I was struck by the imagery of Auschwitz I and read the post. I live in Poland. It is a bit over an hours drive from my home to Auschwitz-Birkanau. I have been there many times. Most friends who visit me want to go there. I’m also a big fan of Vlad Vexler.
The town where I live in the Podhale region of Malopolska had a thriving Jewish community for more than five hundred years. An early Polish king had encouraged Jewish migration to Poland to build up commerce, and it worked. Prior to WWII, about one third of all Jews in the world lived in Poland. Poland’s benign treatment of Jews made it a magnet for business and for people in medicine, law and the sciences.
Now there are only about 4500 Jews living in Poland. Before the war there were between three and four million.
My town had about fifteen percent of the town that was Jewish. Now there are no Jews here. Their former synagogue is our movie theater. The old Jewish cemetery is not far from my house. On the day that the Jews were evacuated to the camps, about two hundred who were sick or old were shot at a mass grave at the cemetery. I’m sure that if you had asked them five years earlier if that was possible, they would have said that it was not. We often underestimate the danger because it is too painful to contemplate.
Only about three percent of the Jews in my town survived the war. Where some Jews from nearby areas got evacuated to labor camps, where more survived, most of the Jews from here went straight to extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz.
A few Jews who survived returned after the war. Several men tried to reclaim the synagogue but were murdered by anti-Semitic Poles. My landlord’s grandmother had hidden the possessions of some of her Jewish neighbors for them, but they never returned to claim them. The few Jews who survived returned to find Poles living in their homes and a communist puppet government. So most emigrated to British Palestine or America.
I met some of the descendants of the Jews from here when they came to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the evacuation to the camps. There was one old woman who lived here as a child and who had survived the camps. But most were children or grandchildren of survivors who have since passed away. They were quite surprised that I knew the history of the Jews here. They have mostly been forgotten. But I went by the cemetery every day and got curious so did some research on the Yad Vashem website and databases.
At one level all this seems like ancient history. But my father was a combat vet of WWII and his division had liberated some of the satellite labor camps to the Dachau concentration camp complex near Munich. It is worth remembering that Dachau started out as a camp for political dissidents who opposed the Nazis. The goal was isolation, not extermination. It all started with that. But that wasn’t how it ended. We always need to remember that. There is no pacifying autocrats. One capitulation just creates more desire for unbridled power. You have to fight at the beginning because you may not be able to fight later.
Perhaps one avenue we can approach is to fall back on a strength of the American system, localism. The core idea of the federal project is that local relationships, local representation, and ultimately local organizing. Perhaps our hope is to turn each local No Kings protest into local democratic networks and local politics that can be authentic, deeply connected, and real and ultimately fight the vapid nationalization of all things.
It's not a well-developed theory but it may be a start.
From my vantage in the bluest county of the bluest state (Vermont) it looks like you're right. Politics here is very local, even if most people sit it out. There are three states where the suicide rate of young men has gone down in recent years: Vermont, New Hampshire and North Dakota. The last may be because of abundant jobs in the oil boom there. Meanwhile Vermont and New Hampshire, despite having legislatures of very different parties, both have the New England tradition of town meetings. And both have Republican governors who want little to do with Trump's fascism. (Vermont's recently said the only excuse to put federal troops in the streets is a "real insurrection, like January 6th.") Indivisible is quite active here. This is the least church-going corner of the nation, yet even young-Earth Christians I know here are largely anti-Trump, recognizing the threat.
How to replicate New England culture elsewhere, I don't know. But it's encouraging looking south to NYC, seeing Mamdani's polling among younger men, who appreciate that, as he says, no amount of experience can make up for the lack of character. In New England too, character still counts for a lot. May character be the key? Can we stand up more exemplars of good, conscious, conscientious character, such that the young may dance to a new, more life-affirming beat?
I'm reading The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. Revolutions against tyrants can happen quickly, unexpectedly, within months -- especially when they make political blunders. Charles I, like Trump, claimed additional power by declaring emergencies where there were none, and bypassing the legislature. It nearly worked; it spectacularly failed.
That's an interesting read. I would like to have those kinds of cultural connections too. Unfortunately one of the key problems we have is that even local races have become so nationalized that city level meetings which are officially nonpartisan are being messed with by state level partisans. I feel like we have to find a way to build local networks so we can at least take back our states if not more.
This one feels like a funeral sermon for a country that hasn’t noticed it’s died yet.
We keep thinking tyranny will come in jackboots, not yoga pants and algorithms. But history doesn’t crash through the door anymore. It just quietly changes the locks while we scroll.
The slap’s already midair. We’re still arguing about who deserves it.
On a more pedestrian, less helpful note: In my early days I would think about the future and death and despair about missing out on how much we would have progressed in so many ways. Now that the meter is almost expired, not so much. Things were challenging enough as it was, turns out I didn’t appreciate they could get this much worse.
Those who oppose the current administration would do well to develop candidates and positions that attract libertarians, constitutionalists, and other advocates of "small government" and "free markets" as part of a broad coalition, which also includes advocates for policies that actually benefit the disadvantaged. If the choice is between big government on the "left" and big government on the "right," I think that the "right" will probably win.
After Biden's withdrawal, one pundit (whose name I forgot) said that if the party really saw winning the election as necessary to preserve democracy, they'd nominate Romney on a unity ticket. If that would be a bridge too far, then somebody like Manchin. Instead, they just attacked the opposition and promised more of the same, without consistently addressing the issues that were driving voters away from them.
Repeating this tactic runs a high risk of repeating the results.
By the way, I think that it's a good thing when the opponent of my favorite candidate is well qualified and has good ideas. Then even if I'm outvoted, I'm relatively reassured.
What serves the country far less is when all parties do a "race to the bottom." in which the most credible claim is, "the other one is even worse."
"How do you organize democratic renewal when the social forces destroying democracy—algorithmic manipulation, atomization, economic exclusion—make democratic organizing nearly impossible?"
I have observed that change usually happens in a progression mirroring the grieving cycle: denial, bargaining, anger, surrender, and acceptance. The U.S. is currently looping in the denial, bargaining, and anger stages, grasping for illusions of hope and ignoring the "slap" that is the likely outcome of decades of denial. I am reminded of the old movie trope of someone becoming frantic and hysterical, and the protagonist slaps them to snap them back down into existential reality.
How do we organize a democratic renewal before we accept that the past system has officially expired and is beyond resurrection? How do we maintain order in the interim between the death of the old Republic and the birth of a new Republic?
An autocratic government is very difficult to dislodge, as we experienced in the Revolutionary War that birthed our founding Republic. King George III was an ailing autocrat, much like today's mad "King" Trump, but it took a war to officially end colonial rule, and for the revolutionary concept of a Republic to be accepted. We will likely have a revolution rather than a peaceful evolution to the formation of a modern, new Republic. Revolutions by their very nature are violent, and the MAGA opposition demonstrates daily its embrace of violence and the use of force to control dissent.
There are more guns than people in the U.S., and a spark of violence will likely ignite an orgy of reprisals and bloodshed. If unchecked, MAGA, following their Project 2025 manifesto, will forcefully establish their autocracy and a mandate from God. They have boldly established a private army of "enforcers" unchecked by any rules of law. There is only one force that can present a realistic "force challenge" to stop the violence and maintain order.
The "slap" is the realization that there is no democratic way to check autocratic forces dedicated to destroying democracy. We need to wrap our heads around the idea that the interim between the death of the Republic and the birth of a new form of democratic Republic will likely be a state of military martial law, something not seen in the U.S. since the Civil War and the following Reconstruction. Democracy does not spontaneously erupt, but must be tended and cultivated until it becomes firmly rooted. So far, the Armed Forces have remained disciplined and true to the honor of their oath to protect the nation. "Death before dishonor" is deeply ingrained in their ethos, and pray that their moral values can hold long enough for the transformation to take root and thrive into the future.
I was struck by the imagery of Auschwitz I and read the post. I live in Poland. It is a bit over an hours drive from my home to Auschwitz-Birkanau. I have been there many times. Most friends who visit me want to go there. I’m also a big fan of Vlad Vexler.
The town where I live in the Podhale region of Malopolska had a thriving Jewish community for more than five hundred years. An early Polish king had encouraged Jewish migration to Poland to build up commerce, and it worked. Prior to WWII, about one third of all Jews in the world lived in Poland. Poland’s benign treatment of Jews made it a magnet for business and for people in medicine, law and the sciences.
Now there are only about 4500 Jews living in Poland. Before the war there were between three and four million.
My town had about fifteen percent of the town that was Jewish. Now there are no Jews here. Their former synagogue is our movie theater. The old Jewish cemetery is not far from my house. On the day that the Jews were evacuated to the camps, about two hundred who were sick or old were shot at a mass grave at the cemetery. I’m sure that if you had asked them five years earlier if that was possible, they would have said that it was not. We often underestimate the danger because it is too painful to contemplate.
Only about three percent of the Jews in my town survived the war. Where some Jews from nearby areas got evacuated to labor camps, where more survived, most of the Jews from here went straight to extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz.
A few Jews who survived returned after the war. Several men tried to reclaim the synagogue but were murdered by anti-Semitic Poles. My landlord’s grandmother had hidden the possessions of some of her Jewish neighbors for them, but they never returned to claim them. The few Jews who survived returned to find Poles living in their homes and a communist puppet government. So most emigrated to British Palestine or America.
I met some of the descendants of the Jews from here when they came to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the evacuation to the camps. There was one old woman who lived here as a child and who had survived the camps. But most were children or grandchildren of survivors who have since passed away. They were quite surprised that I knew the history of the Jews here. They have mostly been forgotten. But I went by the cemetery every day and got curious so did some research on the Yad Vashem website and databases.
At one level all this seems like ancient history. But my father was a combat vet of WWII and his division had liberated some of the satellite labor camps to the Dachau concentration camp complex near Munich. It is worth remembering that Dachau started out as a camp for political dissidents who opposed the Nazis. The goal was isolation, not extermination. It all started with that. But that wasn’t how it ended. We always need to remember that. There is no pacifying autocrats. One capitulation just creates more desire for unbridled power. You have to fight at the beginning because you may not be able to fight later.
Perhaps one avenue we can approach is to fall back on a strength of the American system, localism. The core idea of the federal project is that local relationships, local representation, and ultimately local organizing. Perhaps our hope is to turn each local No Kings protest into local democratic networks and local politics that can be authentic, deeply connected, and real and ultimately fight the vapid nationalization of all things.
It's not a well-developed theory but it may be a start.
The 'united' states is at least potentially 50 governments in a trench coat.
True, although the trouble is, some of them are eager to declare war on the others.
From my vantage in the bluest county of the bluest state (Vermont) it looks like you're right. Politics here is very local, even if most people sit it out. There are three states where the suicide rate of young men has gone down in recent years: Vermont, New Hampshire and North Dakota. The last may be because of abundant jobs in the oil boom there. Meanwhile Vermont and New Hampshire, despite having legislatures of very different parties, both have the New England tradition of town meetings. And both have Republican governors who want little to do with Trump's fascism. (Vermont's recently said the only excuse to put federal troops in the streets is a "real insurrection, like January 6th.") Indivisible is quite active here. This is the least church-going corner of the nation, yet even young-Earth Christians I know here are largely anti-Trump, recognizing the threat.
How to replicate New England culture elsewhere, I don't know. But it's encouraging looking south to NYC, seeing Mamdani's polling among younger men, who appreciate that, as he says, no amount of experience can make up for the lack of character. In New England too, character still counts for a lot. May character be the key? Can we stand up more exemplars of good, conscious, conscientious character, such that the young may dance to a new, more life-affirming beat?
I'm reading The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. Revolutions against tyrants can happen quickly, unexpectedly, within months -- especially when they make political blunders. Charles I, like Trump, claimed additional power by declaring emergencies where there were none, and bypassing the legislature. It nearly worked; it spectacularly failed.
That's an interesting read. I would like to have those kinds of cultural connections too. Unfortunately one of the key problems we have is that even local races have become so nationalized that city level meetings which are officially nonpartisan are being messed with by state level partisans. I feel like we have to find a way to build local networks so we can at least take back our states if not more.
This one feels like a funeral sermon for a country that hasn’t noticed it’s died yet.
We keep thinking tyranny will come in jackboots, not yoga pants and algorithms. But history doesn’t crash through the door anymore. It just quietly changes the locks while we scroll.
The slap’s already midair. We’re still arguing about who deserves it.
On a more pedestrian, less helpful note: In my early days I would think about the future and death and despair about missing out on how much we would have progressed in so many ways. Now that the meter is almost expired, not so much. Things were challenging enough as it was, turns out I didn’t appreciate they could get this much worse.
Those who oppose the current administration would do well to develop candidates and positions that attract libertarians, constitutionalists, and other advocates of "small government" and "free markets" as part of a broad coalition, which also includes advocates for policies that actually benefit the disadvantaged. If the choice is between big government on the "left" and big government on the "right," I think that the "right" will probably win.
After Biden's withdrawal, one pundit (whose name I forgot) said that if the party really saw winning the election as necessary to preserve democracy, they'd nominate Romney on a unity ticket. If that would be a bridge too far, then somebody like Manchin. Instead, they just attacked the opposition and promised more of the same, without consistently addressing the issues that were driving voters away from them.
Repeating this tactic runs a high risk of repeating the results.
By the way, I think that it's a good thing when the opponent of my favorite candidate is well qualified and has good ideas. Then even if I'm outvoted, I'm relatively reassured.
What serves the country far less is when all parties do a "race to the bottom." in which the most credible claim is, "the other one is even worse."
"How do you organize democratic renewal when the social forces destroying democracy—algorithmic manipulation, atomization, economic exclusion—make democratic organizing nearly impossible?"
I have observed that change usually happens in a progression mirroring the grieving cycle: denial, bargaining, anger, surrender, and acceptance. The U.S. is currently looping in the denial, bargaining, and anger stages, grasping for illusions of hope and ignoring the "slap" that is the likely outcome of decades of denial. I am reminded of the old movie trope of someone becoming frantic and hysterical, and the protagonist slaps them to snap them back down into existential reality.
How do we organize a democratic renewal before we accept that the past system has officially expired and is beyond resurrection? How do we maintain order in the interim between the death of the old Republic and the birth of a new Republic?
An autocratic government is very difficult to dislodge, as we experienced in the Revolutionary War that birthed our founding Republic. King George III was an ailing autocrat, much like today's mad "King" Trump, but it took a war to officially end colonial rule, and for the revolutionary concept of a Republic to be accepted. We will likely have a revolution rather than a peaceful evolution to the formation of a modern, new Republic. Revolutions by their very nature are violent, and the MAGA opposition demonstrates daily its embrace of violence and the use of force to control dissent.
There are more guns than people in the U.S., and a spark of violence will likely ignite an orgy of reprisals and bloodshed. If unchecked, MAGA, following their Project 2025 manifesto, will forcefully establish their autocracy and a mandate from God. They have boldly established a private army of "enforcers" unchecked by any rules of law. There is only one force that can present a realistic "force challenge" to stop the violence and maintain order.
The "slap" is the realization that there is no democratic way to check autocratic forces dedicated to destroying democracy. We need to wrap our heads around the idea that the interim between the death of the Republic and the birth of a new form of democratic Republic will likely be a state of military martial law, something not seen in the U.S. since the Civil War and the following Reconstruction. Democracy does not spontaneously erupt, but must be tended and cultivated until it becomes firmly rooted. So far, the Armed Forces have remained disciplined and true to the honor of their oath to protect the nation. "Death before dishonor" is deeply ingrained in their ethos, and pray that their moral values can hold long enough for the transformation to take root and thrive into the future.
Already painfully
conscious.
Incites me to make a piece of art to depict this
Good luck with voting. Have you read Jacob Nordangarde?
https://x.com/maveric68078049/status/1978136689647181903?s=46