The nightmare deepens. As a member of the silent generation, one that grew up in the aftermath of WWII and during the Cold War, this is simply unfathomable.
I am part of a Democrats Abroad Project 2025 book club. We did not finish the entire document before the election, but had read and discussed 20 of the 30 chapters, plus the Forward. It is pretty disturbing stuff, especially the parts of the Intelligence Community, the DOD, the Education Dept. which is supposed to be gotten rid of along with destroying education, and Health and Human Services which is supposed to become the department of life, but really of death of women and children and men too since they won't be able to afford insurance. The IC and DOD are so disturbing because one can just see our country being taken over by authoritarian nations, and it is sad that what was built up over centuries will be totally dismantled by Trump, for a buck, and as one says, Kompromat, and then we will be a client state of Russia, or what.
However, I do not know whether the DOD and CI will just roll over and go along with this. I am not suggesting a military coup, just that there may not be so much going along with violating the constitution as Trump has planned. Afterall he is not able to see that people won't go along with what he wants to do. That remains to be seen.
Also, while I hear many are shifting to Sky Blue and off of X, it is important that everyone who is not illiberal get off of it. Thank you to the Guardian, which I still support. Thank you to Substack for allowing a forum for deeper thought as well. Today Judd Legume of Popular Information posted about alternatives to X.
Potter, I do understand this is the reason why. Thank you for posting this article, which puts it all so well. I also think Aaron Roper's Public Notice addressed this well yesterday using data on what media the Trump vs. Harris consumes. https://www.publicnotice.co/p/how-tiktok-x-helped-trump-beat-harris-2024
Yesterday I had a talk with my 23 year old nephew. He has finished chef school with a BA in business administration, and is working in the corporate cooking world. He sees nothing but opportunity in front of him and does not understand anything Biden did to make this opportunity for him. He voted for Harris because he is in our family, but he considered her equally evil to Trump, and does not take Trump seriously. I don't know where he is getting his news from, but just his take on German news makes me understand that he is not listening critically.
I decided that instead of just arguing what he says, I should listen to him. What I heard is just so much disinformation. We lost his mother this summer, and so I have stepped into a sort of mom replacement role for him and his siblings. I am really looking at the media scape and other than the victory of the Onion taking over Infowars from Alex Jones, which may not stand up to the Supreme Court, the Dems or liberals don't seem to own any media. NPR and Public television is slated for the ax by the way.
So glad you registered for Blue Sky, but how do we get the Gen-Zers like my nephew to it. Also, the millennials to it as well. The millennial men I know did not vote in this election, or any for that matter even though I believe at some point they registered to vote. Those millennials belong to the 93 mil eligible voters that Robert Hubbell said did not vote.
The good news is that my 26-year-old nephew voted for Harris too, and while working on his PhD in sustainable aviation engineering and having a bad problem with his doctoral advisor, did manage to vote and resolve his problems at the same time. My daughter and I voted from abroad and have 2 years how to figure out how to get a greater percentage of the 300-400,000 Americans living in Germany to vote. Last I heard only 10% vote in US elections.
I suggested to my Billionaire governor Pritzker that his consortium of Blue governors need to start their own social security platform to spread pro-democracy news and information. I will write him more than once on this to try to rack up the numbers. They also should be looking at owning news stations and other media. We have to figure out how to go after the media and wrest ownership from them. Let us go after the Murdoch's enterprise, and the Sinclair disinformation machine. Let us get democrats worldwide onto a platform making it more powerful than the right wing disinformation machines.
Thanks for your views on your end if this the situation. It looks like a formidable project to educate people, the younger generation. I believe what will have to happen is consequences that hit personally to make them see and care. That happens when things are already advanced.
In the meantime we have to shadow what's going to try to happen or happen as well as strongly loudly oppose and, yes, educate. Robert Reich’s videos are great. I think he’s working them on X. We need more of this sort of thing ASAP. I’ll link later.
I have a former colleague whose partner always said there are those who learn a years worth in a year, and those who learn a year's worth in 20 years. In other words, there are those who don't learn anything. In order to change this we have to have better information the media the uninformed are accessing.
I am a former teacher in the school founded by John Dewey who was a big proponent of experience as a teacher. However, you have to have the right experiences, and that would include someone guiding these people who are about to suffer for their votes, to understanding about the sources of their suffering. There is no guarantee that they will do it because they have not done it in the past.
Aren’t we creating echo-chambers this way? I feel like it would be important to keep both, and keep counter-acting on X but not to consume information from X. Just keep it for understanding of what’s happening on the other side and targeted messaging?
With you there. I liken the general US population to the early American Indians who had never been exposed to smallpox until the invasion of European explorers and finally conquerors who used themselves along with pox-infected blankets to subdue and even wipe out all who had no resistance to the disease.
Trump voters who think a dictatorship would be just fine have never had an actual experience living under one. We’ve been blessed all these years to have lived under a more or less functioning government so, being ignorant of actual history, think things will always go their way. They won’t. They never do. Trump should remember that even Hitler had his breaking point. Sic semper tyrannis 🗡️
Remember how Pompeo extracted a higher up in the Kremlin who had been feeding the west inside information, because he knew and understood that Putin was actually a fascist dictator hydro carbon kleptocrat?
Accidentally? Given Tim's analysis (as we all know), nothing is accidental when Putin is involved.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.” George W. Bush, 2001
Now I understand Tulsi Gubbard’s purpose - to cleanse the record for Trump. I pray current agents are backing up documents for safe keeping inside or outside of these agencies.
These days I recall reading Ray Bradbury’s brilliant dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. For those who may not be familiar with it, there are four main characters. Montag, the fireman whose job it is to find and burn books (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns) and give their owners over to the justice system for conviction. Books, you see, make those who read them unhappy so no one is to own or to read them (See Ron DeSantis, et al). Montag’s wife who spends all of her time in front of the whole-wall, interactive TV screen from which she receives all her news and proper ways of thinking (See Fox News at al and MAGA America). Beatty, the fire chief whose explanations of the reasoning behind their work often seem so sensible and practical, but ultimately so horrifying. And Clarisse, the young rebel who opens Montag's mind.
The book appeared in 1953, and it is every bit as predictive and frightening as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, and perhaps even more so as it depicts a world not at all far from some aspects of American today. It is more than well worth the read, not only because of its prescience, but also because Bradbury is a past master of English prose.
As I watch Trump 2.0 begin to change from campaign rhetoric to administrative reality, I ponder a certain simplicity, A Leader who demands loyalty about integrity neither has, respects, nor expects either. Those who do have enough integrity to challenge those who don’t tend to end up in ‘the people’s courtrooms’ or the Gulag.
In the Republic of Trump, the first step is usually political exile, which is as far as it went during Trump 1.0, but of course now that he’s stocking the Justice Department with the likes of Matt Gaetz, that could change.
As for those Republican Senators who are so concerned about his cabinet picks, they might ponder that a bit of foresight during Trump’s impeachment trial could have prevented all of this, leaving the party open to an array of potential candidates who could have advanced the conservative agenda without the advancing lunacy and threat of Trump 2.0.
In "Alice's adventures in Wonderland", Lewis Carroll (a mathematician) declared the four branches of arithmetic to be Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. I think this is the only kind of mathematics that Trump and his entourage understand.
As I regularly do, I just published the French translation to The Submission Chain along with the original on my facebook page. I also participate in an online newspaper Les Humanités (leshumanites-media.com) whose editor-in-chief wishes to publish this column, since what you describe is particularly significant for us here in France where the whole mathematical equation definitely places the political right in the submissive position under Trump, with Marine Le Pen now using the Trumpian argument when charged with illegal use of European Union funds: she cannot be declared ineligible for public office for 5 years, she claims, since this would deprive French voters of their free choice at the ballot box... The former Minister of the Interior, Darmanin, has just picked up on the same argument in her favor, indicating a growing trend to ignore the law when it proves annoying...for the radical right. I trust this sharing of your thoughts meets with your approval.
Since the rise of the most unqualified person to be elected POTUS I have been reminded of a quote from Sydney Ellen Wade, Annette Bening’s character, in the 1995 film The American President: How do you have patience for someone who claims to love America but clearly hates Americans?
Every one of the current slate of cabinet nominees fits that description. But then, they are only following the example of the deplorable man who has nominated them.
Those who control disinformation in the USA, Murdoch, Putin, Xi, have been underestimated for decades and remain unchallenged by Democrats or anyone else. Americans are ignorant, indoctrinated, cheap labor for oligarchs. Fox News and AM Talk Radio need to be drowned out, but no billionaires seem to want to step up and lead that effort.
Why do we need billionaires to step up? We can organize, communicate, keep one another strong and level-headed at the community level. If we are waiting for a "white knight", we wait in vain. We must educate one another and collaborate and form a resistance movement like "moms rising" groups; or "indivisible groups". We can be strong without billions.
I’m getting a 1938 Munich Agreement vibe, among other 1930s analogies. Donbass = Sudetenland, the then the rest of The Ukraine, and then onto Poland?. Waiting for Kristallnacht (the first round ups for mass deportation?). And the ever increasing stream of propaganda that pollutes what passes for discourse these days. Thank you Professor Snyder for historical perspective (another victim of the pollution)!
I reread it last August, and because I'd learned so much during the years between the 1st and 2nd readings, I understood it the 2nd time at a much deeper level. Ditto with On Tyranny.
The never mind Ukraine narrative (it's no big deal, it's just Putin just taking his sh** back) is a direct result of Russian disinformation. Even the Left imagines, and some seem almost embarrassed by the idea of, the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the West . . . eliding the "small fact" of a burgeoning democracy in a resource-rich nation (the largest in Europe except for Russia) that has been under colonial oppression for hundreds of years.
There is no greater proof of Ukrainian identity than Russia's centuries long campaign to suppress it. Russification started at the very latest in 1720. If Ukrainian identity couldn't be suppressed in 300+ years, it's because it's real. Still, many Americans believe or are not certain whether or not Ukraine is a real country *because of their ignorance.* They think Ukraine popped up in 2014, or 1991. The "you can't find it on a map" trope should be a source of embarrassment to all. How is it a political counterargument? (God help us survive our ignorance.) So the Trump cabal has not just *lost* the Cold War, it's also collaborating, *collaborating* with Putin, spreading disinformation to *help* him recolonize Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Never mind democracy (quaint idea), global warming, human suffering. Never mind, just never mind, the fact that Ukraine is recognized as a future staging ground for renewable energy for all of Europe of which Ukraine *is an integral piece historically, culturally, and geographically.* Never mind. Let's just give a huge chunk of Europe to Putin, and betray not only our agreements with Ukraine but the rest of Europe. And never mind the consequences of the international oligarchy for the world, for global warming. (We are the mastodons portrayed sinking to their deaths in the La Brea tar pits. Death by oil . . . following the fossil-fuel oligarchs to our demise.)
Sorry if I'm (I'm surely) repeating a great deal in the Snyder corpus which I haven't read, except for a few books. Soon!
“…give a huge chunk of Europe to Putin” — when we think of changing shades of colour on a map we simplistically reduce millions of people fighting for freedom, as disposable, irrelevant, not even chips to bargain with.
Ironic that the idea would be led, let alone supported by the US — the country that fought a War of Independence specifically for freedom and liberty, and underlined it with the Civil War.
Civilizations and “dynasties” die believing their self-importance will sustain them — they implode from within.
A simple math law, disturbed many 9th graders 69: years ago when teaching. Comparing submission to Germany in the thirties is frightenly possible like the urgent speculation about why voters voted, and nit reading Anne Applebaum. I’ve tried hard to get smart people learn from historians. We all need to promulgate these concepts.
Timothy Snyder has been logical with us in 'Discussion about this Post'. We have been searching for ways to be in this time, which is more harrowing than anticipated:
'The Mueller Report, though little read and dismissed, actually makes the case quite indisputably that Russia supported Trump; indeed, even its critics did not directly question that, but rather focused on the idea that it did not prove collusion. This was not really true, either; there was plenty of collusion, but Mueller thought that this was better left for an impeachment than a prosecution, which got us into the square dance of legal irresponsibility around Trump in which we still find ourselves.'
'One can debate the sources of Trump's submissiveness to Putin.'
'The relationship is concrete and specific and has to do with Ukraine. If Trump submits to Putin on Ukraine, he not only demonstrates that he is incapable of dealing with China, he surrenders in advance to China.'
'Ukrainian resistance deters China in way that we cannot deter China ourselves.'
'if the United States tries to surrender Ukraine to Putin, this is not only submission to XI, it is an invitation to a far broader war, one that might have been deterred simply by continuing to back Ukraine.'
'To be sure, the transitive property of submission does not capture everything about domestic and international politics.'
***
I read another compelling piece this morning, which deals with the subject by Christopher Hobson called 'Knowing the time.' In it he wrote:
This is very clear and helpful. How do we think about us ‘libs’ in this image? What is , or can be, stronger than a chain? What is outside the chain? We know there are a lot of people who did not vote for Trump.
The nightmare deepens. As a member of the silent generation, one that grew up in the aftermath of WWII and during the Cold War, this is simply unfathomable.
I am part of a Democrats Abroad Project 2025 book club. We did not finish the entire document before the election, but had read and discussed 20 of the 30 chapters, plus the Forward. It is pretty disturbing stuff, especially the parts of the Intelligence Community, the DOD, the Education Dept. which is supposed to be gotten rid of along with destroying education, and Health and Human Services which is supposed to become the department of life, but really of death of women and children and men too since they won't be able to afford insurance. The IC and DOD are so disturbing because one can just see our country being taken over by authoritarian nations, and it is sad that what was built up over centuries will be totally dismantled by Trump, for a buck, and as one says, Kompromat, and then we will be a client state of Russia, or what.
However, I do not know whether the DOD and CI will just roll over and go along with this. I am not suggesting a military coup, just that there may not be so much going along with violating the constitution as Trump has planned. Afterall he is not able to see that people won't go along with what he wants to do. That remains to be seen.
Also, while I hear many are shifting to Sky Blue and off of X, it is important that everyone who is not illiberal get off of it. Thank you to the Guardian, which I still support. Thank you to Substack for allowing a forum for deeper thought as well. Today Judd Legume of Popular Information posted about alternatives to X.
https://popular.info/p/want-to-quit-x-heres-your-guide-to
And, Aaron Ruper of Public Notice published a piece about the media preferences of people who voted for either candidate which makes it seem more important to get off of these sources. https://www.publicnotice.co/p/how-tiktok-x-helped-trump-beat-harris-2024?r=f0qfn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I really appreciate these analogies. Each is helpful in different ways for helping us to make sense of what is going on.
We registered at Bluesky. I hope it takes.
And check this: https://substack.com/home/post/p-151392920
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?
Potter, I do understand this is the reason why. Thank you for posting this article, which puts it all so well. I also think Aaron Roper's Public Notice addressed this well yesterday using data on what media the Trump vs. Harris consumes. https://www.publicnotice.co/p/how-tiktok-x-helped-trump-beat-harris-2024
Yesterday I had a talk with my 23 year old nephew. He has finished chef school with a BA in business administration, and is working in the corporate cooking world. He sees nothing but opportunity in front of him and does not understand anything Biden did to make this opportunity for him. He voted for Harris because he is in our family, but he considered her equally evil to Trump, and does not take Trump seriously. I don't know where he is getting his news from, but just his take on German news makes me understand that he is not listening critically.
I decided that instead of just arguing what he says, I should listen to him. What I heard is just so much disinformation. We lost his mother this summer, and so I have stepped into a sort of mom replacement role for him and his siblings. I am really looking at the media scape and other than the victory of the Onion taking over Infowars from Alex Jones, which may not stand up to the Supreme Court, the Dems or liberals don't seem to own any media. NPR and Public television is slated for the ax by the way.
So glad you registered for Blue Sky, but how do we get the Gen-Zers like my nephew to it. Also, the millennials to it as well. The millennial men I know did not vote in this election, or any for that matter even though I believe at some point they registered to vote. Those millennials belong to the 93 mil eligible voters that Robert Hubbell said did not vote.
The good news is that my 26-year-old nephew voted for Harris too, and while working on his PhD in sustainable aviation engineering and having a bad problem with his doctoral advisor, did manage to vote and resolve his problems at the same time. My daughter and I voted from abroad and have 2 years how to figure out how to get a greater percentage of the 300-400,000 Americans living in Germany to vote. Last I heard only 10% vote in US elections.
I suggested to my Billionaire governor Pritzker that his consortium of Blue governors need to start their own social security platform to spread pro-democracy news and information. I will write him more than once on this to try to rack up the numbers. They also should be looking at owning news stations and other media. We have to figure out how to go after the media and wrest ownership from them. Let us go after the Murdoch's enterprise, and the Sinclair disinformation machine. Let us get democrats worldwide onto a platform making it more powerful than the right wing disinformation machines.
Thanks for your views on your end if this the situation. It looks like a formidable project to educate people, the younger generation. I believe what will have to happen is consequences that hit personally to make them see and care. That happens when things are already advanced.
In the meantime we have to shadow what's going to try to happen or happen as well as strongly loudly oppose and, yes, educate. Robert Reich’s videos are great. I think he’s working them on X. We need more of this sort of thing ASAP. I’ll link later.
I have a former colleague whose partner always said there are those who learn a years worth in a year, and those who learn a year's worth in 20 years. In other words, there are those who don't learn anything. In order to change this we have to have better information the media the uninformed are accessing.
I am a former teacher in the school founded by John Dewey who was a big proponent of experience as a teacher. However, you have to have the right experiences, and that would include someone guiding these people who are about to suffer for their votes, to understanding about the sources of their suffering. There is no guarantee that they will do it because they have not done it in the past.
they ( and we) have to suffer this enough to feel it. I don't think there is any other way.
What are the German kids learning in school about their Nazi period? (If you have the time to write about it.)
Aren’t we creating echo-chambers this way? I feel like it would be important to keep both, and keep counter-acting on X but not to consume information from X. Just keep it for understanding of what’s happening on the other side and targeted messaging?
With you there. I liken the general US population to the early American Indians who had never been exposed to smallpox until the invasion of European explorers and finally conquerors who used themselves along with pox-infected blankets to subdue and even wipe out all who had no resistance to the disease.
Trump voters who think a dictatorship would be just fine have never had an actual experience living under one. We’ve been blessed all these years to have lived under a more or less functioning government so, being ignorant of actual history, think things will always go their way. They won’t. They never do. Trump should remember that even Hitler had his breaking point. Sic semper tyrannis 🗡️
I sure wouldnt want to be a U.S. intelligence agent. How long will it be before a list of all agents is delivered accidentally to the Russians
You mean delivered again.
I don’t think we delivered all of them. This time we will.
Remember how Pompeo extracted a higher up in the Kremlin who had been feeding the west inside information, because he knew and understood that Putin was actually a fascist dictator hydro carbon kleptocrat?
Would you say more about that?
How long will it be until the people who are messing with the CI and the DOD have an accident?
Accidentally? Given Tim's analysis (as we all know), nothing is accidental when Putin is involved.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.” George W. Bush, 2001
Now I understand Tulsi Gubbard’s purpose - to cleanse the record for Trump. I pray current agents are backing up documents for safe keeping inside or outside of these agencies.
These days I recall reading Ray Bradbury’s brilliant dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. For those who may not be familiar with it, there are four main characters. Montag, the fireman whose job it is to find and burn books (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns) and give their owners over to the justice system for conviction. Books, you see, make those who read them unhappy so no one is to own or to read them (See Ron DeSantis, et al). Montag’s wife who spends all of her time in front of the whole-wall, interactive TV screen from which she receives all her news and proper ways of thinking (See Fox News at al and MAGA America). Beatty, the fire chief whose explanations of the reasoning behind their work often seem so sensible and practical, but ultimately so horrifying. And Clarisse, the young rebel who opens Montag's mind.
The book appeared in 1953, and it is every bit as predictive and frightening as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, and perhaps even more so as it depicts a world not at all far from some aspects of American today. It is more than well worth the read, not only because of its prescience, but also because Bradbury is a past master of English prose.
As I watch Trump 2.0 begin to change from campaign rhetoric to administrative reality, I ponder a certain simplicity, A Leader who demands loyalty about integrity neither has, respects, nor expects either. Those who do have enough integrity to challenge those who don’t tend to end up in ‘the people’s courtrooms’ or the Gulag.
In the Republic of Trump, the first step is usually political exile, which is as far as it went during Trump 1.0, but of course now that he’s stocking the Justice Department with the likes of Matt Gaetz, that could change.
As for those Republican Senators who are so concerned about his cabinet picks, they might ponder that a bit of foresight during Trump’s impeachment trial could have prevented all of this, leaving the party open to an array of potential candidates who could have advanced the conservative agenda without the advancing lunacy and threat of Trump 2.0.
In "Alice's adventures in Wonderland", Lewis Carroll (a mathematician) declared the four branches of arithmetic to be Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. I think this is the only kind of mathematics that Trump and his entourage understand.
As I regularly do, I just published the French translation to The Submission Chain along with the original on my facebook page. I also participate in an online newspaper Les Humanités (leshumanites-media.com) whose editor-in-chief wishes to publish this column, since what you describe is particularly significant for us here in France where the whole mathematical equation definitely places the political right in the submissive position under Trump, with Marine Le Pen now using the Trumpian argument when charged with illegal use of European Union funds: she cannot be declared ineligible for public office for 5 years, she claims, since this would deprive French voters of their free choice at the ballot box... The former Minister of the Interior, Darmanin, has just picked up on the same argument in her favor, indicating a growing trend to ignore the law when it proves annoying...for the radical right. I trust this sharing of your thoughts meets with your approval.
Since the rise of the most unqualified person to be elected POTUS I have been reminded of a quote from Sydney Ellen Wade, Annette Bening’s character, in the 1995 film The American President: How do you have patience for someone who claims to love America but clearly hates Americans?
Every one of the current slate of cabinet nominees fits that description. But then, they are only following the example of the deplorable man who has nominated them.
Those who control disinformation in the USA, Murdoch, Putin, Xi, have been underestimated for decades and remain unchallenged by Democrats or anyone else. Americans are ignorant, indoctrinated, cheap labor for oligarchs. Fox News and AM Talk Radio need to be drowned out, but no billionaires seem to want to step up and lead that effort.
think small; think federalism.
Why do we need billionaires to step up? We can organize, communicate, keep one another strong and level-headed at the community level. If we are waiting for a "white knight", we wait in vain. We must educate one another and collaborate and form a resistance movement like "moms rising" groups; or "indivisible groups". We can be strong without billions.
I’m getting a 1938 Munich Agreement vibe, among other 1930s analogies. Donbass = Sudetenland, the then the rest of The Ukraine, and then onto Poland?. Waiting for Kristallnacht (the first round ups for mass deportation?). And the ever increasing stream of propaganda that pollutes what passes for discourse these days. Thank you Professor Snyder for historical perspective (another victim of the pollution)!
Maybe the Baltic States are first - Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia......
In other words: Autocorrupt corrupts autocratically.
(Ps: The Road to Unfreedom is your most brilliant book.)
fixing to re-read.
I reread it last August, and because I'd learned so much during the years between the 1st and 2nd readings, I understood it the 2nd time at a much deeper level. Ditto with On Tyranny.
As usual, this is brilliant. And scares the S-T out of me!
Professor Snyder, regularly you express insights and knowledge that do the impossible, which is to make sense of Trump bizarre world. Thank you!
The never mind Ukraine narrative (it's no big deal, it's just Putin just taking his sh** back) is a direct result of Russian disinformation. Even the Left imagines, and some seem almost embarrassed by the idea of, the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the West . . . eliding the "small fact" of a burgeoning democracy in a resource-rich nation (the largest in Europe except for Russia) that has been under colonial oppression for hundreds of years.
There is no greater proof of Ukrainian identity than Russia's centuries long campaign to suppress it. Russification started at the very latest in 1720. If Ukrainian identity couldn't be suppressed in 300+ years, it's because it's real. Still, many Americans believe or are not certain whether or not Ukraine is a real country *because of their ignorance.* They think Ukraine popped up in 2014, or 1991. The "you can't find it on a map" trope should be a source of embarrassment to all. How is it a political counterargument? (God help us survive our ignorance.) So the Trump cabal has not just *lost* the Cold War, it's also collaborating, *collaborating* with Putin, spreading disinformation to *help* him recolonize Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Never mind democracy (quaint idea), global warming, human suffering. Never mind, just never mind, the fact that Ukraine is recognized as a future staging ground for renewable energy for all of Europe of which Ukraine *is an integral piece historically, culturally, and geographically.* Never mind. Let's just give a huge chunk of Europe to Putin, and betray not only our agreements with Ukraine but the rest of Europe. And never mind the consequences of the international oligarchy for the world, for global warming. (We are the mastodons portrayed sinking to their deaths in the La Brea tar pits. Death by oil . . . following the fossil-fuel oligarchs to our demise.)
Sorry if I'm (I'm surely) repeating a great deal in the Snyder corpus which I haven't read, except for a few books. Soon!
“…give a huge chunk of Europe to Putin” — when we think of changing shades of colour on a map we simplistically reduce millions of people fighting for freedom, as disposable, irrelevant, not even chips to bargain with.
Ironic that the idea would be led, let alone supported by the US — the country that fought a War of Independence specifically for freedom and liberty, and underlined it with the Civil War.
Civilizations and “dynasties” die believing their self-importance will sustain them — they implode from within.
A simple math law, disturbed many 9th graders 69: years ago when teaching. Comparing submission to Germany in the thirties is frightenly possible like the urgent speculation about why voters voted, and nit reading Anne Applebaum. I’ve tried hard to get smart people learn from historians. We all need to promulgate these concepts.
Timothy Snyder has been logical with us in 'Discussion about this Post'. We have been searching for ways to be in this time, which is more harrowing than anticipated:
'The Mueller Report, though little read and dismissed, actually makes the case quite indisputably that Russia supported Trump; indeed, even its critics did not directly question that, but rather focused on the idea that it did not prove collusion. This was not really true, either; there was plenty of collusion, but Mueller thought that this was better left for an impeachment than a prosecution, which got us into the square dance of legal irresponsibility around Trump in which we still find ourselves.'
'One can debate the sources of Trump's submissiveness to Putin.'
'The relationship is concrete and specific and has to do with Ukraine. If Trump submits to Putin on Ukraine, he not only demonstrates that he is incapable of dealing with China, he surrenders in advance to China.'
'Ukrainian resistance deters China in way that we cannot deter China ourselves.'
'if the United States tries to surrender Ukraine to Putin, this is not only submission to XI, it is an invitation to a far broader war, one that might have been deterred simply by continuing to back Ukraine.'
'To be sure, the transitive property of submission does not capture everything about domestic and international politics.'
***
I read another compelling piece this morning, which deals with the subject by Christopher Hobson called 'Knowing the time.' In it he wrote:
'Force is spreading and legitimacy is failing.'
This is very clear and helpful. How do we think about us ‘libs’ in this image? What is , or can be, stronger than a chain? What is outside the chain? We know there are a lot of people who did not vote for Trump.