#applebaum

[sgreffenius]

Will Putin survive the war, or will the war survive him?

Anne Applebaum explains why Putin's days are numbered, just as Prigozhin's were. The number is larger for Putin, of course, we just don't know how much larger.

If you are a criminal, you do what worked for you in the past, and what apparently works in the present. When you are a seventy-year-old criminal, you do not have a lot of friends left, your imagination is limited, and you cannot change careers. Moreover, dictators don't retire unless their enemies throw them in prison, exile them, or execute them. They are not looking for a pension, just survival.

At some point in the future, Putin will not rule his small circle of friends any longer. We do not need to think about when at some point arrives. Neither need we dwell on the significance of his departure, since other, equally bad leaders will replace him. Corruption does not beget quality.

Prigozhin was hardly a model leader. He should have entered Moscow to see what would happen. If he believed Putin's promise not to retaliate against him, he needed someone to tell him that he may as well die at the head of his troops, rather than in a plane that drops out of the sky. We can only guess what might have happened had he led his forces all the way to the Kremlin.

We don't have to guess whether Applebaum's prediction about more difficulties to come is accurate. Dictators who launch catastrophic, unsuccessful wars generally do not recover. The only uncertainty is how they fall, and who they take with them when they do.

[info-selection]

Wer ist Anne Applebaum?

Anne Applebaum ist eine amerikanische Journalistin, Historikerin und Autorin, die vor allem für ihre Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Ostens Europas und der Sowjetunion bekannt ist. Sie wurde 1964 geboren und hat an renommierten Institutionen wie der Yale University und der University of Oxford studiert.

Anne Applebaum hat mehrere bedeutende Bücher verfasst, darunter „Gulag: A History“, das die Geschichte des sowjetischen Gulag-Systems untersucht und mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichnet wurde. Ein weiteres bekanntes Werk ist „Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956“, in dem sie die Auswirkungen der sowjetischen Herrschaft auf die Länder Mittel- und Osteuropas beschreibt.

Neben ihrer schriftstellerischen Tätigkeit ist Anne Applebaum auch als Kommentatorin und Kolumnistin aktiv und hat für verschiedene internationale Publikationen geschrieben. Sie ist bekannt für ihre kritische Analyse der politischen Entwicklungen in Europa und den USA. Sie befasst sich mit der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Demokratien und Autokratien.

Mehr zu Applebaum hier:

Buchtipp: «Die Achse der Autokraten», von Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum über Trumps Hang zur Kleptokratie

Anne Applebaum: Ruf nach Pazifismus ist oft Hinnahme der Diktatur

Anne Applebaum zur totalitären Entwicklung in Russland

[srebrnafh]

Elon is now insulting Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. That's new.

[alphinias]

MY FAVORITE SHIPS (aka an excuse to gif my hyperfixation of the week)

1/∞: Riven and Musa from Fate: The Winx Saga

[parklyn5]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

This Is Why Dictatorships Fail

April 10, 2025

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.

Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

[pitch-perfect-spookfest]

The 2024 Pitch Perfect SpookFest is coming.

[tomorrowusa]

« All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality.

Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services— military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America. »

– Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum at Substack quoting from her soon to be released book Autocracy, Inc..

You can read several more paragraphs from Autocracy, Inc. at the Substack link above. Her book will be published on the 23rd; if you're within distance of Washington, DC she will be doing a free book reading and Q&A on Friday July 26th at Politics and Prose. She's a good writer and speaker. I've read two of her previous books and can vouch for their quality.

The war in Ukraine is not some remote conflict that idiots like J.D. Vance or Neville Chamberlain might dismiss out of stupidity. Ukraine is just one arena in a worldwide clash between liberal democracy and kleptocratic tyranny.

[sgreffenius]

Why power destroys security and freedom

There is a lesson here for Americans: We need to look hard at what happened in Israel, and start asking which security risks are posed by the scorn that American far-right politicians and propagandists now pour on the American military, the FBI, and of course the federal government as a whole. They have already weakened public trust and, if Donald Trump becomes president again, they may deliberately set out to weaken the institutions themselves: Preparation to replace civil servants has already begun. The impact of their campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in American democracy has already been felt, and its security implications are already evident. To take just one example, online disinformation campaigns of the sort the Russians ran in the 2016 election work best on polarized societies, where levels of distrust are especially high. ~ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic

Anne Applebaum's paragraph above is the plainest statement of the case yet: that when we heap scorn on our national institutions, we weaken our country with disunity, make it less secure against our enemies, and undermine other people's faith in democracy. You can't have a strong, unified country that can protect itself if you have disloyal people within to spread the falsehood that government security institutions cannot be trusted.

Always left out of this analysis is the possibility that government institutions are not actually worthy of our trust. Is that because, given the record, Applebaum thinks that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other security agencies do merit our confidence, our faith that they will protect us and rather than their own interests? Or is the argument that we must trust these institutions, because the consequences of not trusting them are too horrific? That is, if the wolf appears at our door, as these agencies say he did on September 11, 2001, then we must forfeit a lot of freedom to prevent him from getting inside.

Of course, if we say that is not a deal we would ever strike in a democratic country - because state security institutions are inherently untrustworthy, with a record of behavior that proves it so - then those dissenters open themselves to the accusation that they are disloyal to the government. Yet the fact that Trump and Netanyahu charge their opponents with disloyalty does not mean that people who distrust state security agencies are wrong in their skepticism. It merely means that politicians like Trump and Netanyahu say whatever is required to get power.

Trump was right to criticize the FBI during his first term. He did not, however, aim to reform the agency. He wanted to protect his own position. Similarly, the FBI and the Justice Department did not attack Trump to protect the republic. The department acted on behalf of people who hated the president, and who wanted him out of office. Neither side in this conflict cared about the integrity of our institutions, preserving democracy - whatever that means - or protecting our country's citizens and their freedoms.

That was the amazing frankness of the Trump presidency's political combat: no one who participated pretended to care about anything but winning. Ideals such as democracy, freedom, and security had no bearing on the methods the combatants used, or on their reasons for acting. They utterly ignored the fact that when you fight for power, that is all you get when you win: power. You have no capacity at that point to use your power for other good ends.

[argentangelhelps]

FATE: THE WINX SAGA S2 SCREENCAPS

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[ohsalome]

- Anne Applebaum. The Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

Gonna keep this quote for every person who says "but there was famine in russia too!!"

[victusinveritas]

[milksteakkk]

benji and beca are such an underrated duo nobody is doing it like them. did we forget that benji is the reason the bellas even qualified for the nationals finals in the first place and he did it BECAUSE OF BECA

[collateral-joy]

- Pre-Teen World Telethon

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Anne Applebaum :: @anneapplebaum

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power.

* * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 1, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 02, 2024

More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen's Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.

Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.

Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.  

In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.

When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”

Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned. 

The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.

Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there. 

The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."

Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”

There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S. 

Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.” 

Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don't care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”

It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.

It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!” 

Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bardofthetearling]

musa in every episode → 1.05/Wither Into the Truth