#Period of American Regime

[alicearmageddon]

"The North Korean regime in the ‘50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortable—sit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward position—only, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them you’ve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniques—according to Korean friends of mine, they’re actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small children—they were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.

Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country that’s being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But I’m speaking here even of the ones that aren’t. For most, it’s as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerable—only, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. There’s never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You can’t get a permit. You’re always standing in line. If something breaks it’s impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you can’t get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), it’s anyone’s guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense. It can take eight hours to drive 20 kilometers to see your girlfriend, and doing so will almost certainly mean having machine guns waved in your faces and being shouted at in a language you half understand by people who think you’re subhuman. So you do most of your dalliance by phone. When you can afford the minutes. There are endless traffic jams before and after checkpoints and drivers bicker and curse and try not to take it out on one another. Everyone lives no more than 12 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean but even on the hottest day, it’s absolutely impossible to get to the beach. Unless you climb the wall, there are places you can do that; but then you can expect to be hunted every moment by security patrols. Of course teenagers do it anyway. But it means swimming is always accompanied by the fear of being shot. If you’re a trader, or a laborer, or a driver, or a tobacco farmer, or clerk, the very process of subsistence is continual stream of minor humiliations. Your tomatoes are held and left two days to rot while someone grins at you. You have to beg to get your child out of detention. And if you do go to beseech the guards, those same guards might arbitrarily decide to hold you to pressure him to confess to rock-throwing, and suddenly you are in a concrete cell without cigarettes. Your toilet backs up. And you realize: you’re going to have to live like this forever. There is no “political process.” It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life."

-David Graeber, Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank

[mostlysignssomeportents]

End-stage capitalism

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BLOOMINGTON TODAY (Apr 4), and in PITTSBURGH on May 15. More tour dates here.

Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually fail, torn apart by its own contradictions. He called the bourgeoisie, who epitomized these contradictions, capitalism's "grave diggers":

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels marvel at capitalism's adaptability, its ability to reinvent itself in the face of seemingly terminal crises and emerge in a new form. For nearly two centuries, Marxists have treated capitalism as an intermediate stage between feudalism and socialism – a lengthy, but still impermanent, regime whose purpose was to produce the systems of plenty that socialism would deliver to democratic control.

But as capitalism lurched from crisis to crisis, some Marxists speculated that capitalism would give way to something even worse. In 2023, Yanis Varoufakis proposed that capitalism might end up being a transitional phase between feudalism and another kind of feudalism – technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

But Trump's disastrous policies – tariffs, suspension of the rule of law, pointless military expansionism – doesn't serve Varoufakis's technofeudalism or any other kind of feudalism. As Hamilton Nolan writes, Trump represents a rupture of the customarily unshakable class solidarity of the wealthy. Trump's policies are not good for business. Trump is going to make America much, much poorer – and since the vast majority of American wealth is held by a tiny minority of very rich people, any program that vaporizes an appreciable fraction of American wealth will make a lot of rich people a lot poorer.

Hamilton Nolan wrote about this a couple days ago, enumerating all the ways that Trump – who LARPed a TV businessman – is extremely bad for business:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/divergence-from-the-interests-of

Gutting state capacity

As Nolan writes, there are plenty on the right who don't care about the idea that public education produces the skilled workers needed to run and expand the economy, and who believe that paving half the national parks and putting a $500/day admission price on the remainder will suit them just fine. But even the most hardcore plutocrat needs a functional immigration system so they can source workers who can do the jobs Americans won't – or can't – do. You can't be a finance guy in a country with a collapsed, corrupt Treasury Department that periodically reaches into institutional bank accounts and drains them of millions in pursuit of "obscure witch-hunts":

“stupidly breaking the parts of the government that allow our financial markets to function smoothly with no apparent plan" is not “populism” any more than a bite from an alligator is a kiss

Ending the rule of law

Anyone who claims to love "free markets" loves the rule of law. The predictability of a laws-based society is a necessary precondition for capital formation, long-term investing, and the use of contracts to coordinate business within a transparent, known set of rules.

Trump's lavish corruption – his crypto companies (which someone called "a tipjar for the Oval Office"), his sale of commutations and pardons to flagrant criminals, and his purging of Democrats within the DoJ to create space for "buffoons" who run his witch hunts – all offer good reason for investors to stay the hell out of America, and for businesses to get the hell out of the country:

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5182515-senate-democrats-complaint-ed-martin/

The spectacle of the top executives of world's most powerful multinationals openly paying bribes to Trump, while seated at Trump's own members' club, makes an eloquent case for seeking your business opportunities in another country – practically any other country:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/05/trump-dinner-mar-a-lago

Then there's Trump's interference in the Fed, "endangering financial markets for short term political gain":

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-bid-to-control-fed-puts-us-economy-at-risk-by-kenneth-rogoff-2025-01

And finally, there's his defiance of federal court orders, and his attacks on law firms that employ lawyers who had the temerity to sue him. As Nolan writes, "This is not good for business." Sure, it's grimly satisfying to think about all those rich fools who howled because Biden had the temerity to suggest modest tax hikes and improvements to labor law now having to watch as "the world’s most sophisticated corporate legal regime [is replaced] with a system in which you must grovel at his toes in a ridiculous red hat in order to get anything done."

Military adventures

Trump is apparently going to go to war with Iran, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, and several other countries to be determined at a later date. Sure, America's military spending is higher than all the rest of the world's combined, but getting involved in several wars at once is – once again – not good for business. For one thing, he's going to kill Boeing, Lockheed, and all the other US-based arms dealers that rely on a friendly relationship with America's erstwhile allies for billions of dollars per year in business. Things are no better for the companies that do other kinds of business with the countries America is apparently on the brink of war with. This kind of "Hitlerian" program of economic growth was a failure in the previous century, and it will fail again:

Did Hitler’s wild invasions ultimate make Germany richer? No. They started a world war. And, no matter what anyone tells you, world war is not good for business.

Tariffs

Finally, there's Trump's deranged tariff plan. As David Dayen writes for The American Propsect, these aren't really tariffs at all – they're sanctions, punishments visited upon every country in the world (even uninhabited islands!) for a bunch of imaginary crimes:

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-03-theyre-not-tariffs-theyre-sanctions/

Trump's tariffs make no sense as an economic policy, but they are familiar to anyone who's spent time around organized crime (like, say, Trump):

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/

Dayen likens Trump's approach to "a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business." Trump's demands – such as they are – include forcing America's trading partners to do away with their privacy, food safety and antitrust laws:

https://tacd.org/wp-content/uploads/TACD-Statement-Tariffs-3-April.pdf

Even if it was worth it for other countries to dismantle their laws to enjoy continued access to US markets (it isn't), no one trusts that giving in to Trump means that he'll carry out his end of the bargain. As Brad DeLong reminds us, Trump personally negotiated the USMCA terms that Canada and Mexico have been living under since he last left office, and those are the two countries he's most pissed off at:

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/draft-mar-a-lago-discord

This isn't capitalism – it's gangsterism. It's a system that will annihilate trillions of dollars in value to put billions of dollars in the pockets of Trump and a few of his cronies – at the expense of all the other rich people.

Nolan concludes that Trump is "insane" – that his actions are irrational, disconnected from reality, impossible to understand. For Nolan, the question isn't "What is Trump trying to accomplish?" It's "how has this insane man managed to gain control of the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation?"

He's got a hell of an answer, too:

That, my friends, is the unfortunate outcome of an economic system that has so profoundly failed to enforce economic equality, and a political system that so profoundly failed to protect its democracy from the influence of capital that it allowed itself to be totally captured by extreme lunatics backed by extreme wealth.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/04/anything-that-cant-go-on/#forever-eventually-stops

[tanadrin]

Sorry about the long ask, but what do you think about this claim: i often see marxists (and adjacent groups, blah blah) say that the united states (empire) is about to collapse or is gradually declining, something along those lines, and specifically with regard to its economy, military and ideology. For example, i was watching a video hosting Richard Wolff, and he claimed that the united states is being replaced by china as the global superpower; he compares the situation to the historical rise of the united states relative to the british empire that slowly took place in the 19th and 20th centuries. I think his comparison is slightly flawed (imo hes comparing apples to oranges here), but in the broad strokes he might be right? I also remember seeing a pretty respectable maoist on here claim the us military is failing. Idk, i would like to hear your take

This answer got real long, so I added a cut. The short version is "people who say things like this are living in a fantasy land, and you can safely ignore their opinions on anything else as a result."

The United States is not the USSR in 1990 or Somalia in 1994 or Rome in the fifth century, or anything similar. Failed states are absolutely a thing, and they're fascinating (and often quite depressing!) historical case studies, and the United States looks nothing like a failed state. It's not even about to collapse in the sense of "suffer a prolonged period of sharp economic decline that forces it to drastically reduce its presence in the wider world and curtails its power in influence." It's not even about to collapse in the sense of "experience significant regime change." The U.S. economy is, overall, doing quite well. There is no significant popular unrest. There is no elite appetite for revolution. There are not competing centers of power that would rather see the status quo burned to the ground than their rivals get power. You might want the U.S. to collapse, and you might not, but the idea it is about to is pure fantasy.

I think before we get to any other specific claims about the United States' position relative to other countries, it's important to note that claims of impending American collapse are, like claims of impending civilizational collapse or Paul Ehrlich's claim of worldwide hunger or breathless claims that the war in Ukraine is going to escalate into WW3 any day now, IMO affective claims about how the speaker feels about the world: there is a certain class of person who, whether out of nihilistic glee, hope of revolutionary change, or simply untrammeled anxiety sees the signs of collapse all around them, Doom-Is-Nigh streetcorner prophets who are emotionally invested in the idea of collapse, for whom the idea of collapse would often justify some pillar of their politics. If, after all, the US is a failed state about to be toppled by its own decadence, this would justify their inordinate degree of contempt for the US.

On another recent post someone phrased claims like this as often being more about "what would be necessary for someone's politics to be justified," and I think that's an important part of it! In fact I think "affective claims about the world being distorted into factual claims about the world bc they are what would be necessary to justify someone's politics" is a fully general phenomenon, regardless of political orientation. There are much milder forms of it than out-and-out doomerism, though of course the absurdity of doomerist claims to this degree make it really hard to take someone's claims about the state of the world seriously.

About the specific claims here:

Re: China: China has experienced terrific growth since the end of WW2, and that's great! A country of over a billion people should by any reasonable metric be one of the largest economies on Earth, and China is, it seems, taking its inevitable place internationally as an economic powerhouse. It's a big country with a ton of people, and it's terrific that it has been able to lift so many people out of the grinding poverty that prevailed throughout much of the country in the 20th century. But like a lot of middle-income countries it seems to be having a ton of trouble, for significant institutional reasons, transitioning from an industrialization-focused economy to one driven by consumer demand and consumer spending. AIUI (and I am so, so far from an expert; mostly I just read what folks like @argumate post from other sources), China has a lot of debt dragging down its economy, and weak consumer demand. China is still much poorer than the United States on a per capita basis, and though it has a large military, is much less capable of projecting its power beyond its borders. It has aspired to increase its economic and diplomatic influence through the Belt and Road initiative, but returns on this project have been decidedly mixed, and China's military and strategic focus remains decidedly confined to its neighborhood. It wants to absorb Taiwan and protect its interests in the South China Sea, and prop up North Korea and such, but it's not able to or interested in, like, fielding large carrier groups that routinely sail up and down the world's oceans or conduct invasions of distant countries like the U.S. is able to. N.B., I'm not saying those invasions are good, just that the U.S. can historically, if it wants, invade and occupy basically any small-to-medium sized country on the planet in a few weeks, and that's not the kind of capability China has, or--AFAICT--is interested in developing.

The British Empire comparison is also, I think, very misleading, and gets at something I find frustrating about a lot of modern Marxists: they want to fit everything into the model of 19th century capitalist imperialism, when the modern global system doesn't look too much like that anymore. Mostly countries like the United States, if they have economic interests in a country, don't invade and reduce the country to a status of colony to extract raw resources from. The Cold War supported a fair bit of regime change in the service of commercial interests, even in the aftermath of post-WW2 decolonization, but nowadays the tools used to develop and enforce the international order preferred by the Status Quo Coalition (which is led, but not commanded by the United States) are much more indirect. They don't involve directly administering colonies, which is significant because colonialism is, for the states that run it, expensive as hell. Sure, it's great for commercial interests--but it's often more a drain on state finances than anything else. I have come around to the view that colonialism was as much an expression of wealth as it was a means to acquire more. Britain was always a small-but-wealthy island country whose empire was much, much larger than its metropole. The vast majority of the population and wealth controlled by the United States is within the fifty states which comprise the core territory of the United States. This isn't Britain with a far-flung overseas empire which is expensive to administer and a minority of Britons on the island itself--this is a country whose wealth and industry is built on a population of 350 million or so which identifies as American first, which speaks English and votes for President and congress. Most of the United States' actual imperial possessions are tiny archipelagoes these days that are economically marginal, or else military bases overseas--these do not generate American wealth and power, they are expressions of it. For the United States to collapse like the British Empire did, it would have to lose control of California and Texas and the Midwest or something like that--which is a goofy-ass fantasy, because if the United States federal government disappeared tomorrow, I think the vast majority of the 350 million or so people living in the present borders of the United States would support re-establishing the United States federal government. Americans like and support the country they live in! This is very different from the subjects of the British Raj, or even the people of Australia and Canada, who had begun to develop their own identity (and thanks to distance from the metropole, completely divergent economic and political interests).

"The U.S. is an empire analogous Britain" is only true if you squint from very far away and don't care about the specifics of history, economics, or politics. But I think again the way to understand this claim is partly affective. If the U.S. really is the second incarnation of the British Empire, then you can cast a lot of disparate conflicts that otherwise don't fit the mold under the aegis of a broad anti-colonial struggle. It also facilitates a certain sort of base campism that some people love to indulge in--the NATO-is-always-evil-so-anything-NATO-doesn't-like-is-good angle, which has a lot of self-described leftists backing in to saying that Putin's Russia is somehow an antifascist or anticolonial force for good in the world.

"The U.S. military is failing" is pure cope. There's no country or active coalition of countries that's even remotely close to the U.S. military in capabilities. Though there is always going to be a stream of waste and corruption and medium-sized bureaucratic fuckups streaming out of the U.S. military, it remains without peer simply by virtue of one of the largest economies on the planet being willing to spend like 4% of its GDP on military stuff. The EU or China might in some counterfactual world be able to field a similar military if they spent a comparable amount, and had similar strategic aims, but they won't and they don't, so unless U.S. foreign policy drastically changes and military spending is slashed as a result, I don't see that changing at any time in the near future.

[iron-sparrow]

you must understand: they fear you

And so they continue their efforts to erase us.

When seeking updates about my passport (I'm aware it will likely be rejected) this morning, I saw that QIA+ had been removed from the Department of State's website. Previous instances of LGBTQIA+ have now been changed to LGB.

While federal institutions ban Black History Month and other observances as part of the new regime's ongoing efforts to strip away diversity, equity and inclusiveness, we must remember to keep celebrating; not with forced joy, but fire and rage. Do not go quietly. Fight for yourselves and those beside you. Chase your shouts for solidarity with true acts of advocacy, education, and service.

Once more, I choose to love you by offering to you a few basic resources.

The National Assoc. for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

Each and every NAACP member makes a difference to the complex, ongoing work of advancing racial equity. We have driven the hardest-fought wins for civil rights and social justice — with you by our side, we can accelerate the next milestones for Black Americans.

Zinn Education Project

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

With immigrant rights, trans justice, reproductive freedom, and more at risk, we’re in courts and communities across the country to protect everyone’s rights — and we need you with us.

Human Rights Campaign (HRC)

The Human Rights Campaign envisions a world where every member of the LGBTQ+ family has the freedom to live their truth without fear, and with equality under the law. We empower our 3 million members and supporters to mobilize against attacks on the most marginalized people in our community.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH runs between February 1 and March 1, 2025.

[dontforgetukraine]

The exhibition at Washington’s Ukraine House dedicated to the Holodomor genocide. Source: UkrInform

---

Washington’s Ukrainian House has opened an exhibition showcasing the survival meals that kept Ukrainians alive during Holodomor: oak bark soup, potato peel pancakes mixed with grass and flax seeds, and grass bread, according to UkrInform. The Holodomor, a famine that struck Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, stands as one of the most devastating events in Ukrainian history, resulting in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. The Soviet regime orchestrated this artificial famine under Joseph Stalin, who implemented extreme grain procurement policies that led to widespread starvation. The policies aimed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and resistance to Soviet control. In 2006, Ukraine officially recognized the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people. The designation has been supported by numerous countries, although it remains contested by some, notably Russia. During this period, the Soviet government confiscated grain and other food supplies from Ukrainian peasants while imposing impossibly high quotas for grain production. As a result, millions were left without food or means of survival. Historical estimates of the death toll vary widely, with figures ranging from 3.5 million to as many as 10 million victims. Activists in Washington have recreated some of the meals that Ukrainians ate to survive in order to draw Americans’ attention to the tragic page in Ukraine’s history.

“At the exhibition’s center, visitors can see a soup made from pinecones, twigs, and oak bark. We also recreated potato peel pancakes mixed with grass and flax seeds. In some regions of Ukraine, flour was mixed with grass to bake flatbreads"

The exhibit is open at the Ukraine House in Washington DC until the end of November.

Source: Oak bark soup, potato peels, pancakes with grass: Holodomor survival meals on display at exhibition in Washington

[crash476]

Thoughts on Andor and Spy Fiction

I want to preface this by saying that I appreciate the aims of Andor, and I do think that the first season succeeded in breaking away from Joseph Campbell's monomyth, while being a clear-eyed examination of how a fascist regime works. Especially from the perspective of ordinary people. But... I am a Rogue One fan first and foremost. And the second season was pretty bad. It was a four season story in one and that's the tip of the iceberg.

I was always bothered by the changes made to Cassian's backstory; they didn't feel right and contradicted what was established in the film. One gets the sense that Chris Weitz, Gary Whitta, and Gareth Edwards had a very different concept of who Cassian was and were likely pulling from different spy fiction than Tony Gilroy. @ruby-red-inky-blue made a good point that Rogue One Cassian is a John le Carré spy, while Andor Cassian is a James Bond/Jason Bourne type. There's a really good book about 1960s British spy novels called Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang by Mike Ripley. One of Ripley's observations is that spy novels of the period could be divided into "spy fantasy" as established by Ian Fleming, and what I call "spy realism," who's king will always be John le Carré.

Bond is the embodiment of post-Imperial British male fantasies. Fleming was an intelligence officer in the Royal Navy who spent WWII as a desk jockey. He was the guy planning the missions that his cousin Sir Christopher Lee (an agent of the Special Operations Executive) would go on. Bond was born from his frustrated desire to get into the field. Thus, Bond is a power fantasy. And Jason Bourne is an American equivalent. I haven't delved deep into Robert Ludlum, but from what I gleaned, he seemed to be a more conspiracy minded writer. Bourne is clearly a product of the revelations about MKUltra. Even then, Bourne plays into American male power fantasies. Bond longs for the days of Empire and sophistication, Bourne embodies the hyper individualism of America.

John le Carré (born David Cornwell) was an intelligence officer like Fleming, but a generation younger - his superiors at MI5 and MI6 would have been Fleming's peers. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was considered wildly subversive in 1963 because Le Carré wrote characters who were "breathtakingly ordinary." His spies are humans, first and foremost. They don't do any impeccably choreographed fight scenes marred by shaky-cam. There's no gadgets. If anything, it's a lot of detective work - espionage and mysteries are genre cousins, imo. Le Carré spies are good at their jobs, but are world weary and exhausted. Being as spy is presented in the least sexy way possible. Other writers like Len Deighton with his working class heroes would follow, along with tv series like Callan and The Sandbaggers. Bit of a tangent, but the creator of The Sandbaggers, Ian Mackintosh, disappeared in the Gulf of Alaska and there's rumours that he was Soviet of Chinese spy. If you want to learn more, Diamanda Hagan has a great video on Mackintosh and The Sandbaggers.

Unlike the spy fantasies, the appeal of spy realism is the promise of a peak behind the curtain. A lot of these books trade on the author's credentials as an insider and knowledge of how the intelligence world works. Now this can cross over with the spy fantasy realm - I would say that's one reason why The Bourne Identity was so popular was because it had the aesthetics of a spy realism film, but was a spy fantasy through and through. It's a have your cake and eat it sort of franchise. But spy realism isn't meant to be glamorous like spy fantasy. Spy realism doesn't really spectacle the way spy fantasy does. Spy realism simply isn't blockbuster fare, but if done right it wins awards. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney was sold a Bourne style series because, not to be insulting to the Americans, but that approach does appeal to American male power fantasies even more than Bond approach. And definitely more appealing than pure spy realism.

This leads me, ultimately, to where I think things went wrong with Cassian. A lot of ink has been spilled about the troubled production of Rogue One and the issues Edwards, and the rest of the writing team allegedly had with Gilroy. But Rogue One wasn't the first time Gilroy has had issues with other creative teams. He had a falling out with Matt Damon and Paul Greenrass over the Bourne films. It's why the franchise is the way it is now. Now Gilroy and Damon have buried the hatchet, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Greengrass. There was this sort of fragmentation in vision and really should have ended with The Bourne Ultimatum.

Looping this back to Andor, I have a hunch that even than playing with his new favourite character, Tony Gilroy really wanted another crack at Jason Bourne without the interference of Damon and Greengrass. Gilroy's famous for writing "director and actor proof" scripts after all. This is so apparent in the second season where Cassian becomes less of a human and more of a cipher. I will always love Identity the most because outside of his super spy mode, Jason is kind of sweet and dorky. I don't know, that's just my opinion. But as the movies progress, Bourne becomes less and less human. He becomes a force of nature no one can stop. And there's a lot of men who would love to be like that.

The spy who I think Cassian should have been modelled after is Alec Leamas of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. If you haven't read it, or seen the 1965 film with Richard Burton, you should. It's a gorgeous film with amazing acting, honestly one of the last greats of the black and white era. Like it's part of the Criterion Collection. This scene about the nature of spies is so good: "What do you think spies are?".

I have no idea if Edwards, Whitta, and Weitz ever read the book or watched the film when they coming up with Cassian. I'm far more certain they were influenced by The Guns of Navarone (it's another film that if you haven't seen it, you should). the version of him in Rogue One could easily be a Leamas in the middle of his career. Not quite cynical and burnt out enough to give Leamas' last speech, but getting there before he meets Jyn, Chirrut, Baze, and Bodhi. At the same time, Leamas has a great sense of humanity. There's a line early on in the book after Control talks about intelligence organizations needing to be as ruthless as their enemies, and while Leamas agrees with Control, it's for very different reasons. The paragraph goes, "Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the dunes, and the stream of refugees moving along it; saw the little aeroplane miles away, the procession stop and look towards it; and the plane coming in, nearly over the dunes; saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the bombs hit the road."

Honestly, Cassian in season one had that sense of humanity, even if his instincts are telling him to run and hide. But the point of season one of Andor was that you can't run and hide from fascism. It's the same thing as that supposed Trotsky quote, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Season two seems to lack a point for Cassian. He's Cassian Goddamn Andor now who's biggest badass spy in the Rebellion. That Cassian wouldn't be able to get volunteers to join Jyn and the Rogue One crew to go to Scarif. That Cassian couldn't do that out of a budding love for Jyn that reminds me T. E. Lawrence's dedication to Selim "Dahoum" Ahmed, "I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me / When we came."

[ouroborosmoons]

Israel's far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for the full annexation of the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

Speaking at a recent summit in occupied al-Quds, hosted by Israel for an American evangelical audience, Smotrich asserted that Israel should unequivocally declare there would be no Palestinian state.

Smotrich, who has a history of making outrage-inciting comments and provoking Palestinians, repeated his proposal of expanding Israeli settlements within the West Bank and other occupied territory.

He also urged for the return of Israeli settlements to Gaza, undoing the 2005 withdrawal. [Israel withdrew its military and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation. After its withdrawal enacting a blockade]

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a year-long genocidal camp in Gaza, earlier said that his regime would maintain control of the territory for an indefinite period.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Smotrich also called for Israeli control over the besieged Palestinian region to be solidified by establishing a permanent civilian and military presence. [...] he added that Palestinians should only retain limited local self-rule “devoid of national characteristics.”

The minister emphasized that those who insisted on a Palestinian state would be forced to leave and face expulsion. “Those who do not want or are unable to put aside their national ambitions will receive assistance from us to emigrate to one of the many Arab countries where the Arabs can realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world,” he said.

The latest remarks come as Netanyahu is executing a plan to starve out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes in northern Gaza. Under the "generals' plan", civilians who remain in northern Gaza are classified as combatants, allowing Israeli troops to kill them. They are denied access to food, water, medicine, and fuel. The plan gave Palestinians a week to leave the northern third of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, before declaring it a closed military zone.

The Israeli genocidal war in Gaza continues to kill more civilians and leave behind a trail of destruction across the besieged strip.

[democracyunderground]

THE AMERICAN CENTURY IS OVER

America Committed Suicide on November 5th, 2024

1. Canada: Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.

"The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the 2nd World War—a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.

Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.

The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of good and services—is over.

While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality."

And just like that, the age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.

We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.

He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.

He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.

There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:

they wanted what he promised;

they didn’t believe what he promised; or

they didn’t understand what he promised.

Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.

And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people.

2. No Going Back

Understand this: There is no going back.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.

This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.

Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.

Europeans are moving ahead with their own security plans because they realize, as a French minister put it, “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” He was right.

The Canadian prime minister declared the age of American leadership over. He was right.

Instead of arguing with this reality, or denying it, we should face it.

It’s bad enough being a failing empire. Let’s not also be a delusional failing empire. Let’s at least have some dignity about our situation.

The world will move on without us.

Economically this means that international trade will reorganize without the United States as the central hub. Relationships will be forged without concern as to our preferences. The dollar may well be displaced as the world’s reserve currency. American innovation will depart for other shores as the best and brightest choose to make their lives in countries where the rule of law is solid, secret police do not disappear people from the streets, and the government does not discourage research and make economic war on universities.

There’s a reason why countries like Belarus and El Salvador aren’t tech hubs.

All of this will mean slower growth at home and declining economic mobility. The pie will shrink and people will become more desperate to hold on to their slices.

If you want a small preview, look at what has happened to the British economy since Brexit.

The drag we experience will be much greater, because we had much further to fall.

In the security space, Europe will organize apart from us. The Europeans will create a separate nuclear umbrella and will likely include Canada, Japan, and Australia in their alliance. The “free world” as we have understood it for the entirety of our lifetimes will no longer include America.

As a result, America will either drift, or find itself becoming more closely allied with the world’s authoritarians. We may become closer with Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. We may find that we need them—Russia as a counterweight to democratic Europe and China as a source of cheap manufacturing to relieve some of the price pressure on American consumers.

The end of the American era doesn’t mean everything will become chaos overnight. We aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to the sound of the blaring war rig horn from Mad Max. We are still a rich country, with momentum carrying us forward. But in ways that will soon be perceptible and eventually be undeniable, things will get worse. And facts about America and the world that we have taken for granted since the end of the Second World War will no longer hold true.

3. Idiots

On the day that Trump’s tariffs collapsed America’s position in the world, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to Brussels to demand that NATO allies increase defense spending to 5 percent of their budgets.

But here is how utterly stupid and unserious our government is:

Europe is going to rearm. And they are going to do so by building up their internal defense industries so that they do not have to rely on America, which is in the process of threatening military action against a NATO member.

And the American response to this has been to cry foul.

U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers’ participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The messages delivered by Washington in recent weeks come as the EU takes steps to boost Europe's weapons industry, while potentially limiting purchases of certain types of U.S. arms.

Our government thinks it can simultaneously:

demand that Europe re-arm;

threaten our European allies with territorial annexation; and

demand that Europe buy American weapons.

We have a deeply stupid government—from our economically illiterate president to our craven and foolish secretary of state, from the freelancing billionaire dilettante who is gutting American soft power to the vaccine-denying health secretary who is firing as much talent as he can. From the senior economics advisor who thinks comic books are good investments, to the senators who voted to confirm this cabinet of hacks, to the representatives who stumble over themselves justifying each new inane MAGA pronouncement.

But also, we have the government we deserve.

The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it."

[probablyasocialecologist]

If anything, the 2024 election season in the United States has demonstrated that the multicultural ruling elite—including but especially those of a liberal stripe—have no intention of solving the many crises of its own making. On the contrary, their role is to manage “through brutality,” the contradictions of a global necrocapitalist order. To suggest there are identifiable patterns cyclically reproduced by a colonial capitalist world order is not to encourage a sense of hopelessness but a sense of clarity, a grounding toward what can and cannot be accomplished within the given regimes of liberal redress. The Zionist mass extermination campaign in occupied Palestine, with the open and active participation on the part of the liberal democracies of the West, exemplifies the reality that liberalism need not fascism to carry out its regimes of racialized horror intrinsic to Western civilization. Liberalism, in its own right, efficiently exports perpetual violence and war—through occupations, aerial warfare, and economic terrorism—that is largely proclaimed to be exclusive to twentieth-century, or more recently, Trumpian fascism. And yet, every region on the receiving end of Western liberal democracies’ deadly exports of democracy and freedom is left with mass corpses and new avenues of extraction and accumulation that enrich Euro-American cities.  Despite this, liberalism—due to its strategic attempts to position itself as the benign alternative to far right-wing tyranny—is widely believed to be a benevolent institution, political ideology, and therefore a willing ally to the concerns of and political struggles from below. However, a thorough internationalist investigation of the machinations and material outcomes, specifically as it pertains to the working poor, of liberal democracies paints a vastly different reality while also demonstrating the inefficacy of the ballot towards remedying these outcomes. 

[...]

The baseline, permanent state of U.S. politics, specifically but not exclusively at the national level, is that of right-wing dominance. The broadest understanding of American history only proves this—including the last 40 years of neoliberal hegemony, an explicitly brutal right-wing enterprise. A fruitful question we should all ask, is at what point has the U.S. political and economic system ever worked in accordance with the masses of its people? Think about it. During its Indigenous slaughter campaigns that made way for the creation of the modern nation-state? Or, during the worldmaking and world-breaking regime of racial-chattel slavery—in which stolen African labor was directly pinned against that of the labor of the white working poor? Or maybe the Jim/Jane Crow period which oversaw even more destitution and suffering for Black-African people than that of its predecessor? Or, any period since the early 1900s—sans the short-lived era of the New Deal (which was not only brief but exclusive i.e., neglected much of the racialized and poor in its material output)?  Many well-meaning people have tried to do good work holding political office. But how much does one’s morality matter in a capitalist political system that is beholden to the interests of the finance-corporate sectors of civil society? 

3 November 2024

[fatehbaz]

"The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe". British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend's seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. "Towards infinity!"

---

In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called [...] the Congo Free State. [...] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. [...] This was [...] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium [...] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.

Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with funds for a series of monumental building projects [...]. Indeed, Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” [...]. The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing [...]. [H]istorical research [...] recovers Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them [...]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation [...]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, [...] Leopold - now the Roi Batisseur ("Builder King") he long aimed to be - planned renovations explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV's Versailles. Enormous greenhouses contained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. [...]

---

The Tervuren Congo palace [...]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. [...] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots [...] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue [...]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies [...]. As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from British businessman “Colonel” John Thomas North [...].

Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold [...] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 [...]. Ostend encompassed a boomtown not of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but of beachfront and leisure [...] [developed] as a "British-style" seaside resort. [...] Leopold [...] [w]as said to spend "as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels," [...]. Ostend underwent a dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. [...] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. [...] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit [...], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle [...]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and “the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.” Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.

---

Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].

First, it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regime and set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening [...] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property [...]. Leopold [...] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions [...] to extract and export wild rubber.

Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic [...] had made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions [...]. Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). [...]

---

One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront, the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” [...]

King Leopold met American mining magnate Thomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise: Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of [...] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North [...].

At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point [...]. Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) [...].

---

Text above by: Debora Silverman. "Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium". e-flux Architecture (Appropriations series). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[maxdibert]

Max we may not agree on everything but as a Polish hp fan and ww2 history nerd I stand so hard by you. As another person so disgustingly tired by USians or however u say it. everything u said was true and they're mad with having to face reality 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ take care and know I'm with u

I think there’s a shared feeling among people from cultures that have lived through wars, endured totalitarian regimes and dictatorships, and gone through long periods of extreme poverty, and it’s that we’re disgusted by States’ people when they talk about politics. Especially when they come crying about things that have happened — and are happening — around the world forever, many of which, over the last century, the U.S. has been directly or indirectly responsible for.

And then they have the audacity to lecture us on what does or doesn’t count as national suffering. Or to explain our own history to us. Or to “legitimize” social trauma that still affects so many societies to this day, and all of it from a position completely disconnected from our realities, with zero cultural understanding.

Honestly, I think these people live in such a Hollywood bubble that they can’t even realize that yes, our countries may have their disputes, mutual resentment, and complicated histories, but if there’s one thing we all agree on, it’s that US people are unbearable. And the problem is they don’t realize that. Yes, our cultures have our internal conflicts, but we know where the line is. Then they show up and start spewing nonsense they don’t understand, preaching with their puritan morals straight out of Methodist churches and Presbyterian cults like they’ve got the slightest clue about the real world.

They talk about WWII like the garbage movies they were sold are the truth, because no one ever taught them that it was France, England, and Russia who broke their backs and lost hundreds of thousands of lives fighting Nazis, and by the time the “heroes” showed up, Hitler was already pissing himself in a bunker.

And no, I will not tolerate someone from a country that’s never had a war on its soil in the last two centuries lecturing me about fascism, especially when Nazis tested their weapons and assault strategies on my country, flattening cities to help install a dictator who stayed in power for forty years.

And I truly think there’s a universal sense — among people who’ve actually lived through these things — that no one has the right to explain your history or trauma to you. Especially not someone whose country hasn’t seen real war or dictatorship in generations.

I know I’m mixing a lot of things here and getting intense, sorry. This really isn’t the side of me I meant to bring out in this space, I usually keep this for political circles. But I have a huge problem with Americans talking about fascism like they’re experts, because honestly? Anyone else has more right to speak on it than they do.

I just can’t with them. I’m sorry. They bring out the worst in me.

Forgive the rant, I just got my period and I tend to get even more intense than usual when that happens. So to anyone reading this: I apologize. But also… ugh. Americans.

[alainamama17]

The Shadows of History: Parallels and Warnings in American Democracy

As a historian, I am acutely aware that while history does not repeat itself, it often presents echoes that serve as warnings for the future. The United States today stands at a crossroads, with certain elements reminiscent of 1930s Nazi Germany and the ambitious plans of Project 2025, raising concerns about the direction in which the country is heading.

The 1930s in Germany were marked by the rise of authoritarianism, a period where democratic institutions were systematically dismantled in favor of a totalitarian regime. The parallels drawn between that era and the current political climate in the United States are not to suggest an identical repetition of events, but rather to highlight concerning trends that, if left unchecked, could undermine the very foundations of American democracy.

**Project 2025 and the Unitary Executive Theory**

Project 2025, a conservative initiative developed by the Heritage Foundation, aims to reshape the U.S. federal government to support the agenda of the Republican Party, should they win the 2024 presidential election. Critics have characterized it as an authoritarian plan that could transform the United States into an autocracy. The project envisions widespread changes across the government, particularly in economic and social policies, and the role of federal agencies.

This initiative bears a resemblance to the early strategies employed by the Nazi Party, which sought to consolidate power and align all aspects of government with their ideology. The unitary executive theory, which asserts absolute presidential control over the executive branch, is a central tenet of Project 2025. This theory echoes the power consolidation that occurred under Hitler's regime, where legal authority was centralized to bypass democratic processes.

**The Erosion of Democratic Norms**

In both historical and contemporary contexts, the erosion of democratic norms is a precursor to the loss of liberty. The United States has witnessed a polarization of politics, where partisan interests often override the common good. The Supreme Court, once a non-partisan arbiter of the Constitution, has been accused of partisanship, with decisions increasingly influenced by political ideologies rather than constitutional law. This shift mirrors the way the judiciary in Nazi Germany became a tool for enforcing the will of the regime, rather than a protector of the constitution.

**The Role of Propaganda and Media**

Propaganda played a crucial role in Nazi Germany, shaping public opinion and suppressing dissent. Today, the media landscape in the United States is deeply divided, with outlets often serving as echo chambers that reinforce ideological beliefs. This division hampers the ability of citizens to engage in informed discourse and make decisions based on factual information, a cornerstone of a functioning democracy.

**Civil Liberties and Minority Rights**

The targeting of minority groups was a hallmark of Nazi policy, justified by a narrative of nationalism and racial purity. In the United States, there has been a rise in xenophobia and policies that discriminate against certain groups. The protection of civil liberties and minority rights is essential to prevent the kind of societal divisions that can lead to the marginalization of entire communities.

**Conclusion**

The parallels between the United States today, Project 2025, and 1930s Nazi Germany serve as a stark reminder of the fragility of democracy. It is imperative that as Americans, we remain vigilant against the forces that seek to undermine democratic institutions and principles. The lessons of history implore us to safeguard the values of liberty, equality, and justice, lest we allow the shadows of the past to shape our future.

As a historian and educator, I believe it is our responsibility to draw upon these parallels not to incite fear, but to inspire action. We must engage in civic education, promote critical thinking, and encourage participation in the democratic process. Only through collective effort can we ensure that the American experiment continues to be a beacon of hope and freedom for the world.

[misfitwashere]

Rejected Cabinet Nominees

Some historical guidance

TIMOTHY SNYDER

JAN 16

Historically, nominees for cabinet positions have been rejected by the Senate or have withdrawn their candidacies in order to prevent that outcome. It is not common, but nor is it abnormal. The power of "advice and consent" granted to the Senate by the Constitution has been exercised in practice. 

A number of Trump's appointments are simply outrageous by historical, ethical, strategic, or any other standards. The ongoing confirmation hearings tend to normalize the bizarre (although Democrats and a couple of Republicans have asked meaningful questions.)

So a few examples of failed nominations might serve as one tool among others to keep the events of the moment in perspective.

Secretary of Defense

John Tower was the first George H.W. Bush nominee for secretary of defense. He has served in the Senate for more than twenty years, and had chaired its Armed Services Committee. He was an author of the Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra Affair. He was questioned by Senators about his past alcohol use and womanizing.

Pete Hegseth, unlike Tower, has zero knowledge, experience, or qualifications for the of running the Department of Defense. His program, judging from his books, is to ignore foreign enemies, politicize the armed forces, and carry out a "Holy War" against Americans. Pete Hegseth's womanizing and alcohol use, by his own account, far exceed Tower's. Unlike Tower, Hegseth paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault in circumstances that, by her account, strongly suggest the use of a rape drug. Hegseth had to resign from both of the advocacy groups he ran because of incompetence and drunkenness. He regularly had to be physically carried away from events because he was too drunk to stand. In once case he had to be prevented from joining strippers on a stage. He also displayed total financial and budgetary incompetence. In this connection it is worth mentioning that the Department of Defense has the largest budget of any government in history.

There is a disturbing tendency to forgive Hegseth everything because he is a veteran. This seems unfair to veterans who do not display his failures of character. But it also contains within itself the troubling idea that soldiers can do no wrong: an idea that Hegseth himself seems to hold. That way lies military dictatorship. In any event: Tower served in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War and was in the reserve for decades.

The Senate rejected Tower.

Director of National Intelligence.

This position was created relatively recently and elevated to cabinet rank still more recently. It is meant to oversee the work of all American intelligence agencies. So a relevant historical comparison will be to the position of director of central intelligence.

Anthony Lake was second-term Bill Clinton's nominee for the position of director of central intelligence. Lake was eminently qualified. He is one of the most accomplished American diplomats of the post-1945 period. Among many other positions he was Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under Carter, and National Security Advisor during Clinton's first term. His nomination ran into trouble because of two occasions when his deputies on the National Security Council failed to inform him of discussions with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee about donor access to the White House.

Tulsi Gabbard has no qualifications to be Director of National Intelligence. A very long list of Americans with national security experience regard her as a danger to the safety of Americans. She is known abroad as a supporter of two of the world's most violent dictators, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. As a congresswomen she consistently made excuses for Assad, whose regime killed something like half a million people before it was overthrown. She proposed that the Russo-Ukrainian war could be ended "in the spirit of aloha" and repeats Russian propaganda tropes. Russian media refer to Gabbard as "comrade" and "girlfriend" and "our agent."

Under Senate pressure, Lake withdrew his candidacy.

Attorney General

Zoe Baird was nominated by Bill Clinton for attorney general at the beginning of his first term in 1993. She was eminently qualified professionally for the job. She had however hired undocumented immigrants in her household and had not paid Social Security taxes for them.

Pam Bondi is Donald Trump's nominee for the same position. As part of Donald Trump's legal team, she sought to justify his attempt to overturn the results of an election. As Florida attorney general, she accepted luxurious perks from relevant parties in cases she was considering. In that capacity she also failed to pursue a case against Trump University after a political group supporting received a check, an illegal donation, from Trump's foundation signed by Trump. As a lobbyist she represented a Russian money manager convicted in Kuwait and served as a public relations representative for the government of Qatar. She was paid more than $100,000 a month just for that assignment, which she left in order to defend Trump from conviction after his first impeachment. Then she went back to working for Qatar.

Under Senate pressure, Baird withdrew her candidacy.

Succeeding events created the closest thing we have to a historical standard for rejecting cabinet nominees by Republican Senators: the employment of undocumented workers.

After Baird withdrew, Clinton nominated Kimba Wood. She too was eminently qualified to serve as attorney general. It emerged that she too had hired an undocumented worker as a nanny. Wood did so at a time when this was legal, and she paid the appropriate taxes. Nevertheless, the mere fact that she had employed one undocumented person, entirely legally, stopped her candidacy. in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Linda Chavez to be secretary of labor. She then withdrew her candidacy after it emerged that she had paid an undocumented person to work in her household.

So one might move beyond the obvious point that Bondi's scandals dwarf Baird's (and Hegseth's those of Tower, and Gabbard's those of Lake) and propose a pragmatic line of questioning that would apply to Trump's other nominees. Have they or their companies employed undocumented workers? It seems a reasonable question to ask, especially of the billionaires. Given the coming administration's oft-declared hard line on illegal immigration, this would seem to be a minimum standard for its cabinet nominees.

The Senate has a constitutional role, and in the past has exercised it. Some of the nominees presented to them this month are wildly inappropriate to the point of risking the integrity of American national security and calling into question basic principles of the rule of law. The history of failed nominations reminds us just how far some of these people fall below any reasonable standard.

[darkmaga-returns]

For four years, the Biden regime peddled a fairy tale of economic triumph, crowing about job booms while Americans drowned in skyrocketing costs and record debt.

Families juggled second jobs, raided savings, and racked up credit-card bills just to eat, all while the administration and its media lapdogs insisted the economy was thriving.

Now, the truth is out: the Labor Department admits hundreds of thousands of those hyped jobs were pure fiction, conjured to prop up Biden’s image before the 2024 election.

The numbers don’t lie, but the regime sure did.

Newly released data exposes the extent of these discrepancies, raising questions about the integrity of economic reporting under Joe Biden.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revealed that job growth from March 2023 to March 2024 was overstated by 598,000 nonfarm payrolls, marking the largest revision since 2009.

Initial monthly reports boasted 2.9 million jobs were added during this period, but the BLS’s preliminary annual benchmark, derived from the more comprehensive Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, slashed this to 2.3 million—a 30% drop.

This reduces the average monthly job gain to 173,500, significantly below the 242,000 initially claimed.

For July to September 2023, the BLS’s Business Employment Dynamics data reported a net loss of 1,000 private-sector jobs, contradicting the monthly reports of 399,000 jobs gained.

Similarly, from March to June 2023, monthly reports estimated 398,000 jobs added, while BED showed a loss of 163,000 private-sector jobs. This suggests a net loss of over 160,000 jobs in mid-2023, not the near-800,000 gain advertised.

[mariacallous]

History grounds us.

History can help us find our footing. This is not because we can ever know what will happen next. It is rather because history can make familiar some consistent patterns of human life.

Such prompts for further thought are not analogies. When we think in terms of analogies, we get stuck on the differences, and those sticking points then becomes an excuse not to think historically at all. Of course what comes next in the 2020s won't be exactly like the 1790s or the 1860s or the 1930s or the 1990s — the reference points I am choosing here.

But in recalling these epochs (or others) we can start to see certain resemblances, certain patterns, and get ourselves thinking again.

In this spirit, I offer these four scenarios for Trumpomuskovia, the musko-trumpified America that is already upon us.

The 1790s. Rescuing Russia

One possible Trumpomuskovia rescues Russia: actively, passively, or just by collapsing. This scenario draws from the eighteenth century, the time of the partitions of Poland.

Empress Catherine’s Russian Empire, founded just decades before, was in trouble. It had no clear means of succession, and Catherine herself was the German wife of a murdered tsar (her husband). It saved itself by warfare in Ukraine, bringing under its control its fertile territories. Fortunately for Catherine the Great, its western neighbor, Poland, suffered from tremendous inequality of wealth, and was rent by struggles between clans of magnates -- or, as we would say today, oligarchs. One of her former lovers was made king. He did not always do what she wanted, but his Poland was not going to effectively resist. In this situation, Russia was able to intervene in Poland, brings about its partition, and claim Ukraine (beginning the relatively short historical period when Ukraine was ruled from Russia).

Today the Russian Federation, founded a few decades ago, is also in trouble. It has no clear means of succession, as its ruler has done away with democracy and established a personal dictatorship. He has a fantasy of Russian unity with Ukraine, based in some considerable measure on the exploits of the eighteenth-century empress, Catherine. Like Catherine, Putin counts on divisions within (and among) western powers. His campaign for Ukraine has been extremely bloody, and has brought the Russian economy to the point of collapse.

But like Catherine, Putin has favorites that are close to power: Musk and Trump. They will not always do exactly what he wants, but they probably generally will, and their will certainly bring a fractious oligarchy. Putin is counting on the Musk-Trump regime to rescue him by turning American power away from its allies and towards Russia. Quite a few of Trump's proposed appointments, and much of Musk's rhetoric, suggest that rescuing Russia will be the priority.

The 1860s. Secession

When Poland was partitioned at the end of the end of the eighteenth century, it was a shock. Could a major country simply disappear from the map? A second scenario is suggested by the 1860s, when the United States nearly did.

Some of Poland's rebels, such as Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, crossed the Atlantic to help America's fledgling republic, which they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their own. Kościuszko saw slavery as a curse that could weaken the United States, much as serfdom had weakened Poland. Unlike Poland, the young American republic faced no great neighbor, at least after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 withdrawal of the British after the War of 1812. But the issue of slavery was almost enough to break the American republic anyway. In the aftermath of the Civil War, whites in southern states were able to exert disproportionate political power, by preventing African Americans from voting, and by dominating first the Democratic and then the Republican Party.

The United States in 2025 will be, in some sense, the victory of the old south. But is it a sustainable one? When people think of themselves as rebels they sometimes push too far when they actually have power. The social and cultural policies proposed by Trumpomuskovia are mainstream in much of the country, but not for most of the population. And the implementation of some of them, especially mass deportation, can reveal fault lines inside the federal government, between the federal government and the states, and among the states. An attempt to deport millions of people in 2025 could lead to clashes within and contests for control over the armed forces. Over the longer run, repressive social and cultural policies could lead to shifts of population, making the differences among the states still greater than they are. Trump has already been telling his people that the differences between them and the "enemy within" are greater than those between America and China or America and Russia.

Will Trumpomuskovia be stable? It is not a great leap for people to decide to move to California, on the logic that the state could make it alone, and already has a secession movement. Indeed, these moves are already happening.

From there it is a small step to start thinking of constellations of states that would be wealthier and more functional than the current United States. A west coast union would certainly be richer, and would have its own borders with Canada and Mexico.

It is sad to think about. But the next round of musing could easily follow: a west coast union plus Canada plus the New England, New York and Minnesota would have an economy about 2/3 the size of what was left of the United States, with a far higher GDP per capita, a better standard of living and longer life spans — just going by today’s numbers.

Such a hypothetical country would not have to worry about free trade with Canada, since it would be Canada; and it would not have to worry about free trade with Mexico, since it would have a border with Mexico. Unlike the residual United States, aka Trumpomuskovia, it would not be fighting a trade war with the European Union.

The 1930s: Electoral Fascism

This is the most familiar of the thought experiments and so probably requires the least elaboration. The resemblances are all familiar.

A politician who has attempted a coup d'état comes to power later anyway on the strength of elections, with a minority of the overall vote. He is supported by conservatives who want the Left to suffer and businesspeople who imagine that all he will do is suppress the trade unions. This politician speaks angrily of the media as "the enemy of the people" and condemns his political opponents as "the enemy within." He hopes for some kind of emergency in order to declare a state of permanent emergency -- for Hitler this was the Reichstag Fire of 1933, for Trump it could be something entirely imaginary. At that stage of fascism, an event in the real world could be made an element of a conspiracy; at the current stage, the event in the real world might not even be necessary.

Trump speaks, sensibly enough from his fascist perspective, of "Hitler's generals." What Trump has in mind is Hitler's personal control of the armed forces, which began in 1934 when soldiers and officers began to swear a personal oath to the Führer instead of an oath to the German constitution. It was indeed this event that made of Hitler the Führer, the Leader, rather than simply the chancellor or prime minister. Hitler's men opened their first concentration camp right after he came to power; if Trump's men are able to round up millions of non-citizens, they too will be in camps -- an institution, as we know, that can be turned to other purposes than its initial ones. The first major act of violence of Hitler's SS, aside from establishing those camps and running them, was a mass deportation of non-citizens.

From this scenario come the political lessons that I have tried to make familiar in other posts and in On Tyranny.

The 1990s: Reliving Russia

The fourth and final scenario is one that some of us will remember. Indeed, the 1990s in Russia might be seen not just as a point of reference, but as an origin story of Trumpomuskovia. In my book The Road to Unfreedom, I tried to argue that Russia, with its oligarchy, media monopolies, and fascism, revealed possible futures for the United States. This has never seemed a more reasonable place to begin an analysis than right now.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who became known as oligarchs struggled to control the parts of the economy that could return quick profits -- the minerals, the metals, the pipelines, the hydrocarbons. All of this took place against the background, especially in the West, of either intensely naive or intensely cynical free market ideology: what ever is happening in Russia must be for the best, since without the state the magical forces of capitalism will ensure growth, freedom, and democracies. Instead, the collapse of the state led to wealth inequality, a battle for final control at the top, the perfection of alternative realities and media disinformation, and now fascism and a war of atrocity against Ukraine.

In that struggle, a doddering elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The successor they chose, Vladimir Putin, was eventually able to tame them all, and become the oligarch king, the boss of bosses. In doing so he did not clean up the system, but simply insured that all of the dirt was his own. This situation rather strongly resembles the America of today, with an elderly president, Donald Trump, surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The oligarchs have chosen his successor: JD Vance.

It is very hard to tell, right now, who is actually running the show, if anyone. All of the headlines are about shocking personalities who do not identify in any sense with the larger interests of the country. Elon Musk and his tame DOGE seem set to dismantle the parts of the American government that are profitable and seize them for himself. All of this recalls late Yeltsin, and thus the transition of Putin. A difference: ketamine and fentanyl for the White House, not vodka as in the Kremlin back then.

Here’s the twist: there is actually an overlap of personnel in the two scenarios, and so now we are perhaps dealing with one history, rather than the past as an inspiration for the present. When Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, no one would really have imagined that he would not only survive the oligarchs but become their chief and still be ruling a quarter century later. So is the Putin in this scenario… Putin?

It is tempting to imagine that Putin, who has to be regarded now as one of the oligarchs around Trump, could also unexpectedly end up on top, as America relives the Russia of the 1990s. He certainly occupies quite a lot of Trump's mental space. He is working to bully Trump, to make him feel subordinate (for example by showing naked pictures of his wife on television). Nikolai Patrushev, a central figure in the Russian intelligence and security apparatus under Putin, reminds Trump that he has debts to pay. Putin clearly has like-minded allies around Trump, Musk most importantly. Some of the people at the top of Trump's preferred national security team (Gabbard, Hegseth) mix Putinism and anti-qualifications.

Or is the Putin in this scenario Vance? Putin is now 72, and Trump is now 78. Will either of them be around in four years? Putin’s mass murderer client Assad is on the run in Syria and the ruble is well under a penny. At some point, one can at least imagine, Putin’s charisma fades. It is not hard to imagine Trump or Putin or both expelled from oligarchs' island. Putin won after the 1990s as an outsider; who is the dark horse now? Vance is the closest thing to a Putin-like figure in this scenario: odd background, less money than the people around him, rich patrons, clear ideology, smarter than he seems. But might one of his oligarch patrons actually emerge on top?

Or could Trump himself, despite looking like Yeltsin, surprise us and end up being the Putin of the scenario, first getting close to the oligarchs, then using the government to freeze them out, and finally himself getting rich, as he has always wanted?

But if our Reliving Russia scenario is the helpful one, the crucial point of resemblance is the dismantling of government and the oligarchical claim on whatever is left. Who emerges on top is, in some sense, secondary.

Combinations

History helps, because everything that has happened was something that could have happened. And those things that could have happened, usually unexpected at the time, stretch our minds about what might happen.

In the near future, in coming months and years, these four scenarios can intersect and combine. A Trumpomuskovia that seeks to rescue Russia can also be one that relives Russia. A Trumpomuskovia that looks fascist is also one that risks secession.

History warns. It would be wonderful if these scenarios helped people in positions of responsibility to make good choices.

History surprises. Strikingly, we see in most of the scenarios presence of Ukraine: for the old Russian Empire, and for the present one, and for that matter for Hitler, whose chief war aim was the control of Ukraine. Ukraine is a useful shortcut as we try to evaluate Trumpomuskovites: what do they say about Ukraine? As a rule of thumb, those that wish for its fall also want the fall of the American republic. I would expect that the first actions regarding Ukraine will be a harbinger of what is to come for America if Ukraine is sold out, expect America to be sold for parts.

History enlivens. It gets us outside the box of the daily outrages and our emotional responses. As we think outside the box, we sometimes catch a glimpse of what is inside it. In all four of these past moments, we see the problem of inequality somewhere close to the origin of political collapse. Any future rescue operation for the American republic will have to begin there.

[borbon-casual]

I know nothing about Fernando VII but your art is so nice I’m interested now…. who is this pookie what is he like

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¡𝐇𝐨𝐥𝐚! Thank you so much for your question, I'm glad to know that you like my drawings! Also, I appreciate that you want to know more about Fernando VII, as sharing information about my favorite character and the history of my country makes me very happy! ૮₍ ˊᗜˋ₎ა ♡ . ੭

I'm going to give a brief summary of his political career, as it's the basis of the character. I can't explain what Fernando VII was like without you first knowing what happened during his reign, so this answer won't fully answer your question. If you want to know more about his personality, I suggest you ask me again ‹𝟹.

𑁯ׂᰍ 🗝️𑂻𑂴 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐄 𝐒𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐍 ❟

Fernando VII of Bourbon and Parma was King of Spain between 1808 and 1833. He was born on 14 October 1784, the ninth child of King Carlos IV of Bourbon and Queen Maria Luisa of Parma, although he was the first male to reach adolescence and be proclaimed heir.

From childhood, his life was marked by health problems and the mistreatment of his tutor, Manuel Godoy, who isolated him for four years and imposed on him a curriculum that was ineffective for governing. His parents also paid no attention to him, which made him a perfect target for the enemies of the king and his favourite.

The so-called "partido fernandino" conspired twice against the government of Carlos IV, in 1807 and 1808. The last of these conspiracies led to the Motín de Aranjuez, which overthrew Carlos IV and put Fernando on the throne. However, with the napoleonic invasion, he had to travel to Bayonne, where both he and his father were forced to abdicate in favour of Napoleon Bonaparte.

ғᴏʀᴄᴇᴅ ᴀʙᴅɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴs ɪɴ ʙᴀʏᴏɴɴᴇ.

Fernando spent six years in solitary confinement in the Palace of Valençay, together with his brother Carlos María Isidro and his uncle Antonio Pascual, under the surveillance of Talleyrand, foreign minister of the French Empire. In 1814, he was released after the victory of the Spanish troops over the French in the War of Independence.

While Fernando VII was a prisoner, the Cortes of Cádiz drafted the Constitution of 1812, with the aim of legitimizing him as a monarch and establishing a liberal regime. However, upon returning to Spain, he abolished the Constitution and restored absolutism, inspiring kingdoms such as Portugal and Naples to do the same.

This period is known as the Sexénio Absolutista (1814-1820). In 1814, Fernando VII signed the Manifesto de los Persas, beginning the repression against liberals. To strengthen his power, he received support from European powers, especially Russia, whose Tsar Alexander I considered him a key ally.

At the same time, the American colonies began their independence movements, which caused enormous military and economic strain on Spain.

ғᴇʀɴᴀɴᴅᴏ ᴠɪɪ sɪɢɴɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇ ᴀʙᴏʟɪᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴏɴsᴛɪᴛᴜᴛɪᴏɴ.

Fed up with the crisis, in 1820, Coronel Rafael del Riego led a coup d'état that forced the king to restore the Constitution of 1812 and negotiate with the colonies. The uprising was successful and Fernando VII was forced to govern as a constitutional monarch for three years, although against his will.

During this period, known as the Trienio Liberal (1820-1823), institutions of the Ancien Régime were abolished and an attempt was made to modernize the country with diplomatic, economic and social reforms. However, the liberal government faced strong internal divisions between moderates, extremists and absolutists, which prevented the effective implementation of the reforms. Meanwhile, Fernando VII asked the Holy Alliance for help to recover his absolute power and Tsar Alexander I convinced the other countries to intervene in Spain.

In 1823, France sent the army of the Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis, led by the Duke of Angoulême — Fernando's cousin —, who restored absolutism. Thus began the last stage of his reign: the Década Ominisa (1823-1833).

ᴍᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ʙᴇᴛᴡᴇᴇɴ ғᴇʀɴᴀɴᴅᴏ ᴠɪɪ ᴀɴᴅ ʟᴏᴜɪs, ᴅᴜᴋᴇ ᴏғ ᴀɴɢᴏᴜʟᴇ̂ᴍᴇ, ɪɴ ᴘᴜᴇʀᴛᴏ ᴅᴇ sᴀɴᴛᴀ ᴍᴀʀɪ́ᴀ.

With Fernando VII again as absolute monarch, the persecutions, exiles and imprisonments of liberals returned. However, the king attempted an "absolute reformism", incorporating some liberal elements into absolutism to maintain balance. However, this caused even more conflicts: in addition to liberal insurrections, royalist uprisings arose, which did not accept any change in the absolutist model.

Little by little, the king leaned towards more liberal policies, influenced by his brother Francisco de Paula Antonio and his wife, Maria Cristina de Bourbon-Two Sicilies. In 1830, when the queen gave birth to the future Isabel II, Fernando VII issued the Pragmatic Sanction, which allowed his daughter to inherit the throne. Since he had no sons, he relied on the liberals to ensure her succession.

Unfortunately, when Fernando VII died in 1833, his brother, Carlos María Isidro, refused to accept Isabel II as queen and claimed the throne, which led to the First Carlist War (1833-1840), marking the beginning of a new period of instability in Spain.

ᴋɪɴɢ ғᴇʀɴᴀɴᴅᴏ ᴠɪɪ ᴀɴᴅ ϙᴜᴇᴇɴ ᴍᴀʀɪᴀ ᴄʀɪsᴛɪɴᴀ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴛʜᴇɪʀ ᴅᴀᴜɢʜᴛᴇʀs, ᴘʀɪɴᴄᴇss ɪsᴀʙᴇʟ ᴀɴᴅ ɪɴғᴀɴᴛᴀ ʟᴜɪsᴀ ғᴇʀɴᴀɴᴅᴀ.

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I hope this brief explanation has helped you better understand the reign of Fernando VII. If you want to know more about him, don't hesitate to ask me, I'll be happy to answer you!

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