A Trip Through New York City in 1911 | Abolition Transmission by A Ram | History Matters | Suibhne | Rise and fall of the Sikh Kingdom by Basics of Sikhi | Hardcore History by Dan Carlin | ‘Abolition Transmission’ Hits The Airwaves by Lucy Gellman | The election of George Washington was weirder than you think by Premodernist | The History of Rome by Mike Duncan | Founding Son: John Quincy’s America by Bob Crawford | India Is Transforming. But Into What? by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Khalistan Explained by Cogito
“The whole electoral process is in the hands of don’t-trust-anyone-over-the-age-I-was-under-when-I-was-saying-don’t-trust-anyone-over-that-age.”
(from Hey, Hipsters: Please Save Us from Ted Cruz by P.J. O’Rourke)
“America is an anomaly in the world. His candidacy has animated that thought that a multi-ethnic democracy, a multi-culture democracy is impossible. But that is what America is by its foundation and its constitution.
America is not natural. Natural is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands and thousands of years of human behavior and history to create something that no one’s ever created… that’s what’s exceptional about it. It ain’t easy! It’s an incredible thing!”
(from an interview with Jon Stewart by Charlie Rose)
“I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways… Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.
And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways — I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways — I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.
And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance — of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.”
(from The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama)
“The tradition of all generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem involved in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.”
(from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx)
“The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.”
[…] “The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior—all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and “bewilderers” separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.”
[…] “The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, “They want to take our place.” It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.”
[…] “The well-known principle that all men are equal will be illustrated in the colonies from the moment that the native claims that he is the equal of the settler. One step more, and he is ready to fight to be more than the settler.”
[…] “The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swim ming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laugh ing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.”
[…] “This characteristic on the part of the nationalist political parties should be interpreted in the light both of the make-up of their leaders and the nature of their followings. The rank-and-file of a nationalist party is urban. The workers, primary schoolteachers, artisans, and small shop keepers who have begun to profit—at a discount, to be sure—from the colonial setup, have special interests at heart. What this sort of following demands is the betterment of their particular lot: increased salaries, for example. The dialogue between these political parties and colonial ism is never broken off. Improvements are discussed, such as full electoral representation, the liberty of the press, and liberty of association. Reforms are debated. Thus it need not astonish anyone to notice that a large number of natives are militant members of the branches of political parties which stem from the mother country. These natives fight under an abstract watchword: “Government by the workers,” and they forget that in their country it should be nationalist watchwords which are first in the field. The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He has used his aggressiveness to serve his own individual interests.”
[…] “After a phase of accumulation of capital, capitalism has today come to modify its conception of the profit-earning capacity of a commercial enterprise. The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy goods; consequently, if the garrison has to be perpetually reinforced, if buying and selling slackens off, that is to say if manufactured and finished goods can no longer be exported, there is clear proof that the solution of military force must be set aside. A blind domination founded on slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What the factory- owners and finance magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own “legitimate interests.””
[…] “It is understandable that in this atmosphere, daily life becomes quite simply impossible. You can no longer be a fellah, a pimp, or an alcoholic as before. The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. This reign of violence will be the more terrible in proportion to the size of the implantation from the mother country. The development of violence among the colonized people will be proportionate to the violence exercised by the threatened colonial regime.”
[…] “From the moment that the native has chosen the methods of counter-violence, police reprisals automatically call forth reprisals on the side of the nationalists. However, the results are not equivalent, for machine-gunning from airplanes and bombardments from the fleet go far beyond in horror and magnitude any answer the natives can make. This recurring terror de-mystifies once and for all the most estranged members of the colonized race. They find out on the spot that all the piles of speeches on the equality of human beings do not hide the commonplace fact that the seven Frenchmen killed or wounded at the Col de Sakamody kindles the indignation of all civilized consciences, whereas the sack of the douars of Guergour and of the dechras of Djerah and the massacre of whole populations—which had merely called forth the Sakamody ambush as a reprisal—all this is of not the slightest importance.”
(from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon)
“Men carry on a struggle against nature and utilize nature for the production of material values not in isolation from each other, not as separate individuals, but in common, in groups, in societies. Production, therefore, is at all times and under all conditions social production. In the production of material values men enter into mutual relations of one kind or another within production, into relations of production of one kind or another. These may be relations of co-operation and mutual help be tween people who are free from exploitation…”
[…] “But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production.”
(from Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin)
“Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods. For instance, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is resolved by the method of socialist revolution; the contradiction between the great masses of the people and the feudal system is resolved by the method of democratic revolution; the contradiction between the colonies and imperialism is resolved by the method of national revolutionary war; the contradiction between the working class and the peasant class in socialist society is resolved by the method of collectivization and mechanization in agriculture; contradiction within the Communist Party is resolved by the method of criticism and self-criticism; the contradiction between society and nature is resolved by the method of developing the productive forces.”
(from On Contradiction by Mao Zedong)
“For several years, Camus had immersed himself in the philosophers and writers who had wrestled with how to respond to the absurd condition. Many previous thinkers had taken the path to nihilism, to the denial that life had any value. Camus was determined to develop a different view, one that both embraced absurdity as an essential truth and valued life to the fullest.”
[…] “As months passed, Camus painted the picture of everyday life in occupied France in his fictional tale of the plague in Oran. The city’s trapped inhabitants were forced to endure shortages and long lines waiting for food, the rationing of gasoline, and temporary power blackouts. Camus also described ‘isolation camps’ that quarantined people suspected of having the disease. Camus knew about the internment campus that held Jews who had been rounded up, and about the deportations. In his notebook, he jotted: ‘In the chapter on isolation camps: the relatives are already separated from the dead—then for sanitary reasons children are separated from their parents and the men from the women. So that separation becomes general. All are forced into solitude.’”
[…] “Across several articles, Camus made the case that the world was living in terror and that no matter what ideology one subscribed to—Communist, Social, of capitalist—in any contest among these ideologies, the end could never justify violent means. The unprecedented pace of weapons development ensured that war would leave little remaining in the world for the survivors to claim. War was thus unacceptable from any perspective, but nothing was being done to prevent it. Camus appealed for a new ‘civilization based on dialogue,’ a new ‘social contract,’ and a ‘new way of life’ in order to prevent an apocalypse.
He understood, of course, that in the light of history, the odds were stacked against him, but he was willing to state his wager: ‘Across five continents, an endless struggle between violence and preaching will rage in the years to come. And it is true that the former is a thousand times more likely to success than the latter. But I have always believed that if people who placed their hopes in the human condition were mad, those who despaired of events were cowards. Henceforth, there will be only one honorable choice: to wager everything on the belief that in the end words will prove stronger than bullets.’”
[…] “Camus asserted that by saying no, the rebel is in turn affirming that there are limits beyond which his rights are infringed upon. There is thus something to be preserved, something of value, on one side of the limit. Moreover, these limits and rights belong not just to the rebel but also to others. In the act of refusal, the rebel thereby defines a value, a value that Camus alleged ‘transcends the individual, which removes him from his solitude’ and thus joins him to others, and so establishes ‘the solidarity of man in the same adventure.’
The first philosophical secret of life for Camus was the recognition of the absurd condition. This instinct for positive rebellion—against death, oppression, suffering, or injustice—was the second secret of life, and a path to humanity.”
[…] “In the postwar years, revelations about the Soviet Union and the growing tensions of the Cold War led Camus to recognize that rebellion could go too far. Rebellions that evolved into revolutions somehow ended up creating oppressive regimes that denied freedom and happiness, imposed suffering and injustice, destroyed solidarity, and legitimized murder—which betrayed the very purpose of revolt. Camus’s project then took on the added dimension of examining the path from rebellion to revolution to totalitarianism. As he set forth in his introduction, The Rebel sought to “understand the times in which we live,” and how “logical crime” was justified, how murder became seen as a legitimate means to the realization of revolutions. Camus sought to understand this deviation by first tracing the history of revolutions over the previous century and a half, from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror to the rise of Nazism and Hitler.
Camus observed: “All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.” He laid blame once again upon the ascent of nihilism. In those revolutions in which God had been replaced, nihilistic attitudes recognized no limits in ensuring the continuity of the revolution as represented by the state. “Nihilism,” Camus wrote, means “one is justified in using every means at one’s disposal.” Rivals and enemies of the revolution were to be eliminated, and individual freedom suppressed as citizens became mere cogs in the apparatus. When everything is meaningless, power is everything.”
For Camus, the writer’s responsibility was to unite the greatest number of people, and not to compromise his art by serving those in power who make history. Rather, the writer was to be at the service of those who suffer under that power, and to make their suffering “resound by means of his art.” Camus asserted, “The nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.”
(from Brave Genius by Sean B. Carroll)
“What do historical sources preserve? Not the fates of the violets trodden underfoot in the Battle of Liège, nor the sufferings of the cows as Leuven burned, nor the cloud formations on the approach to Belgrade.”
(Theodor Lessing)
“To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.
Earth!-Earth!-Earth!
Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!”
[…] “A few years ago we would have despised ourselves terribly. But now we are almost happy. It is all a matter of habit – even the front-line.
Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly. Yesterday we were under fire, to-day we act the fool and go foraging through the countryside, to-morrow we go up to the trenches again. We forget nothing really. But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago. I soon found out this much: terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; but it kills, if a man thinks about it.
Just as we turn into animals when we go up to the line, because that is the only thing which brings us through safely, so we turn into wags and loafers when we are resting. We can do nothing else, it is a sheer necessity. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Haie Westhus is dying, they will have a job with Hans Kramer’s body at the Judgment Day, piecing it together after a direct hit; Martens has no legs anymore, Meyer is dead, Max is dead, Beyer is dead, Hämmerling is dead, there are a hundred and twenty wounded men lying somewhere or other; it is a damnable business, but what has it to do with us now- we live. If it were possible for us to save them. then it would be seen how much we cared- we would have a shot at it though we went under ourselves; for we can be damned quixotic when we like; fear we do not know much about terror of death, yes; but that is a different matter, that is physical.”
(from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque)