Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience Against Bad Governments Is Justified: An Animated Introduction

in History, Politics | January 30th, 2017

“In March 1845, the United States acquired a new president – James K. Polk – a forceful, aggressive political outsider intent on strengthening his country and asserting its pre-eminence in front of other world powers, especially Mexico and Great Britain,” says The Book of Life. “Within a year of his inauguration, he had declared full-scale war on Mexico because of squabbles over the Texan border, and was soon rattling his saber at Britain over the ownership of Oregon. To complete the picture, Polk was a vigorous defender of slavery, who dismissed the arguments of abolitionists as naive and sentimental.” How did Americans who disagreed with this vicious-sounding character endure his term?

Though Polk did enjoy popular support, “a sizeable minority of the citizenry disliked him intensely,” especially a certain citizen by the name of Henry David Thoreau. The author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods believed that “true patriots were not those who blindly followed their administration” but “those who followed their own consciences and in particular, the principles of reason,” even when it meant publicly standing against not just the man in office but the many who agree with him, or even when it meant running afoul of the laws of the land. He elucidated the principles behind this position in the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” which Josh Jones wrote about here last November.

The animated video above from Alain de Botton’s School of Life, also the producer of The Book of Life, places Thoreau’s ideas on the role of the individual versus the state in the context of Thoreau’s life — one he lived without fear of, say, getting thrown into jail for refusing to pay taxes to what he saw as an immoral state. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” the transcendentalist figurehead declares in “Civil Disobedience,” “the true place for a just man is a prison.” Well over a century and half on, Thoreau still reminds us that political systems, no matter how long they last, remain ever subject to breakdown, adjustment, and even dismantling and rebuilding at the hands of the rulers and the ruled alike. Politics, as history occasionally and forcefully reminds us, is negotiation without end, and sometimes negotiations have to get ugly.

Henry David Thoreau’s Hand-Drawn Map of Cape Cod (1866)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship:” Better to Suffer Than Collaborate

in History, Philosophy, Politics | January 30th, 2017

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons

When Eichmann in Jerusalem—Hannah Arendt’s book about Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s trial—came out in 1963, it contributed one of the most famous of post-war ideas to the discourse, the “banality of evil.” And the concept at first caused a critical furor. “Enormous controversy centered on what Arendt had written about the conduct of the trial, her depiction of Eichmann, and her discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils,” writes Michael Ezra at Dissent magazine “Eichmann, she claimed, was not a ‘monster’; instead, she suspected, he was a ‘clown.’”

Arendt blamed victims who were forced to collaborate, critics charged, and made the Nazi officer seem ordinary and unremarkable, relieving him of the extreme moral weight of his responsibility. She answered these charges in an essay titled “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” published in 1964. Here, she aims to clarify the question in her title by arguing that if Eichmann were allowed to represent a monstrous and inhuman system, rather than shockingly ordinary human beings, his conviction would make him a scapegoat and let others off the hook. Instead, she believes that everyone who worked for the regime, whatever their motives, is complicit and morally culpable.

But although most people are culpable of great moral crimes, those who collaborated were not, in fact, criminals. On the contrary, they chose to follow the rules in a demonstrably criminal regime. It’s a nuance that becomes a stark moral challenge. Arendt points out that everyone who served the regime agreed to degrees of violence when they had other options, even if those might be fatal. Quoting Mary McCarthy, she writes, “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”

While this circumstance may provide a “legal excuse,” for killing, Arendt seeks to define a “moral issue,” a Socratic principle she had “taken for granted” that we all believed: “It is better to suffer than do wrong,” even when doing wrong is the law. People like Eichmann were not criminals and psychopaths, Arendt argued, but rule-followers protected by social privilege. “It was precisely the members of respectable society,” she writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another,” without reflecting on the morality of the entire new system.

Those who refused, on the other hand, who even “chose to die,” rather than kill, did not have “highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters.” But they were critical thinkers practicing what Socrates called a “silent dialogue between me and myself,” and they refused to face a future where they would have to live with themselves after committing or enabling atrocities. We must remember, Arendt writes, that “whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”

Such refusals to participate might be small and private and seemingly ineffectual, but in large enough numbers, they would matter. “All governments,” Arendt writes, quoting James Madison, “rest on consent,” rather than abject obedience. Without the consent of government and corporate employees, the “leader… would be helpless.” Arendt admits the unlikely effectiveness of active opposition to a one-party authoritarian state. And yet when people feel most powerless, most under duress, she writes, an honest “admission of one’s own impotence” can give us “a last remnant of strength” to refuse.

We have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act “irresponsibly” and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance—for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience.

We have example after example of these kinds of refusals to participate in a murderous system or further its aims. Arendt was aware these actions can come at great cost. The alternatives, she argues, may be far worse.

Hannah Arendt’s Original Articles on “the Banality of Evil” in the New Yorker Archive

Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Betty Boop: Meet the Original Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

in Animation, Comics/Cartoons, History, Jazz, Music | January 30th, 2017

Jazz Age cartoon flapper, Betty Boop, inhabits that rare pantheon of stars whose fame has not dimmed with time.

While she was never alive per se, her ten year span of active film work places her somewhere between James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. The market for Boop-collectibles is so vast, a definitive guide was published in 2003. Most recently, Betty has popped up on prepaid debit cards and emoji, and inspired fashion’s enfant terrible Jean Paul Gaultier to create a fragrance in her honor.

As noted in the brief history in the video above, Betty hailed from animator Max Fleischer’s Fleischer Studios and actress Margie Hines provided her voice.

Physically, she bore a close resemblance to popular singer Helen Kane. Their babyish vocal stylings were remarkably similar, too. But when Betty put the bite on a couple of Kane’s hits, below, Kane fought back with a lawsuit against Paramount and Max Fleischer Studios, seeking damages and an injunction which would have prevented them from making more Betty Boop cartoons.

The Associated Press reported that Kane confounded the court stenographer who had no idea how to spell the Boopsian utterances she reproduced before the judge, in an effort to establish ownership. Her case seemed pretty solid until the defense called Lou Bolton, a theatrical manager whose client roster had once included Harlem jazz singer,“Baby Esther” Jones.

Two years before Betty Boop debuted (as an anthropomorphic poodle) in the cartoon short, Dizzy Dishes, above, Kane and her manager took in Baby Esther’s act in New York. A couple of weeks’ later the nonsensical interjections that were part of Baby Esther’s schtick, below, began creeping into Kane’s performances.

According to the Associated Press, Bolton testified that:

Baby Esther made funny expressions and interpolated meaningless sounds at the end of each bar of music in her songs.

“What sounds did she interpolate?” asked Louis Phillips, a defense attorney.

“Boo-Boo-Boo!” recited Bolton.

“What other sounds?”

“Doo-Doo-Doo!”

“Any others?”

“Yes, Wha-Da-Da-Da!”

Baby Esther herself did not attend the trial, and did not much benefit from Kane’s loss. Casual cartoon historians are far more likely to identify Kane as the inspiration for the animated Boop-oop-a-doop girl. You can hear Kane on cds and Spotify, but you won’t find Baby Esther.

With a bit more digging, however, you will find Gertrude Saunders — the given name of “Baby Esther” — belting it out on Spotify. Some of her intonations are a bit reminiscent of Bessie Smith… who hated her (not without reason). Saunders appeared in a few movies and died in 1991.

via Urban Intellectuals

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Female Samurai Warriors Immortalized in 19th Century Japanese Photos

in History, Photography | January 27th, 2017

Most of my generation’s exposure to Japanese culture came heavily mediated by anime and samurai films. One cultural artifact that stands out for me is TV miniseries Shogun, an adaptation of James Clavell’s popular novel, which gives us a view of Japan through the eyes of a British novelist and his British hero (played by Richard Chamberlain in the film). Shogun depicts a feudal Japanese warrior culture centered on exaggerated displays of masculinity, with women operating in the margins or behind the scenes.

Even the great Akira Kurosawa’s visions of feudal Japan, like The Seven Samurai, are “not exactly inundated with the stunning power of female warriors brandishing katanas,” writes Dangerous Minds, “it’s a bit of a ソーセージ-fest.”

And yet, it turns out, “such women did exist.” Known as onna bugeisha, these fighters “find their earliest precursor in Empress Jingū, who in 200 A.D. led an invasion of Korea after her husband Emperor Chūai, the fourteenth emperor of Japan, perished in battle.” Empress Jingū’s example endured. In 1881, she became the first woman on Japanese currency.

Preceding the all-male samurai class depicted in Clavell and Kurosawa, the onna bugeisha “learned to use naginata, kaiken, and the art of tanto Jutso in battle,” the Vintage News tells us. Rather than pay mercenaries to defend them, as the terrified townsfolk do in Seven Samurai, these women trained in battle to protect “communities that lacked male fighters.”

The onna bugeisha’s ethic was as purportedly as uncompromising as the samurai, and it shows in these fierce portraits from the 1800s. Although many tales of prominent onna bugeisha come from the 12th-13th centuries, one famous figure, Nakano Takeko lived in the 19th century, writes Dangerous Minds, and died quite the warrior’s death:

While she was leading a charge against Imperial Japanese Army troops she was shot in the chest. Knowing her remaining time on earth to be short, Takeko asked her sister, Yūko, to cut her head off and have it buried rather than permit the enemy to seize it as a trophy. It was taken to Hōkai Temple and buried underneath a pine tree.

Another revered fighter, Tomoe Gozen, appears in The Tale of the Heike (often called the “Japanese Iliad). She is described as “especially beautiful,” and also as “a remarkably strong archer… as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot.”

In the photos here—and many more at The Vintage News—we get a sense of what such a legendary badass may have looked like.

via Vintage News/Dangerous Minds

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Meet Theda Bara, the First “Vamp” of Cinema, Who Revealed the Erotic Power of the Movies

in Film, History | January 27th, 2017

Readers of a certain generation, asked to envision a vampirically alluring lady of cinema, may find their imaginations going straight to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. But the tradition of the silver-screen “vamp” goes much deeper, reaching all the way back to the silent era. The term itself was first coined to refer to Theda Bara, not exactly a household name now, but then in a league with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. She was one of the most popular performers alive.

Bara revealed to a generation of moviegoers the sheer erotic power of cinema, an accomplishment you can glimpse in the clip above of 1915’s A Fool There Was, the picture that made her an icon. The minute she arrives on screen, writes The Guardian’s Kira Cochrane, “it becomes obvious why she was so popular — why she went on to have songs written about her, children named after her, a perfume and even a sandwich (minced ham, mayonnaise, sliced pimento and sweet pickles on toast — served warm) created in her honour.” Her face, though it may not seem so notable at first, soon “comes into its own — so much so that when you learn that her character’s malevolence has led one man to jail, another to beggary, and her most recent victim to a very public suicide, you believe it.”

Frank Powell, director of A Fool There Was, “took a chance on a 29 year-old Theda (she lied and said she was 25)” by asking her to star, writes Messy Nessy’s Addison Nugent. “It’s the story of a devoted family man who, while on a ship to England, meets a beautiful stranger referred to only as ‘The Vampire Woman.’ This mysterious creature corrupts his soul, destroys his family, drains him of all of his money and dignity, and eventually causes his demise.”

And so the former Theodosia Goodman — with some assistance from Fox Studios’ PR team, who “planted false stories in the press and invented a fantasy backstory for her” — swiftly became a new kind of femme fatale for this new artistic and commercial medium. These dangerous young women, write the New York history podcasters the Bowery Boys, “were the spiritual children of the prior generation of newly empowered women who fought against the constraints of Victorian society. A few years later, as another vein of female power (the temperance movement) helped bring about Prohibition, these young women would be called flappers, carefree and fueled on the powers of jazz and illegal alcohol.”

During her dozen-year-long screen career, Bara made some forty films in total, most of them lost in the Fox vault fire of 1937, including the 1917 epic Cleopatra, a few fragments of which you can see in the video above. Her final appearance, in 1926’s Madame Mystery, both parodied the vamp image she could never quite shake and saw her bid farewell to the world of silent cinema. “Before pictures grew up and started to talk, we had to translate all our motion into pantomime,” said Bara herself in a later radio interview. “We had to express jealousy, hate, love, or devotion all in pantomime, and at the same time keep pace as the director guided us just as a metronome guides a pianist.”

The vamp, as Bara played and defined the figure, expressed all those emotions with a fearsome vividness, and she “became so synonymous with the term that she is now referred to as the original on-screen vamp,” writes Cochrane, “the woman who made performances such as that of Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction possible.” Or as the original vamp summed up her own legacy, “To be good is to be forgotten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remembered.”

A Fool There Was will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

in History, Radio | January 24th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Commons

Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels, of course, but also short stories, essays, and — briefly, suitably late in his career — correspondence from the afterlife. He did that last gig in 1998, composing for broadcast on the formidable WNYC, by undergoing a series of what he called “controlled near-death experiences” orchestrated, so he claimed, by “Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the facilities of a Huntsville, Texas execution chamber.” These made possible “more than one hundred visits to Heaven and my returning to life to tell the tale,” or rather, to tell the tales of the more permanently deceased with whom he’d sat down for a chat.

Vonnegut’s roster of afterlife interviewees included personages he personally admired such as Eugene Debs (listen), Isaac Newton (listen), and Clarence Darrow (listen), as well as historical villains like James Earl Ray (listen) and Adolf Hitler (listen). Other of the dead with whom he spoke, while they may not qualify as household names, nevertheless went to the grave with some sort of achievement under their belts: Olestra inventor Fred H. Mattson, for instance, or John Wesley Joyce, owner of the famed Greenwich Village literary watering hole The Lion’s Head. Only the Slaughterhouse-Five author’s courageous and impossible reportage has saved the names of a few, like that of retired construction worker Salvatore Biagini, from total obscurity.

Famous or not, people interested Vonnegut, who claimed to get his ideas from “disgust with civilization” but also served as honorary president of the National Humanist Association. This aspect of his personality comes up in the Brian Lehrer Show segment just above, a listen back to Vonnegut’s “Reports on the Afterlife” segments for WNYC’s 90th anniversary. (You can listen to all the segments individually here.)

Producer Marty Goldensohn talks about recording them at Vonnegut’s apartment, where the famous writer would answer the phone every few minutes for a brief talk with one curious fan after another, none of whom he’d taken any pains whatsoever to keep from finding his phone number. “It was a wonderful thing,” says Goldensohn. “He had a way of talking, hearing what he wanted to hear, thanking, and hanging up very nicely. Sixty seconds.” He’d also mastered, adds Lehrer, the art of the one-minute trip to the afterlife, and the stories this unusual radio format allowed him to tell surely drew from the vast range of experiences and emotions to which Vonnegut had exposed his mind not just through reading, but also with such frequent and brief yet very real human connections he’d make on a seemingly near-constant basis.

A little bit less than a decade after these recordings and the subsequent publication of their print collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, the unceasingly smoking and drinking Vonnegut would, at the age of 84, make his own final trip to the afterlife. There he now presumably awaits (possibly beside Kevorkian himself) the next correspondent intrepid enough to come up and interview him. Given the events of the past decade, listeners could certainly use whatever dose of his characteristically clear-eyed and sardonic perspective he might have to offer.

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Very First Public Reading from Breakfast of Champions (1970)

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Novel Cat’s Cradle Get Turned into Avant-Garde Music (Featuring Kurt Himself)

An Animated Kurt Vonnegut Visits NYU, Riffs, Rambles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Teaches You to Read Fiction Like a Writer

Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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An Animated History of Planned Parenthood, Brought to You by Lena Dunham, JJ Abrams & More

in Current Affairs, Health, History, Life, Politics | January 23rd, 2017

Lena Dunham drafted a host of well known friends for The History Of 100 Years Of Women’s Health Care At Planned Parenthood, the short film (above) she co-directed with animator Kirsten Lepore. Others taking part in the production include comedians Mindy Kaling and Amy Schumer, actors Meryl Streep, America Ferrera, Hari Nef, Jennifer Lawrence, and Constance Wu, and producer J.J. Abrams.

But the real stars of this show are the female trailblazers who fought (and continue to fight) for access to safe and affordable reproductive care for all women, regardless of age, race, or ability to pay.

In the words of founder Margaret Sanger, a controversial figure who seems to share quite a few traits with Dunham, from her deft leverage of her celebrity on behalf of her chosen cause to her capacity for alienating fans with some of her less savory views and statements:

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Women like Rosie Jimenez, a single mother who died from complications of a back alley abortion following the passage of the Hyde Amendment, were victimized by laws regarding reproductive choice.

Others, like Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, flouted the laws to bring about change.

More recently Faye Wattleton, Planned Parenthood’s first African American president and its current president, Cecile Richards, have worked to promote awareness of both the public’s rights and any impending dangers to those rights.

(Vice President Mike Pence’s inadvertent fundraising efforts go unheralded, appropriately enough. The millions of women—and men—who made small donations to Planned Parenthood in his name are the true heroes here.)

For more of Dunham’s highly visible support of Planned Parenthood, read her 2015 interview with President Cecile Richards or check out the t‑shirt she designed to benefit the California Planned Parenthood Education Fund.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism, According to Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

in History | January 20th, 2017

Image by Rob Kall, via Flickr Commons

Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of totalitarianism during the 1930s and 40s. Among his long list of appointments and publications, he has won multiple awards for his recent international bestsellers Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and last year’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. That book in part makes the argument that Nazism wasn’t only a German nationalist movement but had global colonialist origins—in Russia, Africa, and in the U.S., the nation that pioneered so many methods of human extermination, racist dehumanization, and ideologically-justified land grabs.

The hyper-capitalism portrayed in the U.S.—even during the Depression—Snyder writes, fueled Hitler’s imagination, such that he promised Germans “a life comparable to that of the American people,” whose “racially pure and uncorrupted” German population he described as “world class.” Snyder describes Hitler’s ideology as a myth of racialist struggle in which “there are really no values in the world except for the stark reality that we are born in order to take things from other people.” Or as we often hear these days, that acting in accordance with this principle is the “smart” thing to do. Like many far right figures before and after, Hitler aimed to restore a state of nature that for him was a perpetual state of race war for imperial dominance.

After the November election, Snyder wrote a profile of Hitler, a short piece that made no direct comparisons to any contemporary figure. But reading the facts of the historical case alarmed most readers. A few days later, the historian appeared on a Slate podcast to discuss the article, saying that after he submitted it, “I realized there was more.… there are an awful lot of echoes.” Snyder admits that history doesn’t actually repeat itself. But we’re far too quick, he says, to dismiss that idea as a cliché “and not think about history at all. History shows a range of possibilities.” Similar events occur across time under similar kinds of conditions. And it is, of course, possible to learn from the past.

If you’ve heard other informed analysis but haven’t read Snyder’s New York Review of Books columns on fascism in Putin’s Russia or the former Yanukovich’s Ukraine, or his long article “Hitler’s World May Not Be So Far Away,” you may have seen his widely-shared Facebook post making the rounds. As he argued in The Guardian last September, today we may be “too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s.” On November, 15, Snyder wrote on Facebook that “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism.” Snyder has been criticized for conflating these regimes, and rising “into the top rungs of punditdom,” but when it comes to body counts and levels of suppressive malignancy, it’s hard to argue that Stalinist Russia, any more than Tsarist Russia, was anyone’s idea of a democracy.

Rather than making a historical case for viewing the U.S. as exactly like one of the totalitarian regimes of WWII Europe, Snyder presents 20 lessons we might learn from those times and use creatively in our own where they apply. In my view, following his suggestions would make us wiser, more self-aware, proactive, responsible citizens, whatever lies ahead. Read Snyder’s lessons from his Facebook post below and consider ordering his latest book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

via Kottke

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

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