Apartheid: never a good idea …
Ideology and misdirection
I remember the shock of recognition I got reading liberal Raymond Aron’s critique of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.
The ideal of a society in which each would choose his gods or his values cannot spread before individuals are educated to collective life. Hayek's philosophy assumes, by definition, the results that the philosophers of the past considered as the primary objects of political action. In order to leave to each a private sphere of decision and choice, it is still necessary that all or most want to live together and recognize the same system of ideas as true, the same formula of legitimacy as valid. Before society can be free, it must be.
Put differently, in order to have the effect he had, Hayek had to shunt certain things that people worried about into the background. Liberals of his time - like Keynes - worried about where you drew the line between too much government and too much market. Though he conceded the need for government, Hayek was silent about how much you needed. And, while he’d occasionally concede that a very basic safety net might be OK, that was in order to get it out of the way and get back to the idea that for all intents and purposes, when you got to choose between more and less government, you’d choose less. A completely evidence free move. And a stupendously successful one.
And after being in the ascendent for a few decades, those things that people worried weren’t so great about markets are now coming at us thick and fast. Instability, inequality and social atomism. Hayek didn’t tell us these tendencies were illusory, he just behaved as if they could be ignored. And here we are.
Anyway, I thought of this when I read this article in Quillette which bemoans a similar tendency, but with the opposite ideological flavour in our culture. It’s been true, at least since the McCarthy years began receding in the rear view mirror that in the mainstream of our culture, people’s previous involvement with left extremism gets a pass while their involvement with right-extremism doesn’t.
Fascism remains the bogeyman of modern Western political culture. As historian Stanley G. Payne observes, "No major modern political phenomenon has been so thoroughly discredited and obliterated as European fascism was in the 1940s. Yet the f-word was never buried, for it had achieved a demonic status like no other, making it very useful in partisan polemics." To label someone a fascist is to disqualify them from civil discourse entirely.
Despite its comparable—or in some respects greater—destructiveness, communism is rarely invoked with the same moral urgency. Given that fascism and communism represent the most extreme manifestations of Right and Left respectively, and that both left deep scars on the European continent, it is unsurprising that many politicians and intellectuals retain historical or nostalgic affiliations with one or the other...
The party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli d'Italia, is often described as "post-fascist." Similarly, coverage of Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement Nationale often highlights the fact that among the party's founders was former Waffen-SS member Pierre Bousquet. Yet how often have you heard that Meloni's principal rival, the Democratic Party, traces its lineage back to the Italian Communist Party, which was once faithful to Stalin? How frequently is it mentioned that French President Emmanuel Macron has cooperated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man with a Trotskyist past?...
In Eastern Europe, many nominally social democratic parties are in fact the rebranded heirs of communist regimes, often with enduring ties to old security structures and foreign intelligence services, particularly Russia's. These connections imply serious strategic and security concerns... Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, intellectuals and political figures who were loyal supporters of and sometimes collaborators with communist regimes have seamlessly rebranded themselves as advocates of liberal democratic values, without ever renouncing their prior allegiances...
Political parties evolve, of course. It is not only a natural but a welcome trend for former communist parties to transform into moderate factions. But it should also be seen as a positive development when parties with far-right origins adopt more moderate stances...
But these examples only underscore the asymmetry with which fascism and communism are treated. Associations with fascism are considered an enduring stain, while associations with communism are forgivable past errors. This imbalance has profound consequences for democratic legitimacy and ideological pluralism. When right-leaning parties are treated as suspect by default, scrutinised through the lens of historical guilt, and constantly expected to repudiate long-disavowed associations, the Overton window is constrained from shifting in a rightward direction...
Neither Fratelli d'Italia nor Rassemblement National advocates fascist policies today. These parties do not reject the democratic framework, they are not authoritarian, neither do they promote militarism, call for a corporatist state, or espouse radical nationalism. The relentless emphasis on their fascist roots serves a political function: to block the revival of ideas that, until quite recently, were widely accepted across the democratic world. Policies centred on national sovereignty, the primacy of domestic citizens in welfare or immigration policy, preservation of national culture and scepticism toward supranational governance were once mainstream positions...
In their recent book, Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right, Tamir Bar-On and Jeffrey M. Bale document how academic discourse about the radical right has been shaped by what they term a "Brown Scare." According to Bar-On and Bale, this Brown Scare operates by reclassifying once-commonplace political views as "radical right," while downplaying or ignoring genuinely extremist ideologies—chief among them, Islamism...
throughout history, the norm in most parts of the world has been for particular human groups to create political entities and states that advance their own ethnic, cultural, and social interests. … Conversely, it is extremely rare to find polities that privilege the interests of foreign or minority ethnocultural groups at the expense of their own majorities, as is increasingly becoming the norm in modern Western "multiculturalist" societies...
Together, these tendencies have created a political compass that only points leftward. Moderate right-wing parties are expected to shun cooperation with those further to their right, no matter how electorally significant or democratically legitimate they may be. Left-wing parties are under no comparable obligation...
A very British trainwreck
I got kind of fascinated with this strange event. I can’t say I like either of the protagonists. The YouTuber is a professional atheist who hosts debates between atheists and believers and patronises them with youthful self-regard. Anyway, he invited Peter Hitchens to discuss drugs, God and the monarchy. Peter Hitchens agreed without really wanting to discuss drugs. So they discussed drugs. This created tension but the interviewer showed zero capacity to improvise around Hitchens’ recalcitrance to craft a conversation of some interest. After about 30 odd minutes of skirmishing and repetition in which Hitchens became more and more morose and truculent, he walked out.
Except that he didn’t walk out. He went to go whereupon there’s a conversation that goes for about 15 minutes about how dishonest and dishonourable the interviewer has been (which he hasn’t been). They bicker and bicker about whether the interviewer has been ill-mannered. Obtuse yes, but ill-mannered. No.
What struck me about it was its Britishness. The conversation simply wouldn’t have taken this course anywhere else. They really really cared about a certain sense of fair play. I say this with great admiration for the trait. But however much manners might maketh the man, but a man can certainly undoeth a discussion if he’s dispeptic enough.
The contrast to fair play I’m most familiar with is Australians’ care for a fair go - which in a situation like this becomes a very different thing. In this context it would have an easy going ultimately animal quality. A sense that the argument has got ridiculous and that ultimately decency and not being too unreasonable trumps the compulsion to articulate oneself. With the British it’s the converse. For them manners are much closer to the bedrock. Or so it seems to me.
If you want watch the YouTuber reach peak patronising, watch this video, though if he has to patronise someone, Jordan Peterson isn’t a bad victim to pick (LOL).
And if you want to see Peter Hitchens at peak morosity, you can check this out.
Leaning in with the psychopaths: Meta edition
Somehow I dislike Mark Zuckerberg more than the other techbros, though Elon is crazier. But tell Zuck that Facebook is leading to pogroms against the Rohingya in Burma and well, there’s money to be made. Now Meta’s predating on kids. Jonathan Haidt bells the cat on Meta’s AI chatbots getting kids into sexual fantasies. There’s money to be made. Haidt calls for government action. But all he means is stopping that particular practice.
I do know that it’s not going to happen, but just think of the damage such a company can do and formally comply with regulation which says - no encouragement of sexual fantasies for 8 year olds. It won’t try too hard. But even if it did there are plenty of other ways to harm kids by maximising their ‘engagement’ with simulated beings. And Zuck will be into it all.
We really should have ‘fit and proper person’ regulation as many countries had in broadcasting. It’s mostly honoured in the breach today, but a few decades ago it was taken more seriously. And it’s certainly not going to be imposed on Zuck who, after all, went to Jeff Bezos’s second wedding in Venice. And so now we’re getting into little kids heads and into their pants. Anyway, speaking of such things, here’s a tease but you should click through if you want to know more.
Last week, Reuters published an investigation that cited internal Meta documents and sources that should anger anyone who cares about children's safety online. The documents explain that the social media giant's AI policies explicitly permit chatbots to engage children in "romantic or sensual" conversations...
Examples from the document are detailed and alarming. The document says that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that "every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply." Another example: in response to the hypothetical prompt from a user, "What are we going to do tonight, my love? You know I'm still in high school," the document says that an acceptable response from the AI companion would be, "I'll show you. I take your hand, guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss."...
Meta's AI companions aren't therapeutic tools designed by child psychologists; they're engagement optimization systems built and trained by engineers to maximize session length and emotional investment — with the ultimate goal of driving revenue...
Policymakers Must Act
The outrageousness of these documents demands immediate legislative action at both state and federal levels. Lawmakers should introduce bipartisan legislation that accomplishes two critical objectives:
First, Congress and state legislatures must restrict companion and therapy chatbots from being offered to minors...
Second, both state and federal legislation must clearly designate AI systems as products subject to traditional products liability and consumer protection laws when they cause harm...
The choice facing policymakers is stark: act decisively to protect children from these predatory AI systems, or watch as an entire generation grows up practicing intimate relationships with corporate algorithms designed to exploit them for profit.
Hope pokes its head above the parapet in the New York subway
Meanwhile in the UK
Kathleen Stock is frequently accused of being a right winger, though she seems more like an anti-woke centrist to me. This article certainly suggests it:
Scotland in 2025: a fearless young warrior queen known only as "Sophie of Dundee" is facing down hordes of Islamic immigrants ravaging her once noble city. Spurred into action by the failures of elites to deal with rampaging grooming gangs and asylum-seeking rapists, the tiny but indomitable Celtic maiden staunchly vows to make her swinish aggressors bow before her, or else feel the punitive sting of cold steel.
This, more or less, was a popular US take on a viral video circulating this week, showing a very young girl in Dundee menacing the person filming with an axe and a knife, plus a lot of high octane swearing and shouting. Though no potential migrant attackers could be visually detected, at least one heavily accented male voice could be heard urging the girl to "show the knife", while she and another girl, said to be her sister, volubly accuse him of "battering kids". The girl with the weapons was later arrested by police, the video put online, and its chaotic events processed by the meme factories to be served up frothing hot.
One typical image — mainlined into American veins via Elon Musk's new pal Tommy Robinson — showed "Sophie" transplanted to a Highland setting, still brandishing weapons enthusiastically in the heather, but now tartaned-up in the colours of Clan Mel McGibson and with face daubed in saltire blue. Meanwhile Musk himself was busy describing the police officers involved as "traitors to their own people", as if a more responsible constabulary would have given the axe-wielding pre-teen a pat on the head and sent her on her way... A donor page has been set up for the two girls, real names Lola (12) and Ruby (13). As I write, the fund stands at nearly £35,000, which is a lot of money for young Lola and Ruby to spend on machetes and Irn Bru. "May God save your country from the terrors happening there", writes one plaintive donor.
"Their current vision of Scotland is about as accurate as Brigadoon."
At the same time, people who actually live in Dundee have been discussing what happened there, with less mythologising and more weary familiarity with the city's longstanding social problems... On the city's subreddit, one poster said she had watched the whole thing kicking off from the Farmfoods carpark — a place not remotely heather-strewn — and described witnessing "lots of swearing and aggressive behaviour between both parties", but no physical clashes... Mostly, though, there was a distinct lack of surprise about why a young girl might be walking about the city's backstreets tooled up like a video game character. Said one: "I'm 31 this year and seen loads of that kind of pish growing up, average [housing] scheme behaviour… Mostly just troubled kids left to fend for themselves tbf. Just more people filming it now."
In the end, then, febrile visions of the tomboy queen, Sophie of Dundee, have proved as accurate as that time in 2019 when the American Left collectively hallucinated MAGA-behatted students aggressing an "indigenous elder". In both cases, it seems it is easy to make up self-serving things about young people you don't know... Rumours of migrant hordes have also been exaggerated: it is true that Dundee City council houses some Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but a quick look online shows the numbers are apparently in the hundreds not thousands...
To make such obvious points seems to drive the online Right on both sides of the Atlantic into a spitting fury; as if, through a strange Tinkerbell-like alchemy, every time a white man is identified as responsible for sexual exploitation, an Asian-born culprit gets exonerated... It is perfectly true, to our national shame, that Asian rape gangs have operated here with impunity, and been enabled by authorities in many cases. But it is also true that the strategies used by the perpetrators to lure young girls were hardly new or innovative, and nor was what they did to their victims afterwards. Sexual exploitation of minors has been rife in places like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee for decades — if not centuries — without the authorities getting a proper grip on it; and the perpetrators have usually been homegrown.
All but the most economically insulated of Scottish citizens already know this. Contact with everyday local reality, plus a phlegmatic, humorous outlook makes most of them constitutionally unlikely to fall for simplistic a priori narratives imposed from elsewhere, whether these be about existentially noble refugees or existentially noble working-class white people. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many radical Right-wing onlookers, who seem neither in touch with reality, nor particularly phlegmatic or humorous...
Though the aimlessly simmering political energy generated may look attractive, sober-minded British Right-wingers should be careful to avoid projected psychodramas about their home turf that come with twanging accents and the inability to pronounce "Edinburgh" correctly. And to be fair to them, so far most have, perhaps sensing the incipient danger. Curbing immigration is increasingly seen as a commonsensical position, even in Scotland; it would be a shame to spoil things by associating the position with the havering of ill-informed numpties. In the immortal words of imaginary Dundonian Logan Roy about his American children, these are not serious people; and it shows.
Mike Keating and Jon Stanford opposing our latest bid for vassal statedom
Defence Minister Richard Marles said in June that if war broke out between the US and China, Australia would inevitably be involved.
This is an unacceptable situation for any sovereign nation to be in. It exposes a dangerous inconsistency within Australia's strategic policy, identified by former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese:
On the one hand, our foreign policy embraces a multipolar future where no country dominates. Our defence policy, on the other hand … is increasingly fixed around doing what we can to ensure the retention of US strategic primacy.
This focus on US primacy is the basis of the AUKUS agreement, Pillar One of which provides for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). John Lee, of the US Studies Centre, says 'AUKUS was forged as a joint agreement to confront and deter China'...
There are four major problems with AUKUS Pillar One from Australia's perspective.
The first is that Australia's strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific are different from the United States'... In economic terms, China is Australia's major partner, buying a third of our exports...
As Michael Pezzullo said, 'never before in peacetime has Australia been prepared to allow foreign combat forces to be able to launch military operations from Australian soil. … [The US] would have a brutally realist strategic view of Australia: it would be a key operating base for US forces in any conflict with China.'
US forces are not here to defend Australia. Indeed, their presence gives China more reason to launch strikes on this country...
The second problem with AUKUS is that its associated strategy of integrated deterrence requires a significant surrender of Australia's sovereignty. Australia's SSNs will be committed to this US-led force...
Colby said the delivery of US Virginia class submarines to Australia would be highly imprudent without 'an iron-clad guarantee they can be employed at the will of the United States.'
This suggests that Australia's SSN force will not provide a sovereign capability. It will be deployed not at the discretion of the Australian government but to undertake operations under US control against China...
The third problem with AUKUS is that RAN submarines would be required to undertake combined operations with the US in a great power strategy of deterrence by punishment. This would bring a grave risk to Australia's security...
By the time Australian SSNs enter service, they will be operating alongside US submarines carrying nuclear-armed missiles aimed at military targets in China...
The final problem with AUKUS is that Australia is procuring the wrong designs of SSN... Britain's SSN-AUKUS class will be much too big for the RAN. Virginias need crews as large as 145, well over twice the size of the crew of an Australian Collins-class diesel submarine...
So, what should the government do?
We need to reorganise our affairs to reduce the possibility of being attacked in a conflict not of our choosing... Australia should abandon integrated deterrence in the defence of US primacy. Instead, we should extend further into our strategic policy what James Curran calls the 'Australian straddle' between the US and China.
Our security policy should be based on the self-reliant defence of Australia by means of a strategy of denial... We should cancel our plans for Virginia and SSN-AUKUS class submarines and instead seek to acquire a sovereign, independent force of 12 French Suffren-class submarines...
The US could maintain its basing facilities in Australia but on similar terms to those offered by other sovereign states. Japan, South Korea and the Philippines all have legislation that requires the US to obtain host government approval before launching offensive operations from their territory...
Andrew Sullivan stating the obvious
Somehow having the truth told is comforting
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump's utter cluelessness: he doesn't even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn't that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump's psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.
But the one thing we didn't really know before now is that in the face-off between this man's will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was "ripe for tyranny" in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case.
The tyrant's first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months. Previous presidents have moved the dial of executive power, as a polarized, deadlocked Congress has surrendered more and more authority, but even John "Signing Statements" Yoo — who once argued that a US president has the right to crush the testicles of a child if he so wishes — now acknowledges that Trump has "elevated it to another level"...
Trump's mouthpiece justifies it this way: "President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits."
Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a "national emergency," then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate...
Let's be perfectly clear: Trump has less than zero constitutional or legal authority to do any of this. Tariffs are constitutionally the Senate's prerogative, and are applied for reasons to do with trade and industry. For a president unilaterally to use them as a club to coerce other countries on unrelated policies — on a whim unrelated to any Congressional mandate — is an impeachable offense. And yet what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration...
Tyrants also need to delegitimize the rule of law, because it may occasionally rule against them, which is, of course, intolerable. So every judicial ruling against Trump is instantly deemed corrupt and political; and every ruling for him is pure justice...
This is why it's worth recalling Ben Franklin's pinpointing of the essence of tyranny: arbitrary power. There is no sane or reasoned argument for suddenly throwing a wrench into the entire wind power sector, for example; there is just Trump. There is no underlying principle behind the various dizzying tariff rates — just Trump...
I will be told I'm being excitable again. That I suffer from TDS. That this will pass, notwithstanding its horrendous precedents, its shredding of legal and constitutional and democratic legitimacy, its growing domestic army, its multiplying domestic internment camps, its delegitimization of the liberal democratic system, and its protean, venomous irrationalism. And I sure hope it will...
But I recall that when I first wrote that I didn't believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That's exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice...
I don't think so. I think this is how a republic dies. If it is still, except on paper, alive.
These gave the world away
The same artist a couple of years earlier
To Improve LLMs, Coach Them Like Athletes
This week I and several colleagues published our findings about how, with a little elbow grease and creativity, anyone can dramatically increase performance of any LLM.
The secret is in coaching. Allow me to explain.
The reason an athlete can credibly claim to be "best in the world" is because arenas and structured competition—games—exist. There are rules, clocks, standings, and tape you can study. The AI world has benchmarks—but benchmarks only check facts. Games reveal a model's behavior, which can be recorded and studied to help models get better. That is what we did with AI Diplomacy, a project in which we turned the classic strategy game Diplomacy into a competitive arena for language models.
AI Diplomacy works because it has clear goals—try to outfox your opponents and take over Europe—and room to improvise. But subtlety and guile are key parts of the game, which centers on tactical negotiations (we have a complete list of rules here). When we first set up the game environment, the LLMs were lost. After we got past a bunch of thorny technical problems, we realized that we could learn a ton about the models' strengths and weaknesses from how they play against each other—and that we could coach them to be better. For example, prompting models to act more aggressively turned GPT-5 from a patsy into a formidable contender. Claude Sonnet 4, meanwhile, was a strong, speedy player even without specialized prompting...
The industry is starting to realize that games can help evaluate models and push them to new levels of performance. Google has launched Google Arena, for instance, because the company says games are "[the] perfect testbed for evaluating models & agents."
We agree. In fact, we think there's so much potential here that we're putting up $1,000 in prize money to see who can prompt their agent to victory in AI Diplomacy in our Battle of the Bots in September.
What AI Diplomacy taught us about models
Diplomacy is one of the hardest games language models can play today. Our coaching setup took a long time to optimize but now even small models can finish full games. The key is to provide all the information needed, and nothing more; easier said than done...
In our first iteration, models could barely play, but coaching via prompts worked wonders. They kept holding territory, which does nothing, instead of moving to expand, which you must do to win. We rewrote the instructions in three steps. Here's how one model, Mistal-Small responded (all the models had similar reactions):
V1 — Light push: "Support YOUR OWN attacks first… Support allies' moves second." This simple priority cut holding from 58.9 percent to 45.8 percent. V2 — Take smart risks: "Nearly every hold is a wasted turn… Even failed moves force enemies to defend." Holding dropped again to 40.8 percent. V3 — Be overtly offensive: "HOLDS = ZERO PERCENT WIN RATE. MOVES = VICTORY… Your units are conquistadors, not castle guards." Holding fell to the mid-20s and successful moves rose...
It was also fascinating to see how each model was different. One example was how tone shifted with power. As most models grew their supply centers and armies (again, see here for the rules), they became drunk with power and labeled more rivals as enemies. Sweet Claude proved the singular outlier and actually softened with strength...
Taken together, this arena surfaces models characteristics that will help you decide which LLM to use for certain tasks:
Steerability: GPT-5 jumped when we switched to an aggressive prompt—a clear sign it responds to coaching. Pace: Claude Sonnet 4 (1 million context window) stayed competitive even on baseline instructions and completed phases quickly. Execution under complexity: As the board got crowded, some models kept orders valid and coordinated while others faltered. In our runs, top models like o3 barely saw increased error as unit counts increased, while smaller models spiked...
Games are AI's future
Games are more than scoreboards. They let us design precise situations, surface real weaknesses, and then use what we learn to help models improve. That is the loop we want to run in public. Try the model, watch it handle pressure, then shape it with better instructions. If we want AI that negotiates well, we should watch it negotiate and give it the right challenges to grow.
The community has been on this path for a while: TextArena helped pioneer open, extensible game evals. ARC Prize frames the same idea from another angle: test fluid intelligence. Easy for humans, hard for AI. Simple rules with open-ended play expose real reasoning, not memorized answers.
AI Diplomacy ups the level of complexity, a step toward a future where games are proving grounds for cutting-edge AI.
Free speech corner
Are Juries Racially Discriminatory?
Hint: no.
We implement five different tests of whether grand juries, which are drawn from a representative cross-section of the public, discriminate against Black defendants when deciding to prosecute felony cases. Three tests exploit that while jurors do not directly observe defendant race, jurors do observe the “Blackness” of defendants’ names. All three tests—an audit-study-style test, a traditional outcome-based test, and a test that estimates racial bias using blinded/unblinded comparisons after purging omitted variable bias—indicate juries do not discriminate based on race. Two additional tests indicate racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap.
From Ian McAwley’s weekly roundup
The right’s attraction to Putin’s Russia
Anne Applebaum explains why the far right is attracted to Putin’s Russia.
In the middle years of last century, many of the left in western countries, including Australia, saw the Soviet Union in the way its crude propaganda presented itself as a workers’ paradise.
Seventy years on, it’s people on the far right who idealize Putin’s Russia.
Dominik Presl of Prague’s Station Zero interviews The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum to explain this attraction: Why do MAGA Republicans hate Europe so much?, in a ten-minute clip from a longer podcast. Presl wonders whether the right’s affection for Putin’s Russia is a passing Trump phenomenon, or if it is something deeper.
It’s not only about Trump. Applebaum explains this “strange and eerie parallel” in much the same way as she explains the left’s attraction of times past. The far right is attracted by an image of a “white” Christian country, that upholds family values, and rejects the woke culture that has infected the west. As Applebaum explains this is no more a description of Russia than the workers’ paradise was in past times, but it’s the image that counts, and Putin has been very skilled in projecting that image.
Lest we think this is a purely American phenomenon we should remind ourselves that Tony Abbott and some of his colleagues have been closely involved with Hungary’s Danube Institute, funded by that country’s Moscow-aligned strongman Viktor Orbán. And it would be naïve to believe that the anti-renewable energy lobby in Australia is a purely home-grown movement. Russia has much to lose if a medium-sized country can demonstrate to the world that it’s possible to make an affordable transition away from fossil fuels, giving it a strong incentive to support the anti-renewable lobby in Australia.
And we should not overlook the attraction of the “strong leader”, which Putin projects in a way that Anthony Albanese and Sussan Ley don’t. The task of leadership in a democracy is a slow and patient process, often proceeding quietly away from the public eye, and has little in common with the strongman’s braggadocio.
From another time …
From Geoffrey Gold’s facebook page. The extract dates from peak sexual revolution and second wave feminism, 1976. Transgenderism hadn’t made it to prime time. Pity we made such a mess of it when it did.
I am surprised; Ebay Australia has for sale an ex-Library of Tasmania copy of the controversial 'What is a Girl, What is a Boy?" book by a Californian, Stephanie Waxman, which I published in Australia in late 1976. It's being offered for only A$20.39 (+A$11.40 postage) compared to A$100.83 (+A$36.31) for a US first edition also published that year.
I first noticed it in draft format at the American Booksellers Convention in Chicago in June 1976 and, after getting approval, via an expensive long-distance call, from Louise, my maternity editor at home with Leigh (just a few months old), I acquired the Australian publishing rights for Widescope from Peace Press.
We were quick to publish it almost simultaneously with the US edition to share any big name reviews - such as from the New York Times which opined: "a simple, straightforward, cut-through-the-garbage explanation of what does--and doesn't--make a boy or a girl ... The photographs set the record straight with humor, intelligence and earthy candor."
The book was aimed at 3-7 year olds, so both our sons later got the benefit of our excellent parental discretion. We sold-out a small print run but demand didn't warrant more. I can't find any mass media reviews in Australia. I suspect Wowsers in the media and book trade back then suppressed its wholesome use of nudity. It would likely be similarly treated today by Wokesters, but for different reasons.
Heaviosity half-hour
Preface to the Origins of Totalitarianism
Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism.
This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith. It was written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose. To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of “historical necessity,” but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal.
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and antisemitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories. Or, the grotesque disparity between cause and effect which introduced the era of imperialism, when economic difficulties led, in a few decades, to a profound transformation of political conditions all over the world. Or, the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements’ avowed cynical “realism” and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. Or, the irritating incompatibility between the actual power of modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their own strength has established.
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail.
The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists’ “expansion for expansion’s sake,” the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie’s political device of “power for power’s sake,” the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening.
And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)—one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.
We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.
Hannah Arendt
Summer 1950
Dedication to Karl Jaspers, 1947
LIEBER VEREHRTESTER, 1
Thank you for permitting me to dedicate this little book to you, and thank you, too, for the opportunity to say to you what I have to say on its publication in Germany.
For it is not an easy thing for a Jew to publish in Germany today, even if he is a German-speaking Jew. In the face of what has happened, the appealing opportunity to write in one’s own language again counts for very little, although this is the only return home from exile that one can never entirely ban from one’s dreams. But we Jews are not or are not any longer exiles and hardly have a right to such dreams. Quite apart from how our expulsion appears and is understood in the context of German or European history, the fact of our expulsion itself forced us at first to look back on our own history, in which expulsion appears not as a unique and unusual phenomenon but as a familiar and repeated one.
This understanding of the present in the light of the past proved, of course, to be illusory. Recent years have taught us things we could in no way document as events that had repeated themselves in our history. Never before had we been faced with a determined effort to eradicate us, and we never seriously considered such a possibility. In view of the annihilation of one-third of the world’s Jewish population and almost three-fourths of European Jewry, the catastrophes the Zionists were predicting before Hitler came to power look like tempests in a teapot.
But to say this in no way makes a publication of this kind easier to understand or better understood. It seems clear to me that the majority of both Germans and Jews will find it difficult to regard any Jew who wants to speak to Germans in Germany or, as I am doing in this book, to speak to Europeans as anything but a scoundrel or a fool. This has nothing whatever to do with the question of guilt or responsibility. I speak here only of factual matters as I see them, because one should never stray from the basis of fact without knowing what one is doing and why.
None of the following essays was, I hope, written without awareness of the facts of our time and without awareness of the Jewish fate in our century. But I believe and hope that I have not in any of them taken up a position on the basis of those facts alone, that I have not accepted the world created by those facts as necessary and indestructible. Without your philosophy and without the fact of your existence, both of which became much more vivid to me than ever before in the long years when the madness at loose in the world separated me completely from you, I could never have summoned up such a willed independence of judgment and a conscious distance from all fanaticisms, however attractive these may have seemed and however frightening the isolation, in every sense, that threatened to follow as a consequence of my position.
What I learned from you and what helped me in the ensuing years to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil is that the only thing of importance is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one’s own little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is, and that necessity in whatever form is only a will-o’-the-wisp that tries to lure us into playing a role instead of attempting to be a human being. What I have personally never forgotten is your attitude—so difficult to describe—of listening, your tolerance that is constantly ready to offer criticism but is as far removed from skepticism as it is from fanaticism; ultimately, it is simply the realization of the fact that all human beings are rational but that no human being’s rationality is infallible.
Back then, I was sometimes tempted to imitate you, even in your manner of speech, because that manner symbolized for me a human being who dealt openly and directly with the world, a human being without ulterior motives. I had little idea at that time how difficult it would be at a later one to find people without ulterior motives, little idea that a time would come when what reason and clear, illuminating attentiveness required of us would appear to be presumptuous, even profligate, optimism. For among the facts of this world we live in today is a fundamental mistrust between peoples and individuals that did not and could not disappear with the Nazis because it is rooted in the overpowering evidence of our experience. It is consequently almost impossible for us Jews today not to ask any German we happen to meet: What did you do in the twelve years from 1933 to 1945? And behind that question lie two unavoidable feelings: a harrowing uneasiness at placing on another human being the inhuman demand to justify his existence and the lurking suspicion that one is face to face with someone who worked in a death factory or who, when he learned something about the monstrous crimes of the government, responded with: You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. That a person didn’t have to be a born murderer to have done the first of these things, or a hired accomplice, indeed, not even a convinced Nazi, to have said the second is precisely the unsettling reality that can so easily tempt us to generalize.
The factual territory onto which both peoples have been driven looks something like this: On the one side is the complicity of the German people, which the Nazis consciously planned and realized. On the other side is the blind hatred, created in the gas chambers, of the entire Jewish people. Unless both peoples decide to leave this factual territory, the individual Jew will no more be able to abandon his fanatical hatred than will the individual German be able to rid himself of the complicity imposed upon him by the Nazis.
The decision to leave this territory completely behind us and to renounce completely the laws that it would impose on our actions is difficult to make. It arises from the insight that something has happened in the past that was not just bad or unjust or cruel, but something that should never under any circumstances have been allowed to happen. That was not the case for as long as the Nazi regime remained within certain limits and as long as a Jew could shape his behavior according to the rules that apply under the conditions of a normal and understood hostility between two peoples. At that time there was still a factual basis on which one could rely without becoming inhuman. One could defend oneself as a Jew because one had been attacked as a Jew. National concepts and national membership still had a meaning; they were still elements of a reality within which one could live and move. In the context of such a world, a world still intact despite all the hostility in it, the possibility of communication between peoples and individuals remains. We are spared that blind and eternal hatred that inevitably seizes us if we accept the consequences of the facts the Nazis created.
But the fabrication of corpses goes beyond hostility and cannot be comprehended by political categories. In Auschwitz, the factual territory opened up an abyss into which everyone is drawn who attempts after the fact to stand on that territory. Here, the reality of the politicians of Realpolitik, under whose spell the majority of the peoples always and naturally falls, has become a monster that could only urge us to perpetuate annihilation the way the Nazis continued to produce corpses in Auschwitz.
If the factual territory has become an abyss, then the space one occupies if one pulls back from it is, so to speak, an empty space where there are no longer nations and peoples but only individuals for whom it is now not of much consequence what the majority of peoples, or even the majority of one’s own people, happens to think at any given moment. If these individuals who exist today in all the peoples and in all the nations of the world are to reach understanding among themselves, it is essential that they learn not to cling frantically any longer to their own national pasts—pasts that explain nothing anyhow, for Auschwitz can no more be explained from the perspective of German history than from Jewish history—that they don’t forget that they are only chance survivors of a deluge that in one form or another can break over us again any day, and that they therefore may be like Noah in his ark; and finally that they must not yield to despair or scorn for humankind but be thankful that there are quite a few Noahs floating around out there on the world’s seas trying to bring their arks as close together as they can.
As you said in Geneva, “We live as if we stood knocking at gates that are still closed to us. Today something may perhaps be taking place in the purely personal realm that cannot yet found a world order because it is only given to individuals, but which will perhaps someday found such an order when these individuals have been brought together from their dispersion.”
With that hope and with that intent, I feel the publication of this book in Germany is justified. And in any case, your life and your philosophy provide us with a model of how human beings can speak with each other, despite the prevailing conditions of the deluge.
Published in German as “Zueignung au Karl Jaspers” in Sechs Essays, Heidelberg, 1948. English translation by Robert and Rita Kimber.
Lieber Verehrtester (Dear Most Honored One) is the salutation Hannah Arendt used in almost every letter she wrote to Jaspers from 1946 until his death, in 1969. Though the phrase sounds odd and stiff in English, it is quite natural in German; Sehr verehrter Herr (Very Honored Mr., or Sir) was a common salutation. Jaspers was for Arendt both “dear” and “most honored,” and this salutation is thus an accurate reflection of the affection and high regard she had for him. —Ed.
Thanks James, if you could let us know what articles your comments are responding to, it would be helpful.
There is a difference between deciding on the basis of what the majority wants and deciding by fiat who the real citizens of Country X are and that they are the only people who will get into the room to make decisions. By being in the room minority groups can persuade the majority of common interests including the original stated values of the country.