Well, six months since my last post (Feb. 2024). Unable to sustain more than an hour or two focused work these days, and that only 60% of the time roughly. So, let me try to just write something quickly (while America and myself still exist). If the pieces seem disconnected, stay 'wid me and perhaps connections will become clear (or my increasing decrepitude will become clear).
March 23, 1775 Patrick Henry made his famous statement:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
In Germany May 1928. the Reichstag elections indicated the antirepublican parties were receiving only 13 percent of the vote in total, i.e., the democratic Wiemar Republic had a real chance to succeed. When the American stock market crashed on October 29, 1929 and plunged the entire world into a depression, Germany's recovery from WWI was ended: businesses failed, unemployment and inflation skyrocketed, and parliamentary democracy in Germany soon came to an end. In July 1932 the Nazi party received 37 percent of the vote in Reichstag elections, though the Nazi party had made it clear they intended to dismantle democracy. With the help of a March 23, 1933 ammendment to the Weimar Constitution which was similar in effects to the recent US v Trump decision by our Supreme Court (for a readable description of our SCOTUS decision and its implications, see The American Enabling Act, by Eisenman and Coe at CounterPunch), Hitler became unrestrained dictator of Germany by August 1934. The economy did improve for a while in Germany, but the end result was the complete destruction of Germany and the death of around 6 million Germans (military and civilian) and around 11 million Jews, communists, and other folks considered undesirable by Hitler and his pals. I cannot tell you how a Trump 2.0 presidency would end, but I assure you it would end badly (it is generally a bad idea to grant absolute power to anyone, but in particular someone with obvious character disorders, based on the historical record and common sense).
The connection(s)? The masses seem to prefer life as virtual serfs, i.e., workers who have enough to eat and drink (well, judging by the current epidemic of obesity, perhaps better said "who have more than enough to eat and drink") and don't mind if a few parasites at the top own most of the wealth and power of a nation. Patrick's 1775 comment apparently means something different to virtual serfs, e.g., "give me my place in life, however low, if I can at least get by."
I recently read a 1930 essay, What I Believe, by Albert Einstein, originally published October 1930 in the periodical "Forum and Century," vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living Philosophies. I found a scanned copy of that 1930 magazine and from that typed the article in verbatim to make the essay more easily accessed. Let me quote some of Einstein's words from that essay:
My political ideal is democracy. Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized...Full well do I know that in order to attain any definite goal it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding and carry most of the responsibility. But those who are led should not be driven, and they should be allowed to choose their leader. It seems to me that the distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force. I am convinced that degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proved that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.
For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to such régimes as exist in Russia and Italy today. The thing which has discredited the European forms of democracy is not the basic theory of democracy itself, which some say is at fault, but the instability of our political leadership, as well as the impersonal character of party alignments.
I believe that you in the United States have hit upon the right idea. You choose a President for a reasonable length of time and give him enough power to acquit himself properly of his responsibilities.
We remind the reader that Einstein was born in 1879 of parents "of the Israelitic faith" (as his birth certificate put it) in the then new German empire. In 1932 Einstein had been asked if he might like to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He agreed, initially planning to spend five months of the year in Princeton and the rest of the time in Berlin. However, December 1932 Einstein and his wife left Germany and did not return. Einstein was sworn in as a United States citizen by Judge Phillip Forman in 1940 in Trenton, New Jersey. Abraham Pais writes of that 1940 ceremony by Judge Forman, "I cherish the memory; he inducted me, too." Pais, a Dutch Jew, had been hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam in 1943, but was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo in March 1945, narrowly escaping execution before the war ended. In 1946 Pais went to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and often talked with Einstein as they took walks or lunch together. Pais later (1982) wrote a detailed biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-853907-0.
At any rate, Perhaps it is my advancing age and dealing daily with the "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" (from Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark c. 1600), but the reverence Pais shows for America (re cherishing the memory of his becoming an American citizen) as it was before the perversion of the country and Western civilization generally since the 1960's brought a tear to my eyes (well, to my right eye; apparently my left eye was less moved, perhaps because it typically handles allergen-provoked dripping and refuses to accept any additional responsibilities).
As I wondered before up here (discussing the Ritchie Boys, Jewish refugees from the Nazis who trained as US Counter Intelligence agents operating in Europe in WWII) what will be the fate of good men fleeing tyranny (I don't mean hordes of people illegally pouring over the borders of a country without much motive other than recreating the third world conditions that they left) if the American Republic collapses into a totalitarian state? It is probably futile for me to worry about such things, given that Homo sapiens seems to be devolving to something more akin to a colony or hive organism where uniformity is inspected in real time at every level, functional idiots receiving their "guidance" from stochastic parrots regurgitating statistically associated words and sentences (so-called AI), faces in the clouds as it were without any intrinsic meaning.
It appears a few folks other than myself are aware that AI is somewhat of an "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon:
Many people seem to believe that AI will be the most important technological invention of their lifetime, but I don’t agree given the extent to which the internet, cell phones, and laptops have fundamentally transformed our daily lives, enabling us to do things never before possible, like make calls, compute and shop from anywhere......people generally substantially overestimate what the technology is capable of today. In our experience, even basic summarization tasks often yield illegible and nonsensical results. This is not a matter of just some tweaks being required here and there; despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful for even such basic tasks. And I struggle to believe that the technology will ever achieve the cognitive reasoning required to substantially augment or replace human interactions. Humans add the most value to complex tasks by identifying and understanding outliers and nuance in a way that it is difficult to imagine a model trained on historical data would ever be able todo.
(interview with Jim Covello, Head of Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs).
Going back to my concern about the potential collapse of the rule of law in America in November, I have been trying to understand what it is like living under a Putin-style totalitarian regime. This may be more applicable to our present situation than the 1932 Germany example, given that Trump has no motivations other than his malignant narcissism, contrasting with Hitler's ideological agenda (admittedly that in service to his disorders of character in large part). I read a RAND corporation article, "Corruption and the Russian Government Reshuffle" which was interesting in and of itself, but found there a cite to "Unwritten rules: How Russia really works" by Alena Ledeneva, a Russian who produced the article with support of Centre for European Reform in 2001. Alena said:
It is not that the components of the rule of law are absent; rather, the ability of the rule of law to function coherently has been subverted by a powerful set of practices that has evolved organically in the post-Soviet milieu. Taking such an outlook as a point of departure, I will argue that the “rules of the game” in Russia can actually be understood if so-called “unwritten rules” are taken into account.
She goes into much detail, much of which I recognized as already occurring here in America, though limited up to now by the protections of our constitutional government combined with enough noble souls at every level to cause the rule of law to be generally adhered to in our own country, up to now. There are always exceptions of course. Anywhere you have humans acting with state or corporate power you always have the potential that the rule of law will be replaced by rules of the game, e.g., "there is a law we can use to harm you if you persist in inconveniencing us" (or for those already subject to unrestricted govenment power in a particular context, there may be a direct threat of violence or further deprivation of liberty). In such a system, you have folks praising the police, but making it clear that police power to enforce the law does not apply to them personally (this should sound familiar to you in 2024), i.e., everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others (paraphrasing Orwell in Animal Farm, first published in England in 1945). Some folks seem to prefer such a system, where things are done or not done depending on what personal relationship you can claim with the appropriate person, but I doubt they realize that America only achieved the high standard of living (that we had before they handed the game over to special interests and coopted the educational system in the service of radical agendas that had nothing to do with the intent of the Founders) we enjoy because rule of law meant that talent and character, rather than connections, could lead to individual success and advance for the society as a whole. I don't mean to be hypocritical, i.e., of course the human connection has been important to me, but only in the service of what was just, as assessed by all parties to the particular social transactions.
If my previous post was somewhat of the angry prophet harangue, perhaps this post is more along the lines of, "do you realize what you are getting yourselves into?" (as regards the November 2024 election).
Posts
