Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian ; How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world
"In the wake of Trump’s unnerving appointees, the investigative journalist and veteran of the libel court offers pointers on coping in an age of surveillance"
Star Wars via YouTube; STAR WARS: Andor Clip - "Fight The Empire!" Maarva's Epic Monologue (2022)
"The adventures of rebel spy Cassian Andor during the formative years of the Rebellion prior to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The series explores tales filled with espionage and daring missions to restore hope to a galaxy in the grip of a ruthless Empire."
Lois Beckett, The Guardian; ‘Anticipatory obedience’: newspapers’ refusal to endorse shines light on billionaire owners’ motives
"When two American billionaires blocked the newspapers they own from endorsing Kamala Harris this month, they tried to frame the decision as an act of civic responsibility.
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times, said. He emphasised that though some might assume his family is “ultra-progressive”, he is a registered “independent”.
At the Washington Post, which reported that its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was behind the decision, publisher William Lewis described the retreat from making presidential endorsements as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.
Veteran journalists and media critics are using a very different phrase to describe Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’s choice: they’re saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing “anticipatory obedience” to Donald Trump.
Yes, “cowardice” has also been a popular way to describe the choice by the billionaire owners of two of the country’s major newspapers to not to risk angering Trump by allowing their papers to endorse his opponent.
But “anticipatory obedience” is more specific. The term comes from On Tyranny, the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe. The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, “the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.” It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by “mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian”, Snyder explains."
Dylan Matthews, Vox; Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.
"Five years have now passed, and the fascism questions have only grown more frequent. Trump has had time to implement quite anti-immigrantand anti-Black policies, and refused to denounce his most extreme and violent supporters, from the neo-Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville to the Proud Boys group. And every week, I receive dozens of emails from readers wondering if I stand by my conclusion in 2015, that Trump is simply a bigot with an authoritarian streak, not a fascist.
So I reached out to the experts I talked to back then. Four of the five replied, and I also got in touch with a few more scholars who have researched fascism to get a broader view.
The responses were, again, unanimous, albeit tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies. No one thinks Trump is a fascist leader, full stop. Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works, came closest to that conclusion, saying that “you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement” and that Trump is “using fascist political tactics,” but that Trump isn’t necessarily leading a fascist government."
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The Ink; Real men reject fascism
"Two things have grown increasingly clear: Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is winning the support of most American men. But it doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way out.
Yesterday, a breathtaking report arrived in The New York Times. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, warned in the starkest terms that Trump is a fascist with a real authoritarian vision and confirmed the murmurs about Trump being jealous not to have had the kind of generals Hitler did...
The distressing thing is that a majority of American men are looking at all of this and saying, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We are dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death...
So now here we are in a country that is changing a lot, has changed a lot — indeed, has, over the past few generations, done more to change the status and rights and dignity of women than hundreds of prior generations did. And we have done the right things while failing to manage social and psychological change — failing to manage the minds and hearts of those who experience these worthy changes as headwinds.
This seems to me central to the story of how a majority of men could do what populations bewildered by change and anxious about the future and their place in it have done: support fascism, support dictatorship, support tyranny to smash it all...
Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the future itself.
But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the strings.
However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the mass of American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and sense of dislocation in the future that is coming. And they need to be invited into a contrary story of progress. Saving the country from tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.
They need to remember, and become excited to say, that real men reject fascism."
Today’s show was produced by Charla Freeland. It was edited by Allison Michaels and Damir Marusic and mixed by Emma Munger, The Washington Post; Surviving Putin's gulag: Vladimir Kara-Murza tells his story
"Pulitzer Prize winner Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was part of August’s massive prisoner exchange with Russia, sat down to talk with Post Opinions editor David Shipley about his time in jail, the importance of freedom of speech and what the future holds for Putin’s regime."
Associated Press via The Guardian; Russian court jails US-Russian woman for 12 years over $50 charity donation
"A Russian court on Thursday sentenced the US-Russian dual national Ksenia Khavana to 12 years in prison on a treason conviction for allegedly raising money for the Ukrainian military.
The rights group the First Department said the charges stemmed from a $51 (£40) donation to a US charity that helps Ukraine.
Khavana, whom Russian authorities identify by her birth name of Karelina, was arrested in Ekaterinburg in February. She pleaded guilty in her closed trial last week, news reports said.
Khavana reportedly obtained US citizenship after marrying an American and moving to Los Angeles. She had returned to Russia to visit her family."
Greg Sargent , The Washington Post; As more schools target ‘Maus,’ Art Spiegelman’s fears are deepening
"What alarms Spiegelman about the targeting of “Maus” on specious grounds, he told me, is that its “fable” form was able to reach a broad audience with a story “about dehumanizing people” and “othering.” Spiegelman suggested those looking to restrict books are seeking to limit school curriculums with their own acts of othering.
“Those others can include Asians, Indigenous Americans, Black people, Muslims — not to mention LGBTQ and beyond,” Spiegelman said. The book-removal frenzy, he noted, is “about squelching what’s supposed to happen in school, which is an education that allows people to become one country that can talk to each other with a base of knowledge.”"
Robert Reich, The Guardian; Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’
"It is dangerous to believe that “balanced journalism” gives equal weight to liars and to truth-tellers, to those intent on destroying democracy and those seeking to protect it, to the enablers of an ongoing attempted coup and those who are trying to prevent it...
“Balanced journalism” does not exist halfway between facts and lies."
Tommy Ebbs, CBR; What the Banning of Maus and V for Vendetta Tell Us About Comic Book Censorship
"What is of particular interest is the fact that both Maus and V for Vendetta are innately political texts. While Maus is a genre-bending memoir about the Holocaust and V for Vendetta is a fictional tale about an anarchist revolt, both books deal with themes relating to fascism and authoritarianism. In 2014, Russia banned Maus due to it featuring the swastika on its front cover during a crackdown on anything involving Nazi paraphernalia, even though the comic is one of the most anti-fascist works in all of fiction. In 2020, China also banned the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, and although no official reason was given, the Guy Fawkes mask from the comic and film was worn by many Hong Kong protesters during the 2019-2020 unrest.
While the rationale of removing the books from Tennessee schools is due to a belief that it will make students “uncomfortable”, many of the books are written by members of the LGBTQ+ community and address issues related to race and gender. When the CCA was first introduced, comics were still in their infancy and regarded as children's entertainment that did not address social and political issues. Since then, however, both Maus and V for Vendetta have been considered challenging literary works that deal with political topics in a mature fashion. This is an incredibly concerning development, considering how both books are anti-fascist and deliberately warn against the limitation of free speech and the curbing of artistic expression, as well as what can happen when these issues go unchallenged."
Anton Troianovski and ; Belarus Forces Down Plane to Seize Dissident; Europe Sees ‘State Hijacking’
The dissident, Roman Protasevich, co-founded a Telegram channel that is a popular opposition outlet in Belarus. The plane was flying from Athens to Lithuania when it was forced down.
"It underscored that with the support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Lukashenko is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to repress dissent."
"It was a relentlessly grim and gloomy picture of America, built on thinly disguised racial distrust and paranoia. It was a portrait that was also essentially false. Violent crime has been steadily falling for more than two decades. Immigrants are less prone to criminality than native-born Americans. But portraying America in such a dark light let Trump cast himself as the nation's dark hero, a kind of billionaire-businessman fixer, unbound by rules or expectations of decorum—President Batman, the only one with the guts and the will to fight for the people. Trump did not invoke superpowers, of course, but he might as well have; he had no other ideas or solutions to offer... Trump's entire speech was packed with threats and power grabs, details be damned. It was a speech about how government should be made bigger and stronger and given more authority over every part of American life, and government, in most cases, simply meant Donald Trump himself. It was an argument for unlimited government under a single man, for rule by Trump's whim. He sounded less like he was running for president and more like he was campaigning to be an American despot."
