about a mile, generally with two brigades ‘up’ and one in reserve. What this meant, in terms of soldiers on the ground, was that two battalions each of a thousand men, forming the leading wave of the brigade, would leave their front trenches, using scaling-ladders to climb the parapet, extend their soldiers in four lines, a company to each, the men two to three yards apart, the lines about fifty to a hundred yards behind each other, and advance to the German wire. This they would expect to find flat, or at least widely gapped, and, passing through, they would then jump down into the German trenches, shoot, bomb or bayonet any who opposed them, and take possession. Later the reserve waves would pass through and advance to capture the German second position by similar methods.

The manoeuvre was to be done slowly and deliberately, for the men were to be laden with about sixty pounds of equipment, their re-supply with food and ammunition during the battle being one of the thing the staff could not guarantee. In the circumstances, it did indeed seem that success would depend upon what the artillery could do for the infantry, both before the advance and once it was under way.
p. 230 (1988 edition)

If there’s an image associated with the First World War, it’s trench warfare. If there’s a specific weapon, it might be mustard gas, but more likely the machine gun, used on a greater scale than ever before. As Keegan explains:

The machine-gun was to be described by Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the great enragés of military theory produced by the war, as ‘concentrated essence of infantry,’ by which he meant his readers to grasp that its invention put into the hands of one man the fire-power formerly wielded by forty. Given that a good rifleman could fire only fifteen shots a minute, to a machine-gunner’s 600, the point is well made. But, as Fuller would have no doubt conceded if taxed, a machine-gun team did not simply represent the equivalent of so many infantrymen compressed into a small compass. Infantrymen, however well-trained and well-armed, however resolute, however ready to kill, remain erratic agents of death. Unless centrally directed, they will choose, perhaps badly, their own targets, will open and cease fire individually, will be put off their aim by the enemy’s return of fire, will be distracted by wounding of those near them, will yield to excitement, will fire high, low or wide. It was to overcome influences and tendencies of this sort – as well as to avert the danger of accident in closely packed ranks – that seventeeth- and eighteenth-century armies had put such effort into perfecting volley by square, line and column. . . .

The machine-gunner is best thought of, in short, as a sort of machine-minder, whose principal task was to feed ammunition belt into the breech, something which could be done while the gun was in full operation, top up the fluid in the cooling jacket, and traverse the gun from left to right and back again within the limits set by its firing platform. Traversing was achieved by a technique known, in the British Army, as the ‘two inch tap’: by constant practice, the machine-gunner learned to hit the side of the breech with the palm of his hand just hard enough to move the muzzle exactly two inches against the resistance of the traversing screw. A succession of ‘two-inch taps’ first on one side of the breech until the stop was reached, then on the other, would keep in the air a stream of bullets so dense that no one could walk upright across the front of the machine-gunner’s position without being hit – given, of course, that the gunner had set his machine to fire low and that the ground as devoid of cover. The appearance of the machine-gun, therefore, had not so much disciplined the act of killing – which was what seventeenth-century drill had done – as mechanized or industrialized it.
pp. 232–234

On the first day of battle, July 1st, 1916, the British artillery started its job, and the British soldiers, many of them relatively untrained, advanced:

Most soldiers were encountering heavy fire within seconds of leaving the trenches. The 10th West Yorks, attacking towards the ruined village of Fricourt in the little valley of the River Ancre, had its two follow-up companies caught in the open by German machine-gunners who emerged from their dug-outs after the leading waves has passed over the top and onward. They were ‘practically annihilated and lay shot down in waves’. In the neighbouring 34th Division, the 5th and 16th Royal Scots, two Edinburgh Pals’ Battalions contained a high proportion of Mancunians, were caught in flank by machine-gun firing from the ruins of La Boiselle and lost several hundred men in a few minutes, thought the survivors marched on to enter German lines. Their neighbouring battalions, the 10th Lincolns and 11th Suffolks (the Grimsby Chums and the Cambridge Battalion) were caught by the same flanking fire; of those who pressed on to the German trenches, some, to quote the official history ‘were burnt to death by flame throwers as [they] reached the [German] parapet’; others were caught again by machine-gun fire as they entered the German position. An artillery officer who walked across later came on ‘line after line of dead men lying where they had fallen’. Behind the Edinburghs, the four Tyneside Irish battalions of the 103rd Brigade underwent a bizarre and pointless massacre. The 34th Division’s commander had decided to move all twelve of his battalions simultaneously towards the German front, the 101st and 102nd Brigades from the front trench, the 103rd from the support line (called the Tara-Usna Line, in a little re-entrant know to the brigade as the Avoca Valley – all three names allusions to Irish beauty spots celebrated by Yeats and the Irish literary nationalists). This decision gave the last brigade a mile of open ground to cover before it reached its own front line, a safe enough passage if the enemy’s machine-guns had been extinguished, otherwise a funeral march. A sergeant of the 3rd Tyneside Irish (26th Northumberland Fusiliers) describes how it was: ‘I could see, away to my left and right, long lines of men. Then I heard the “patter, patter” of machine-guns in the distance. By the time I’d gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.’ Not all went down so soon. A few heroic souls pressed on to the British front line, crossed no-man’s-land and entered the German trenches. But the brigade was destroyed; one of its battalions had lost over 600 men killed or wounded, another, 500; the brigadier and two battalions commanders had been hit, a third lay dead. Militarily, the advance had achieved nothing. Most of the bodies lay on the territory British before the battle had begun.
pp. 248–249

As for the overall results:

The first day of the Somme had not been a complete military failure. But it had been a human tragedy. The Germans, with about sixty battalions on the British Somme front, though about forty in the line, say about 35,000 soldiers, had had killed or wounded 6,000. Bad enough; but it was in the enormous disparity between their losses and the British that the weight of the tragedy lies: the German 180th Regiment lost 280 men on 1 July out of about 3,000; attacking it, the British had lost 5,121 out of 12,000. In all the British had lost about 60,000, of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes. ‘The trenches,’ wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, ‘were the concentration camps of the First World War’; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of 1 July, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered across their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same range of emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz – guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger – and not just from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalion failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers. Anger is the response which the story of the Somme most commonly evokes among professionals. Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? Why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death?
pp. 259–260

It’s a striking account of senseless, unnecessary death. (It’s stuck with me since I first read it ages ago.) The battle grew to be criticized, but it took a while for the public to get a fuller picture. The newpaper Times of London, published by Lord Northcliffe, consistently painted a rosy view of the British soldier’s life. As Paul Fussell recounts in The Great War and Modern Memory:

It is no surprise to find Northcliffe’s Times on July 3, 1916, reporting the first day’s attack on the Somme with an airy confidence which could not help but deepen the division between those on the spot and those at home, “[Commander] Sir Douglas Haig telephoned last night,” says the Times, “that the general situation was favorable,” and the account goes on to speak of “effective progress,” nay, “substantial progress.” It soon ascends to the rhetoric of heroic romance: “There is a fair field and no favor, and [at the Somme] we have elected to fight out our quarrel with the Germans and to give them as much battle as they want.” In short, “everything has gone well”; “we got our first thrust well home, and there is every reason to be sanguine as to the result.” No wonder communication failed between the troops and those who could credit prose like that as factual testimony.
p. 106 (in the Illustrated Edition)

Fussell presents another familiar story – a government that doesn’t want the public to know what happened in a war (and at least one media outlet happy to play along). Some Americans might be reminded of U.S. government efforts to suppress the news about the Vietnam War and Walter Cronkite’s 1968 public commentary that the war was a stalemate and the U.S should negotiate an end. But similar dynamics play out with many wars.

It makes perfect sense that the Battle of the Somme remains a more powerful event for the British than for Americans, or even the French or Germans; it’s one of many events that shape my personal thoughts on Armistice Day, but that mix will be different for everyone. But if contemplating Armistice Day entails any lessons, for me they’re fairly straightforward: some wars may be necessary. Others definitely aren’t. The same goes for battles; military history is full of disastrous decisions. If you must go to war, prepare well. Going to war should require a high threshold; it shouldn’t be done capriciously. Distrust anyone who wants to go to war. Challenge anyone who tries bully others to go to war and attacks their patriotism or lies or offers frequently shifting rationales. Discuss matters of war and peace honestly and openly as a democracy. Obtain as much accurate information as possible and question suspect accounts (and certainly challenge outright propaganda). Treat veterans well, especially when it comes to physical and mental health. Listen to their stories. Remember that the best way to support current military personnel is to avoid sending them into an unnecessary war or sending them into a pointless battle or poorly preparing them. Challenge anyone who tries to pretend that either skepticism about going to war or questioning a specific war-related decision shows a lack of “support for the troops.” Resist authoritarian bullying.

In our current day, it’s worth remembering that although some veterans go on to become fine public servants, others become political hacks. Generals may serve as wise counsel for presidents, or may agitate for nuclear war, as Curtis LeMay did to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As political figures, generals may act as a sobering influences, but they can also be authoritarian bullies who lie and slander for attempted political gain, and misunderstand or disdain democracy. They have a voice, but undue deference to them can be dangerous.

Thanks to all who has served on this Veterans Day. As for Remembrance Day and Armistice Day, in 1959, Pogo creator Walt Kelly wrote:

The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special. Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart. Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name “Armistice Day.” Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.

Not Silent Bystanders
by Batocchio

It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day (one of several such memorial days worldwide). Last year, I quoted a piece about remembering by Holocaust survivor Gene Klein. He wrote a timely piece about intervention last November that I wanted to feature this year:

In the time preceding our deportation from our home in Hungary, my family experienced many acts of anti-Semitism. A brick was thrown through our living room window. A man spoke at an assembly at my school, shouting that the Jews were responsible for all of the country’s troubles. My sister’s high school prom was ruined by a group of local hooligans who burst in shouting anti-Semitic slogans. The street became a gauntlet of threats and taunts.

All of our assailants felt empowered by the Nazi party influence in Hungary, but none of these actions were officially sanctioned by the government. They were the result of people inspired by racial rhetoric to take matters into their own hands.

I am reminded of these affronts to my family’s freedom and safety as I read the news about the dramatic increase in racial hate crimes since the election (as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups). Some people now feel empowered to insult immigrants, African Americans and Muslims the way people in our town felt empowered to say hateful things to us. It felt terrible to be the target of such hatred, having done nothing to bring it about. And most of all, it felt incredibly lonely. The abuse that we experienced before we were deported took place in public, often in front of many onlookers. The failure of others to intervene—those who watched silently and then carried on with the business of their day—was socially isolating, and their silence dramatically increased our sense of fear and vulnerability.

It is critical in today’s climate that we not be silent bystanders who simply witness the victimization of others. Social psychologists have studied for decades the circumstances under which people will intervene when others need help. They find that three factors are critical. First, when we feel empathy for the victim, we are more likely to help. Second, when we feel that we have the ability to help, we will feel more confident about stepping in. And third, when we recognize that it is our responsibility to help, we are more likely to do so. When there are many onlookers, this responsibility can be diffused in a crowd: everyone thinks that someone else will help, and so no one does, and since no one is helping, it seems like the appropriate thing to do is just to watch or walk by.

What this means for all of us is that if we witness someone who is abused because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation, there are three things we can do:

1. Feel their pain. Imagine what it would feel like to be in their place. Even if you see that person as very different from you, we can all remember—or at least imagine—what it is like to be threatened, shouted at, or physically harmed. Act as if the victim is a family member or a close friend.

2. Feel confident, because it is not that hard to help. All you need is a few kind words for the victim. Simply walking up to the target of the attack and asking if he or she is okay can mean the world to that person, and this will likely encourage others to follow your example. Research on bystander intervention tells us that once one person helps, others follow. That first courageous helper sets the tone, makes clear that intervention is called for, and leads the way for others to join.

3. Recognize your responsibility. If you think that you can remain quiet because others will step up, the victim is likely to go unaided. Imagine you are the only witness—that unless you help, you are condemning someone else to suffer.

Klein provides a vivid example of this:

When my two sisters and my mother were in a concentration camp, they were marched through a German town every evening on their way to work the night shift in a munitions factory. They were often taunted by people on the street. Children would stick out their tongues. Passing soldiers would curse at them. On one occasion, Hitler youth wearing neatly pressed uniforms and ugly smiles shouted at them, and the women were surprised when an elderly German man shouted back at their persecutors: “Don’t laugh at them! There is nothing for them to be ashamed of. It is not their shame; it is our shame!” The boys stopped and stared at the old man, uncertain of what to do next, then straggled off. My sisters always remembered that German gentleman who stood out in contrast to the malice all around them.

My hope is that if a woman is yelled at today on the street of your hometown for wearing a headscarf, she will find herself surrounded by others defending her right to dress as she pleases, and the perpetrator will stand alone, shamed. I hope that if you see an immigrant being told to go back to where he came from, you will stand with him in support of his right to be here. We must all be ready, always, to demonstrate what this country truly stands for.

I normally avoid getting too topical with Holocaust posts, but the relevance of these issues is unavoidable. The sobering reality is that ugly incidents are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. As Klein notes, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations have been tracking an increase in hate crimes. And the national news continues to be troubling.

Consider: President Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd (size insecurity) and then had two surrogates aggressively attack the press for fact-checking his obvious lie. Trump compared the CIA to Nazis and then blamed the media for depicting a “feud with the intelligence community” by Trump. These are bullying, authoritarian moves, amounting to ‘suck up to me, agreed with my lies or I’ll hurt you.’ Candidate Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, lied about seeing thousands of American Muslims cheer the 9/11 attacks and has otherwise lied to incite racial tensions and violence (as Josh Marshall points out, “authoritarian figures require violence and disorder”). Candidate Trump repeatedly referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and has vowed to go ahead with his crazy plan to build an expensive wall on the Mexican border. He’s ordered that a weekly list of crimes by undocumented workers be published, which is sure to stoke further racial tensions. Trump has claimed, without a shred of proof, that 3 to 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, has cited bizarre, illogical reasons for believing this and has announced he will investigate voter fraud, which is likely laying the groundwork for further conservative voter suppression efforts. Trump claims that he’ll defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo on the issue of torture (officially, they don’t endorse it), but he’s a strong proponent of it, even though a mountain of evidence shows that torture is notoriously unreliable for producing accurate intelligence. This means Trump has accused Americans of being Nazis… while endorsing torture techniques used by the Nazis (among others). In terms of lessons learned from World War II and the Holocaust, so far Trump has shown he’s learned all the wrong stuff. And Trump has only been president for a week. Things can get much, much worse.

Hatred and fear certainly don’t need to reach the level of genocide to destroy a country, and many lives before that. We know how these stories can go. The United States has plenty of ugly history but also some great accomplishments. Right now, we’re seeing shades of the same spiteful, hateful and fearful spirit that displaced and killed Native Americans, enslaved black people, held lynchings as public entertainment and perpetuated Jim Crow laws. We don’t need to and dare not wait for those impulses to grow further to oppose them. Luckily, we’re also seeing some of the same spirit that moved abolitionists, suffragettes and freedom riders and we can’t encourage or support those impulses enough. As Klein says, we can “demonstrate what this country truly stands for.” We don’t need to be silent bystanders. The lessons to be learned from World War II and the Holocaust are many, but they include: The nation that held the Nazis accountable to the rule of law at Nuremberg should not throw away those principles every time some insecure bully with a megaphone shits his pants. Bigotry must be challenged. And we can empathize, intervene and support one another.

Of Kings and Presidents
by Batocchio

Recently, civil rights icon John Lewis criticized Donald Trump, saying he wouldn’t be a “legitimate president,” and Trump, true to form, issued a factually challenged attack on Lewis for being “All talk, talk, talk – no action.” For added irony, this occurred just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Lewis of course actually marched with King and was severely beaten in the course of fighting for voting rights. Meanwhile, Trump was elected in the first presidential election after John Roberts and other conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Lewis helped secure. Voting rights continue to be under attack and there’s plenty of bad faith evident from conservatives and Republicans on the subject. Given MLK Day and Trump’s looming inauguration, I found myself pondering these issues and some words by King.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.” (1955)

“No justice, no peace” is the rally version of this one. I’ve seen many pieces, often with a scolding tone, arguing how everyone who didn’t vote for Trump should try to understand and sympathize with Trump voters, who are typified as white, working class and economically anxious (the working class part isn’t entirely true). I’ve seen much less discussion of the economic anxieties of folks who aren’t white and why their concerns matter less, or conversations about Trump’s horribly plutocratic policies, a standard conservative/Republican approach that will not help anyone but the rich. (Republicans keep invoking the middle class and running against the predictable consequences of their own economic policies and then offer as their solution more extreme versions of the same.) Nor have I seen anyone who’s complained about how mean liberals are to conservatives address the issue of Trump proposing to discriminate against Muslims (which was a planned statement, not one of his many crazy, off-the-cuff remarks). That wasn’t a deal-breaker for Trump voters, and I’ve yet to hear from those complaining about social discomfort whether they approve of the loss of actual rights for a minority group or just don’t consider it that big an issue. (The two concerns aren’t equivalent.) We’re not hearing honest and in-depth discussion of any of this stuff, and that prevents any kind of meaningful reconciliation. True peace can’t be achieved through capitulating on essential rights or accepting a rigged system of justice and prosperity.

“The time is always right to do something right.” (1964)

This one serves as a gut-check. It’s not always hard to tell right from wrong; the kicker is whether we’re willing to deal with the hassle. King championed some causes that were unpopular in his time and many still are – voting rights, racial equality, aid for the poor and opposition to war, to name a few. Activism isn’t easy or quick or glamourous, nor is there any guarantee of success. All that work may never pay off in the material world, at least not in one’s lifetime. And sometimes even when that work succeeds, it may be undone later and the same struggle will need to be refought.

“If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” (Often attributed to King, although I haven’t been able to verify a source.)

It’s easy to look at the current political climate and the year to come with dread, or feel overwhelmed by all the battles to come. It’s easy to get burnt out as an activist. I like this line because it makes those challenges a bit more manageable. No one has the energy to fight every struggle. Realistically, with all three branches of government in Republican control, the destructive ideology of movement conservatism and the level of conscience demonstrated by elected officials and political operatives, plenty of good policies are likely to be shredded and many bad measures will be enacted. It may be possible to block some of them. But it’ll be important to call out wrongdoing, go on record and bring that up in future battles, especially elections. And although it may be possible to win over some of the people who voted for Obama and then Trump, it would be wise to register many new voters, motivate registered nonvoters and fight to make sure that more people who want to vote actually can do so. The long game for a healthy democracy depends a great deal on small things.

Forgiveness, Compassion and Generosity
By Batocchio

Some thoughts for Armistice Day (or Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day).

How does one deal with a tragedy? Or a great injustice? Or persistent unfairness for years? How does one face violence, or conflict or hatred?

One of the most striking stories I’ve encountered this year is that of Terri Roberts and her Amish neighbors. Both The Washington Post and StoryCorps did excellent pieces about them. From The Post:

The simple, quiet rural life [Terri Roberts] knew shattered on Oct. 2, 2006, when her oldest son, Charles Carl Roberts IV, walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse on a clear, unseasonably warm Monday morning. The 32-year-old husband and father of three young children ordered the boys and adults to leave, tied up 10 little girls between the ages of 6 and 13 and shot them, killing five and injuring the others, before killing himself.

Terri Roberts’s husband thought they’d have to move far away. He knew what people thought of parents of mass murderers. He believed they would be ostracized in their community, blamed for not knowing the evil their child was capable of.

But in the hours after the massacre, as Amish parents still waited in a nearby barn for word about whether their daughters had survived, an Amish man named Henry arrived at the Robertses’ home with a message: The families did not see the couple as an enemy. Rather, they saw them as parents who were grieving the loss of their child, too. Henry put his hand on the shoulder of Terri Roberts’s husband and called him a friend.

The world watched in amazement as, on the day of their son’s funeral, nearly 30 Amish men and women, some the parents of the victims, came to the cemetery and formed a wall to block out media cameras. Parents, whose daughters had died at the hand of their son, approached the couple after the burial and offered condolences for their loss.

Then, just four weeks after the shooting, the couple was invited to meet with all the families in a local fire hall. One mother held Roberts’s gaze as both women’s eyes blurred with tears, she said. They were all grieving; they were all struggling to make sense of the senseless.

Steven Nolt, a professor of Amish studies at Elizabethtown College, said that for most people, forgiveness and acceptance come at the end of a long emotional process. But the Amish forgive first and then every day work through the emotions of it. This “decisional forgiveness” opened a space for Roberts to offer her friendship, which normally in their situation would be uncomfortable, he said.

But the Amish did more than forgive the couple. They embraced them as part of their community. When Roberts underwent treatment for Stage 4 breast cancer in December, one of the girls who survived the massacre helped clean her home before she returned from the hospital. A large yellow bus arrived at her home around Christmas, and Amish children piled inside to sing her Christmas carols.

“The forgiveness is there; there’s no doubt they forgive,” Roberts said.

The relationship hasn’t been one-sided; Terri Roberts began to spend time taking care of Rosanna, the most severely wounded survivor of her son’s attack:

Several months later, Roberts had all the women back to her home for a tea — a gathering that’s now become an annual tradition. As she played again with Rosanna, she asked the girl’s mother if she might help care for her. In the intervening years, Roberts spent nearly every Thursday evening at the King family’s farm, bathing, reading and attending to Rosanna until her bedtime. After the first couple of visits, Roberts said, she would cry uncontrollably the entire drive home, overwhelmed by the reality that this little girl was severely handicapped because of her son.

This has been a rough path for all involved:

For [Rosanna’s father, Christ] King, forgiveness has not come easy. Some parents have mourned the death of their daughters. Others have seen their daughters fully heal. His daughter survived, but he also lost her. Every day, he fights back his anger. Every day, he has to forgive again.

Sitting in a folding chair, with Rosanna’s hospital bed in view behind him, King speaks slowly, methodically, measuring each word. There are joy-filled moments with their daughter, like when she seems to perk up when he comes in from work. But then there are days when she has seizures or she’s up in the night and can’t be comforted.

“I’ve always said and continue to say we have a lot of hard work to be what the people brag about us to be,” he said.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d be capable of that level of forgiveness – some people might call it emotional maturity or spiritual maturity or perhaps grace – but I admire the people who are capable, who work to achieve it and practice it.

I generally think that true forgiveness is impossible – or at least undeserved – unless the offending party regrets the offense. I also don’t believe in enabling or excusing destructive, abusive behavior. I definitely don’t believe true forgiveness can be commanded or cajoled, and that it’s obnoxious to try. Some people prefer the framing, “Forgive but not forget,” but it’s really just a semantic difference from “not forgiving or condoning, but not stewing on things to a self-destructive degree, either.” (Although in some cases such stewing may be perfectly understandable.)

I’m still in partial shock from this week’s events. Donald Trump explicitly ran on bigotry and spite, was judged unqualified and temperamentally unfit for office by significant portions of the population, yet still was narrowly elected. There’s plenty of analysis left to be done. But hate crimes over the past days reveal the escalation of a disturbing trend this year. I fear we’re entering an era threatening the ascent of gleeful bullying, shameless hatred, cruel and reckless policies at home and belligerence abroad. It won’t matter if people are wrong or even know they’re wrong, because they’ll have the power to enforce their will, and they’re eager to use it. I hope I’m incorrect. I fear we already possess plenty of evidence (and too many people forget the Bush years and older history), but the coming months and years will provide plenty of opportunities for the Republican Party and conservatives to show their true character.

(Perhaps the worst won’t happen – and we can hope for that – but if there’s one thing our most recent election shows, it’s that it’s folly to count on a decent outcome and that things can always get worse.)

So how can one respond?

One way is with strength and resolve. In a political context, or maybe just a personal one, civil disobedience is nonviolent, but it is not passive. It is often confrontational – not aggressive, but steadfast. Conscientious dissent is crucial, especially against bullies.

Another way is with compassion and generosity. I can’t pretend I’ll reach the level of forgiveness Roberts and King have achieved in the story above. But I can make an increased effort to be kind to others, especially the most vulnerable, most especially those targeted and scapegoated by Trump and his supporters. People make worse decisions when they’re scared. Every generous deed and act of connection helps ameliorate the effects of hatred and just might diminish the hatred itself a bit. (I’m also reminded of a story told by Arun Manilal Gandhi about his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi, winning over with sheer kindness a white South African who had supported apartheid.)

I’ve seen some memes and personal offers of aid this week that give me hope. Several schools have posted some version of this:

Dear undocumented students, in this classroom, there are no walls.

Dear black students, in this classroom, your life matters.

Dear Mexican students, you are not rapists or drug dealers.

Dear female students, men cannot grab you.

Dear Muslim students, you are not terrorists.

I’ve also seen this one:

If you wear a hijab, I’ll sit with you on the train.

If you’re trans, I’ll go to the bathroom with you.

If you’re a person of color, I’ll stand with you if the cops stop you.

If you’re a person with disabilities, I’ll hand you my megaphone.

If you’re an immigrant, I’ll help you find resources..

If you’re a survivor, I’ll believe you.

If you’re a refugee, I’ll make sure you’re welcome.

If you’re a veteran, I’ll take up your fight.

If you’re LGBTQ, I won’t let anyone tell you you’re broken.

If you’re a woman, I’ll make sure you get home ok.

If you’re tired, me too.

If you need a hug, I’ve got an infinite supply.

If you need me, I’ll be with you. All I ask is that you be with me, too.

These might seem a bit hokey, but not to someone in genuine need. Facing discouragement is often draining, and confronting actual hatred all the more so. It’s easy to get burnt out as an activist, and finding a way to recuperate and support each other is important. Jared Bernstein has characterized conservatism as YOLO, “You’re on your own,” whereas liberalism is WITT, “We’re in this together.” This week, I’ve seen many people genuinely upset, or scared or grieving – and occasionally some nasty taunting in response – but also plenty of compassion, kindness and support. I’ll be making my annual food bank donation soon, and I’m reflecting on what else to do in the months ahead. Developing a long-term political strategy is crucial, and specific, concrete activism is as well, but another key way to face down inhumanity and make America better is simply to be better to one another.

(I normally focus more on war on 11/11, but violence certainly isn’t limited to war. My most relevant related posts are probably 2011’s “They Could Not Look Me in the Eye Again” and 2009’s “War and the Denial of Loss.” )

Spite
by Batocchio

Donald Trump is a bully and a bullshitter. His fans love him for the first part and don’t recognize or don’t care about the second. They love him because he hates the people they hate and vows to inflict pain on those other people, who aren’t real Americans or full citizens in one way or another, due to their skin color, national origin, religion, gender, sexuality, or just beliefs slightly more moderate than those of the conservative base. In one sense, Trump’s nothing new in conservative and Republican politics – like many before him over the past 50-some years, he stands for bigotry and plutocracy – but he’s made the past subtext more explicit and harder to deny. In this election, Trump and his supporters have given an increased, starring role to spite.

Republican hopefuls Scott Walker and Chris Christie also sold themselves as bullies, but Walker’s working style is stealth to achieve right-wing aims without providing the reassuring hatred of angry speeches for the base. Christie, although unquestionably a bully, was damaged by the bridge closure scandal and couldn’t compete with the appeal of Trump’s explicit bigotry. Ted Cruz, although undoubtedly right-wing and favored by some religious conservatives, was extremely disliked by others on the right. Ben Carson was both right-wing and clueless enough for the gig, but his somnambulist, soporific style didn’t really fire up the base. Carly Fiorina showed she could be vicious, but not in the league of Trump. John Kasich’s actual positions are pretty right-wing, but during the primaries, he chose to portray himself as reasonable, practical and comparatively moderate, which contrasted him with Trump, but didn’t win over a majority of Republican primary voters in most states. Sure, all the 16-some candidates could be counted on to preach “small government” and push for even more tax cuts to the rich (the chief goal of the Republican establishment), and most were game to throw in some racist dog-whistles per usual, but they couldn’t match Trump’s belligerence, nastiness and complete lack of shame. Trump knew what the conservative base wanted, and was determined that he would be the last, biggest asshole standing.

Trump lies much, much more often than Clinton, and over five days, “averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks.” Using Harry Frankfurt’s definition, Trump is a bullshitter more than a liar, because he simply doesn’t care if what he says is true or not. Unfortunately, many of his supporters are unconcerned, too – as The Washington Post reported in June:

Many of Trump’s fans don’t actually think he will build a wall — and they don’t care if he doesn’t.

Many also don’t think that Trump as president would really ban foreign Muslims from entering the country, seize oil controlled by terrorists or deport 11 million illegal immigrants. They view Trump’s pledges more as malleable symbols than concrete promises, reflecting a willingness to shake things up and to be bold. . . .

Perhaps more than any other presidential candidate in history, Trump has mastered the art of putting forth a platform that is so vague — and so outlandish — that supporters can believe what they want to believe about his plans, even when it comes to something such as a concrete wall on the southern border.

They also don’t care about his many scandals, or that he’s a horrible businessman who screws over nearly everyone who works for or with him. Nor do they care that he’d cut taxes for the wealthy and explode the national deficit and debt. (To be fair, the tax cuts for the rich are Trump’s main appeal for the Paul Ryan crowd, but they wouldn’t help most Americans, including most Republican voters.) Alas, political coverage spends little time on actual candidate policy positions, a dynamic that has helped out Trump tremendously – he gives few specifics about his policies, but as he himself has pointed out, his voters don’t really care. His standard approach is to bluff and bullshit his way through any question – bragging that he’s great, he knows everybody, he’ll hire the best people; his opponents are awful, idiots, the worst ever. This approach works well enough for short interviews, especially with friendly or nonconfrontational outlets, but exposes him as an ignoramus when a more in-depth answer is required or follow-up questions are allowed, as in the three presidential debates (although the moderators still could have spent more time on policy). Whatever one thinks of Hillary Clinton’s policies, she actually has some – policy papers on her website amounting to 112,735 words compared to just over 9,000 for Trump’s site. For that matter, other Republican candidates offered more substantial policies than Trump, too, that conservatives might like more than Clinton’s – but Trump’s appeal is mostly image and little substance, all swagger, viciousness, a game of dominance.

Lying isn’t new to politics, even if the depth and breadth of it from Trump is significant. (Although let’s not forget the 917 falsehoods from Romney that Steve Benen documented, especially as some folks are pining for Romney as so much better than Trump – he was, but when judged fairly, still awful.) The lying is a serious problem, but even more troubling is that conservative political figures don’t stop telling specific lies after being directly called on it. This disdain for fact-checking and truth didn’t start with Trump. Back in 2008, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin kept claiming “I told Congress thanks but no thanks to that Bridge to Nowhere” even after fact-checkers had shown it wasn’t true and their work was widely reported. In 2009, Palin, Betsy McCaughey and other conservatives were hawking lies about the Affordable Care Act creating “death panels,” a falsehood that was debunked, but they keep on saying it. In 2015, during the Republican primary debates, Carly Fiorina told a despicable falsehood about a supposed undercover video of Planned Parenthood: “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ ” Fiorina was referring to fake footage, and was fact-checked on her statements, but when directly pressed on the issue, she insisted on repeating what by then she had to know was a lie, and a monstrous lie at that – one that demonized her political opponents for political gain. Fiorina simply didn’t give a damn, effectively saying “screw you” to the press and anyone who cared about the truth. She knew how the lie would play with the conservative base; its members would take her statements as further proof that the people they already hated were monsters. These dynamics also describe what Rush Limbaugh has been doing since his career started in the 80s – some of his listeners will even admit he exaggerates, but don’t much care. As I’ve written before, Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck and their ilk “aren’t selling facts, they’re selling grievance, cultural solidarity, an emotional truth, and the Two-Minutes Hate. Right-wing audiences simply do not care if their leaders are corrupt, incompetent and lie to their faces – as long as they get their scapegoat.” (Tom Sullivan and others have made similar observations.) Lying on this level, especially from a politician running for national office, is a power play, authoritarian and antidemocratic – it says, essentially, I can tell bald-faced, horrible lies and you can even call me on it and it still won’t matter, because it’ll fire up the base and win me votes and give me power – and then we’ll see what you say about me, huh?

This brings us to Trump himself and his good pal and campaign surrogate, Rudy Giuliani. More than any other figures in this election, they’ve adopted the belligerent smear as a key campaign tool, and tried to bully any critics into silence. Trump has threatened to make it easier for him to sue reporters, revoked the credentials of The Washington Post because he didn’t like their (accurate) coverage and has encouraged his crowds to boo the media. (His supporters issued death threats against a reporter who tweeted about the atmosphere of hatred at a Trump rally. That proved him right, but their driving impulse isn’t persuasion – it’s intimidation.)

Bigotry and spite has been central to Trump’s campaign from the beginning (and let’s not forget his earlier racist birther bullshit). When Trump announced his run for president on 6/16/15, he attacked undocumented Mexican workers by saying, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In late November 2015, he repeatedly claimed that “thousands” of Muslims and Arabs in New Jersey cheered during the 9/11 attacks when the Twin Towers fell, but such cheering never happened. On 12/7/16, he announced that “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” (One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to know that’s unconstitutional, but I’d add it’s clearly immoral – we know how discriminating against a group based on their religion can go, and it’s not just ugly, it can be deadly.) In June 2016, he claimed that American Muslims knew who potential terrorists were but weren’t turning them in. (Muslims aren’t real, full Americans, you see, and can’t be trusted.) In July 2016, Trump pulled something similar. I’ll quote Josh Marshall at length, who wrote (his emphasis):

Trump claimed that people – “some people” – called for a moment of silence for mass killer Micah Johnson, the now deceased mass shooter who killed five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night. There is no evidence this ever happened. Searches of the web and social media showed no evidence. Even Trump’s campaign co-chair said today that he can’t come up with any evidence that it happened. As in the case of the celebrations over the fall of the twin towers, even to say there’s ‘no evidence’ understates the matter. This didn’t happen. Trump made it up.

The language is important: “When somebody called for a moment of silence to this maniac that shot the five police, you just see what’s going on. It’s a very, very sad situation.”

Then later at the Indiana rally: “The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage. Marches all over the United States—and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”

A would-be strong man, an authoritarian personality, isn’t just against disorder and violence. They need disorder and violence. That is their raison d’etre, it is the problem that they are purportedly there to solve. The point bears repeating: authoritarian figures require violence and disorder. Look at the language. “11 cities potentially in a blow up stage” .. “Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!” … “And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer.”

At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, if you translate the German, the febrile and agitated language of ‘hatred’, ‘anger’, ‘maniac’ … this is the kind of florid and incendiary language Adolf Hitler used in many of his speeches. Note too the actual progression of what Trump said: “Marches all over the United States – and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!” (emphasis added).

The clear import of this fusillade of words is that the country is awash in militant protests that were inspired by Micah Johnson. “Started by …”

We’re used to so much nonsense and so many combustible tirades from Trump that we become partly inured to them. We also don’t slow down and look at precisely what he’s saying. What he’s saying here is that millions of African-Americans are on the streets inspired by and protesting on behalf of a mass murderer of white cops.

This is not simply false. It is the kind of wild racist incitement that puts whole societies in danger. And this man wants to be president. . . .

These are the words – the big lies rumbling the ground for some sort of apocalyptic race war – of a dangerous authoritarian personality who is either personally deeply imbued with racist rage or cynically uses that animus and race hatred to achieve political ends. In either case, they are the words of a deeply dangerous individual the likes of whom has seldom been so close to achieving executive power in America.

As for Giuliani, who’s always been an authoritarian, he claimed in early July that he had softened Trump somewhat on the “ban on Muslims,” but by the end of the month, “said he would be in favor of forcing Muslims on the federal government’s terrorism watch list to wear electronic monitoring tags or bracelets for authorities to track their whereabouts.” In mid-July, Giuliani gave a screaming speech at the Republican National Convention (video here). As he has at past conventions, Giuliani trotted out his beloved ‘the Democrats didn’t use the magic words’ bullshit argument, but it was his combination of bigotry, apocalyptic framing and shameless demagoguery that really struck me. (Honestly, I found the speech chilling, and not in the way Giuliani intended – the first word that came to mind was “Nuremberg,” same as for Blue Gal. By the way, Godwin’s law doesn’t apply if the analogy is valid, and Mike Godwin himself has weighed in on this in relation to Trump.) Trump and other speakers at the convention took a page from Nixon’s book (really, it’s a conservative staple) and talked a great deal about “law and order.” But the truth is, they don’t truly care about “law and order”; they certainly don’t care about due process. They only care about punishment of the people they hate. That has always been the scared and spiteful essence of their pitch. Trump and at least some of his surrogates are willing to lie, fear-monger and stir up racial anxiety and hatred for political gain. On some level, beneath any denial or self-delusion, they know what they are doing. They are consciously choosing to do this. It’s sadly nothing new, but it remains despicable and even evil.

Unfortunately, Trump and his surrogates haven’t been pushed nearly hard enough on this. Nor have their followers. I’d occasionally see Fox News segments in which people endorsed Trump, saying they liked him because he said what was on his mind and wasn’t “politically correct,” but tellingly, the hosts never really pressed such guests on what exactly they meant by that. It’d be nice if we could have an honest conversation, where such people would say outright, “I want to treat Muslim-, Arab- and Mexican-Americans as second-class citizens,” but of course they won’t, nor will they admit to being scared of Muslims but knowing very little about them. As soon as Trump proposed banning Muslims – which was a campaign statement, not an off-the-cuff remark – every single interview should have pressed him on it (or any of his other bigoted statements). He and his supporters have the right to express their views, but I’ve been dismayed that haven’t been challenged nearly enough. (“Do you realize what you’re saying? Do you realize what this would entail?”) At least a few folks have pressed Trump on how he’d deport over 11 million undocumented immigrants or how he’d build a border wall, but he’s never given convincing answers. Of course, the conservative base doesn’t care if such things are impossible, because a promise of hostility from Trump against their chosen foes is enough. But it’s important that such insanity and extremity be put on display, front and center, for the rest of the electorate.

Any number of Trump’s positions, statements and actions are disqualifying, and I’ve barely touched on some of them. His economic plans are horrible. His personal character is atrocious –he doesn’t pay people who do work for him. He’s a rampant misogynist who’s bragged about sexually assaulting women. Trump’s also endorsed torture repeatedly: “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” His attitude is driven, as usual, by his machismo and his ignorance – as Rear Admiral John Hutson put it, “Torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough.” There’s virtually no admirable position or trait Trump possesses – yet he was the Republicans’ choice for president. And despite efforts to disown him, Trump’s ascent is a feature, not a bug, of movement conservatism and the choices the Republican Party has made over 50-some years (much more on that in a future post).

The Washington Post has an editorial titled, “History will remember which Republicans failed the Trump test,” and The New York Times has an ongoing feature titled, “More than 160 Republican Leaders Don’t Support Donald Trump. Here’s When They Reached Their Breaking Point.” (The number went up throughout the campaign season.) These are valuable pieces, but Brad De Long did something similar with George W. Bush back in 2007 – it would be a grave mistake to forget how horrendous Bush and other Republicans and conservatives were and are, even if Trump weren’t in the picture. It is Republican dogma never to raise taxes and to cut them on the rich; conservatives have been fighting against a sustainable fiscal and economic model since Reagan, and have likewise been fighting against a responsible model of governance. Liberals criticize the Democratic Party all the time, and there’s certainly room for improvement there, but Republicans have become much more conservative over the years, have enacted unprecedented obstructionism in the modern era and simply are the major problem in American politics. Unfortunately, many Republicans and conservatives will deny this, as will the many shallow “both sides” political commentators around (see Digby, driftglass or my archives for much more).

Step one is defeating Trump, but efforts can’t stop there. I’m always in favor of outreach and discussion, but it’s important to acknowledge that they might not work – some people will never be persuadable – especially if they’re primarily driven by spite. We can’t count on ‘cooler heads to prevail’ or ‘the better angels of their nature’ to hold sway for everyone. The conservative base hates many of their fellow Americans and will not be dissuaded. So while we’re trying to convince the crowd charmed by the season’s latest bigot or snake oil salesman to reconsider, it’s essential to get out the vote in case such outreach fails. Voting is crucial, and sustained activism is even more so. Even if Trump loses this election, there’s much more work to be done.

Memorial Day 2016


by Batocchio

Memorial Day is meant for remembering those who died in military service (a worthy commemoration). It’s also a holiday that naturally spurs thoughts of civilians killed in war, of living veterans and how they’re treated, and how war is discussed in our country. It’s only right to pause and remember the dead. And perhaps the best way to honor them the other days of the year is by challenging the belligerati who believe that casually and aggressively endorsing war or torture somehow makes them tough or makes the nation safer. Requiring a high threshold for war shouldn’t be a political calculation; it’s the position of basic sanity. Unfortunately, saber-rattling insanity is both fashionable and profitable in some circles, and rarely seems to draw the same condemnations that wiser, less bellicose positions do.

This weekend, PBS broadcast a short documentary about The Telling Project, which uses theater to help military veterans talk through their experiences, from losing a limb, to being raped, to PTSD, to contemplating suicide. One of the veterans remarked that ‘there’s no bigger pacifist than a deployed serviceman.’ Rather than letting our national discussions of war be hijacked by the braggadocio of the insecure, the cruel, the calculating and the delusional, we’d benefit from considering the harsh realities of war instead. Rather than letting tough guy (and tough gal) fantasies reign, we should seek out true stories. Rather than letting another bombastic speech from an irresponsible ignoramus dictate the terms of discourse, we should give time to veterans and civilians affected by war, and quietly listen.

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