[Periodicals Chat] THE NEW GOON

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mortons stork: Oct 13, 2012

So the new republic has just put out an absolutely blistering report on around 20 years of the gates foundation's meddling in global healthcare and medicine, and boy you should read this if you really want to get insanely angry about how time and again, culminating with this latest pandemic, his foundation has helped whitewash ip protection and industry initiatives aimed at preventing global sharing of tech and pharmaceuticals, especially now. like he actively sabotaged a public science covid vaccine initiative as it was being born, like goddamn.

# ? Apr 12, 2021 21:45

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# ? May 9, 2024 05:48

mortons stork: Oct 13, 2012

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/the-brazilianization-of-the-world/

American Affairs put out a blistering critique of the consequences of late stage neoliberalization, and it's a banger. I feel like it makes especially poignant points on societal ungluing and the increasing regression of capitalist society, of its involution and folding into its own delusions

quote:

We are weighed down, as the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, by �the slow cancellation of the future,� of a future promised but not delivered, of involution in the place of progression.

The West�s involution finds its mirror image in the original coun�try of the future, the nation doomed forever to remain the country of the future, the one that never reaches its destination: Brazil. The Brazilianization of the world is our encounter with a future denied, and in which this frustration has become constitutive of our social reality. While the closing of historical horizons has often been a leftist, indeed Marxist, concern, the sense that things don�t work as they should is now widely shared across the political spectrum.
Indeed, this story of regression is now perhaps most conspicuous in the Global North, which today is demonstrating many of the features that have plagued the Global South: not just inequality and informalization of work, but increasingly venal elites, political vola�tility, and social ungluing. Is the rich world not also becoming �modern but not modern enough,� but in reverse?

[...]

Moreover, the social exclusion that seems so essential to Brazil�s social formation is not an accident, but a produced duality. In Brazil, this has been known as Bel�ndia, a term coined in 1974 by the economist Edmar Lisboa Bacha: Brazil is a rich, urban Belgium perched atop a poor, rural India, all in one country. Those in the Brazilian �Belgium� inhabit a country that is ostensibly modern and well-functioning, but is held back by those �outside,� in the backwards, semifeudal India. Yet as de Oliveira showed, the �inside� is dependent on the exploitation of the �outside� for its progress. Not only that, but the dualism shapes the inside of the �Belgium� itself; it creates a corrupt, patrimonial, and selfish elite, only too happy to wash its hands of the conditions found in its own �India.�
[...]

This could just as easily be a picture of Italy, the United States, or the United Kingdom, with their deep regional inequalities, sclerotic politics, and spectacular populism.

It's a pretty long and depressing article, but it feels like basically a broad literature review on the state of global neoliberal politics
the points on the spiteful, venal, corrupt and wholly unaccountable colonial elite feel particularly poignant to me as a resident of italy, as it very much mirrors the state of national politics going back a looong time now

# ? Jun 14, 2021 12:02

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/history-as-end-politics-of-the-past-matthew-karp/

quote:

Today�s historicism is a fulfillment of that discourse, having migrated from the margins of academia to the heart of the liberal establishment. Progress is dead; the future cannot be believed; all we have left is the past, which must therefore be held responsible for the atrocities of the present. �In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism,� one essay in the 1619 Project avers, �you have to start on the plantation.� Not with Goldman Sachs or Shell Oil, the behemoths of the contemporary order, but with the slaveholders of the seventeenth century.

# ? Jun 15, 2021 10:44

mortons stork: Oct 13, 2012

thanks, that is a good article. I think we've seen this sort of broader evolution in the way liberals fight their political battles, in that they imply that being racist, poor etc is basically an unchangeable part of people's dna, and that we must simply do without them. i mean, ive even seen liberals argue for restrictions of the franchise in my country. this i think links up fairly well with how the new historicist perspectives the article talks about have been adopted as mainstream consensus, as they articulate the ideological basis for the actual desired goal - conservatism. after all, if certain traits are inscribed in your dna, or are fruit of an original sin hundreds of years upstream from where you are, it is unlikely that change can be effected
and i do think this also serves as a useful distraction from talking of the future and re-imagining what's next, to re-discussing what was, but never in any meaningful way

it also links up nicely with the article i posted, regarding the cancellation of the future, and the complete encroachment of capitalism in the cultural sphere, which has completely sealed off the horizon to the point nothing new can be imagined, and we are stuck re-digesting the past

mortons stork has issued a correction as of 12:04 on Jun 15, 2021

# ? Jun 15, 2021 12:01

Wraith of J.O.I.: Jan 25, 2012

karp essay was great, just came to post it myself

the take on the current conservative historiography is pretty standard but i thought his assessment of the liberal side was the most interesting part

# ? Jun 15, 2021 20:17

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Dropping a long essay on COBOL and its relationship to society today

https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/

# ? Jul 16, 2021 11:57

Fortaleza: Feb 21, 2008

gradenko_2000 posted:

Dropping a long essay on COBOL and its relationship to society today

https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/

This is so far up my alley I�m going to need a second alley. Cheers man :cheers:

# ? Jul 16, 2021 17:11

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Dropping a long essay on COBOL and its relationship to society today

https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/

good poo poo, thanks

# ? Jul 16, 2021 23:01

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

There�s trouble at Babby�s First Social Democrat Rag

https://twitter.com/lyta_gold/status/1428011761635143681?s=21

# ? Aug 18, 2021 16:23

Prince Myshkin: Jun 17, 2018

Pictures of Nathan J. Robinson

# ? Aug 18, 2021 16:29

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Not too surprised the guy who was super hostile to Marxism and claimed to read a ton but never read Capital turned out to be a lovely socialist

there are several good dunks in that thread

# ? Aug 18, 2021 17:04

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

They did occasionally put out some good stuff so it's a shame it happened but also lol

# ? Aug 18, 2021 17:38

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

I was not a fan. The media landscape will be richer for its absence.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 17:47

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

He always seemed like a deeply strange person and it doesn't surprise me that when push came to shove his supposed leftism took a backseat to his desire for control. I liked some of what the magazine put out but NJR never used 100 words to say something when 1,000 would do.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 17:49

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

vyelkin posted:

NJR never used 100 words to say something when 1,000 would do.

The Bill Simmons of left-liberal anticommunism

# ? Aug 18, 2021 17:53

Prince Myshkin: Jun 17, 2018

vyelkin posted:

He always seemed like a deeply strange person and it doesn't surprise me that when push came to shove his supposed leftism took a backseat to his desire for control. I liked some of what the magazine put out but NJR never used 100 words to say something when 1,000 would do.

10,000.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 18:08

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

NJR Drake no: reading Marx to deepen your understanding of capitalisma and how to dismantle it
NJR Drake yes: reading every right wing grifter's lovely book so you can write 10,000 words about how dumb it is

# ? Aug 18, 2021 18:28

mortons stork: Oct 13, 2012

vyelkin posted:

He always seemed like a deeply strange person and it doesn't surprise me that when push came to shove his supposed leftism took a backseat to his desire for control. I liked some of what the magazine put out but NJR never used 100 words to say something when 1,000 would do.

https://twitter.com/lyta_gold/status/1428012345943633922

a series of very long emails

# ? Aug 18, 2021 19:00

side_burned: Nov 3, 2004; My mother is a fish.

You just can't trust people who causally where three piece suits.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 20:54

e-dt: Sep 16, 2019

"Can I take a bit of power?" "Love to, mate, love to, but this is all mine and I want it all, so... gotta be a no."

# ? Aug 18, 2021 23:31

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Two recent pieces I've quite enjoyed.

First, a short article on the NLR's blog about philanthropy as tax evasion and theft from society: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/21st-century-gossip

Second, a long article from the LRB on green capitalism: https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/james-meek/who-holds-the-welding-rod

Both are excellent and worth reading.

# ? Aug 24, 2021 20:25

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Very good short article on Nazi and neoliberal versions of totalitarianism here: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/rule-by-target

quote:

Rule by Target
MARCO D'ERAMO
15 OCTOBER 2021
Can a frugal state be totalitarian? Or, in other words, is an anti-statist totalitarianism possible? These questions have been asked countless times during the era of triumphant neoliberalism: beginning in 1973 when Pinochet implemented the economic dictates of the Chicago School, passing through the various military regimes responsible for carpet privatizations (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, etc.), up to the discussions � no matter how wrongheaded � of the �sanitary dictatorship� of neoliberal governance during the pandemic.

Totalitarianism requires a strong, �totalizing� state, at least according to the doctrine promoted by Hayek in his 1944 Road to Serfdom, which in its redacted form, published by Reader�s Digest, sold one million copies. According to Hayek, a society sinks into totalitarianism as soon as the state begins to worry about the economic security of its citizens. The trajectory is irreversible; we start with social security and end up in concentration camps (or gulags). The omnipresence of the state is thus integral to �totalitarianism� in the Arendtian sense.

A recent book, however, has planted in me a seed of doubt. Johann Chapoutot�s Libres d�ob�ir. Le management du nazisme � aujourd�hui (Free to Obey: Management, from Nazism to the Present Day [2020]), translated this year into Italian and German but, as is often the case, not English. Its central figure is Reinhart H�hn (1904-2000): a jurist, academic and SS general, sentenced to death for war crimes but subsequently pardoned. H�hn was part of a group of intellectuals that provided the theoretical framework not so much for Nazism itself as for the Gestapo, the SS and the occupation of almost all of Europe. His partners in this project included Werner Best (1903-89): a jurist too, but first and foremost a senior police officer in Hessen, then head of the political police, and finally plenipotentiary of occupied Denmark; Wilhelm Stuckart (1902-53), lawyer, jurisconsult to the Nazi party, member of the SS and formulator and compiler of the Nuremberg Race Laws; Franz Alfred Six (1909-75), a doctor of political science and member of the SS; Otto Ohlendorf (1907-51), an economic consultant and SS colonel who studied economics, held a doctorate in jurisprudence and commanded a unit responsible for around 90,000 deaths in Ukraine, before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg and hanged.

The presence of this educated �lite at the head of one of the fiercest apparatuses of repression ever conceived, is a marked contrast with the hysterical image of SS officers in many American Second World War films: an image whose coarseness borders on the comical, and banishes the idea that a phenomenon like Nazism could ever repeat itself. We are typically reassured that such ghouls could never again implement such dangerous ideas. Not so in Chapoutot�s portrait. The author explains how these SS intellectuals were called upon to provide a conceptual framework capable of overcoming the enormous logistical difficulties by the conquest of practically the entire continent. In a 1941 text entitled Fundamental Problems for a German Administration of the Great Space, Werner Best wrote that �the rapid and powerful expansion of the territories on which the German people directly or indirectly exercise their sovereignty obliges us to review all concepts, principles and procedures through which this sovereignty has hitherto been thought and constructed.� However much the territory under German dominion might increase, �the German people will never be able to afford doubling the number of public servants.� More would have to be done with fewer personnel, not least because a large part of the male population was conscripted. The procedures of the state needed to be honed, made more flexible. In fact, Best had (unsuccessfully) proposed to Himmler that the public sector adopt a model of relativ lockeren Besetzung (�relatively �loose� occupation�). The SS intellectuals thus became advocates of flexible management and streamlined protocols, at odds with the caricatured image of the Nazi dictatorship.

Chapoutot charts the social trajectory of these characters following the defeat of Nazism. After his commuted twenty-year sentence, Franz Six became an advertising consultant for Porsche; Best worked as a consultant for the company Stinnes AG, then became an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Federal Republic. The most interesting story was that of Reinhart H�hn, who, having escaped the death sentence and spent years practicing homeopathy under a pseudonym, went on to found the Akademie f�r F�hrungskr�fte der Wirtschaft (the Academy for Business Executives) at Bad Harzburg in Lower Saxony. By the time H�hn retired in 1972, around 200,000 German managers had passed through his institution; when he died, the number stood at 600,000. Professors at the school included other ex-SS officers, such as Six and Justus Beyer.

Bad Harzberg taught a style of management by target derived from H�hn�s reforms to the military chain of command. Under this system, the superior officer demands that his subordinates achieve their prescribed objectives, but leaves them free to decide exactly how, intervening only in exceptional cases (management by exception). Regrettably, Chapoutot does not investigate the relationship of the Bad Harzberg technique to the management styles now practiced in the United States. But his narrative shows how these hands-off methods were initially a product of German military expansion, which sought to reconcile a massive administrative operation with a reduced workforce.

The Nazi theorists were famously hostile to law and rights, viewed as creations of inferior Judaic and Latin cultures (Commandments of the Bible and Roman law codes respectively), and foreign to the proud German spirit which claims freedom from legal obligations. As such, they had a deep-rooted distrust of the state as a guarantor, responsible for the enforcement of law. The state was rather seen as a codified, ossified body which obstructs the flexibility and agility necessary for the expansion of Lebensraum. Nazis always talked of Reich (empire), never of Staat (state). Whereas Carl Schmitt saw states as bulwarks of political order, Best developed the idea of a V�lkische Gro�raumordnung (popular order of the Great Space), in which the superior races would create zones of domination around themselves without fear of any normative restriction. Power was the only all-embracing source of political order. Aside from peoples (not, as per Schmitt, states), there existed no other normative points of reference that could be counterposed to the regime established by National Socialism.

For H�hn and his contemporaries, the state is unable to cope on its own when faced with the huge multiplication of tasks and responsibilities entailed by imperial expansion. It was precisely for this reason � to deal with re-armament, war preparations and the administrative challenges posed by the occupation of Europe � that para-state Nazi organizations began to surface, starting with the SS: a �private� police force of 915,000 belonging to the party (even if Nazis always preferred to speak of a Bewegung � a movement � rather than a party). Likewise, Organisation Todt was born as a para-state company and ultimately employed 1.4 million foreign workers to meet civil and military engineering demands during the war. The state thus became one tool among many for achieving the Nazis� domestic and overseas objectives.

H�hn believed that �legal theory has created an illusion, attributing to the state an �invisible personality�, transforming it in a perennial quest for sovereignty�, whereas in reality the state is nothing but an ��apparatus� at the service of power�, a tool which �the Nazi movement has captured, and to which it has ascribed other duties.� In a chapter for the edited volume Grundfragen der Rechtsauffassung (Basic Questions for the Conception of Right), he elaborated on this argument: �The state is no longer the supreme political entity� It is rather an entity which limits itself to the execution of tasks assigned to it by the leadership (F�hrung), which operates in the service of the people. In this sense, the state is no more than a simple instrument . . . [to fulfill] the objectives it is assigned�.

It is this subordination of the state to externally-imposed targets and assignments that links H�hn�s theory to contemporary neoliberalism. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberals don�t seek to destroy the state; they know full well that without state there is no market. Rather, they want to invert the relationship of power between the market and the state. Not a market in the service of the state, but a state in the service of the market. Just as for H�hn the state is merely a mechanism equipped to achieve certain ends, so too for neoliberalism the state is a company that serves other companies � an entity that provides a service to be assessed in terms of the parameters of private enterprise (profitability, flexibility, best practices, benchmarking). None of this prevents a microscopic, pervasive control of citizenry, nor does it necessarily threaten the ability to stifle dissent. Just because war is outsourced to contractors (private mercenaries, that is to say) doesn�t mean it is less bloody, or lethal � or �total�.

The idea these Nazis passed down to us, then, is that of a heteronomous state, subordinated to external functions, designed to obey a logic which lies outside of it (and comes from a party or a company). This reverses the conventional wisdom. Totalitarianism doesn�t consist in enslavement by an omnipotent state; it rather wishes to impose a regime in which the state itself is enslaved as an instrument of an extrinsic omnipotence. A theory of management born to facilitate the advance of the Panzerdivisionen came to resemble the neoliberal project. We are thus able to resolve the Pinochet paradox, in which a brutal dictatorship violently imposes the free market. But if we were to think beyond 1973, it would be interesting to dwell for a moment on Paul Bremer�s 100 Orders, formulated in 2004 with the objective of instituting a neoliberal regime in Iraq, at the time occupied by the US Armed Forces. As Wendy Brown explains in Undoing the Demos (2015),

quote:
These mandated selling off several hundred state-run enterprises, permitting full ownership rights of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms and full repatriation of profits to foreign firms, opening Iraq�s banks to foreign ownership and control, and eliminating tariffs [�] At the same time, the Bremer Orders restricted labor and throttled back public good and services. They outlawed strikes and eliminated the right to unionize in most sectors, mandated a regressive flat tax on income, lowered the corporate rate to a flat 15 percent, and eliminated taxes on profits repatriated to foreign-owned businesses.

# ? Oct 16, 2021 17:29

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Keeping this thread alive by sharing a good recent LRB article on the intersections between US special forces and US business, which loves to reward ex-soldiers for killing people. https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/laleh-khalili/stupid-questions

# ? Mar 9, 2022 14:50

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

See if you had all simply followed my lead you could have been so far ahead of the �Adam Tooze Guy� curve

https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1501664651095986176

# ? Mar 10, 2022 04:42

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

look I don't just buy Tooze's books solely because they're big enough for miniature wargaming terrain

# ? Mar 10, 2022 05:27

Mycroft Holmes: Mar 26, 2010; by Azathoth

shoutout to "Wages of Destruction", proving the Nazis would have lost no matter what.

# ? Mar 10, 2022 08:15

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Plowed through the March issue of Monthly Review last night, some good stuff. Especially enjoyed this interview with the author of a recent book on the Federal Writers Project and Kevin B Anderson on Marx, Race, and Capitalism.

# ? Mar 16, 2022 15:28

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Two leading journals in the field of Russian and East European history have made a whole bunch of articles about Ukraine and Russia open access for at least the next couple of months. There's a ton of articles in these two collections so take a look through and see if anything piques your interest.

Kritika: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47631/print

Slavic Review: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/a-special-collection-of-articles-on-ukraine-from-slavic-review

# ? Mar 25, 2022 18:11

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

oh good look nice

# ? Mar 25, 2022 18:39

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

I realize that just dumping that as a big "check out these articles" post might be a bit much, so if you want a place to start I recommend Mark von Hagen's 1995 essay from Slavic Review, "Does Ukraine Have a History?" (https://www.cambridge.org/core/serv...e-a-history.pdf)

It's an important and influential work that helped identify and spark discussion of the problems of writing histories of countries like Ukraine that did not have a clearly-defined long history of statehood to fall back on upon post-Soviet independence. Some of it is somewhat dated now since it's nearly three decades old, but it's still an excellent gateway into the problems that are at the heart of competing interpretations of Ukrainian history and national identity.

# ? Mar 26, 2022 15:47

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Cool. Also N+1 un-paywalled their Ukraine Symposium from 2016 which was really good -> https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-24/ukraine-supplement/introduction-3/

link is to Keith Gessen�s intro, multiple articles linked at the bottom

# ? Mar 26, 2022 16:10

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Oh nice, that's a good rec.

# ? Mar 26, 2022 19:19

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

I regret to announce that it is now soy and cringe to like Adam Tooze.

I will be censoring my post history to reflect the new Line.

# ? Mar 28, 2022 20:51

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Another leading journal in Eastern European history has made available an open access selection of articles on Russia and Ukraine, this time The Russian Review: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-9434.ukraine-and-russia

A good place to start imo is this short review essay from 2016, discussing three quickly-produced books reacting to events in Ukraine from 2014 onwards: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/russ.12087

# ? Apr 8, 2022 14:15

Man Musk: Jan 13, 2010

War of choice

A Ukrainian village tries to make sense of Russian occupation

370 villagers were locked in a cellar for a month while soldiers plundered their homes

quote:

THE RUSSIANS rolled into Yahidne, a small farming village just south of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, shortly after 4pm on March 3rd. The weeks that followed may not be forgotten for centuries. At least 20 of the villagers died during 28 days of occupation. Six were shot in highly suspicious circumstances. A father and his 12-year-old daughter were gunned down as they tried to escape; the weapons used were so powerful they severed the girl�s head. Another dozen died from suffocation in a basement in the local school. They were locked in there, along with the entire village, as human shields to protect a massive Russian army camp above ground during the whole period.

Olga Martienko mops up tears with a pink scarf as she recalls the experience. She is 57, but looks a great deal older. There were 370 people sheltering in the school basement (pictured), she says; the youngest was a month old. Four to each square metre, the neighbours slept standing against one another, breathing in the same increasingly putrid air, and relieving themselves in the same bucket at the top of the stairs. On some days they were allowed out to breathe some fresh air; but on others they were not. �Almost as soon as the bombing started, people started hallucinating,� Mrs Martienko says. For significant periods, the villagers were forced to cohabit with corpses in the basement, as the most frail passed away and there was no way of taking the bodies out.

Ms Martienko�s spot was at the entrance to the cellar. She was first to face Russian soldiers when they dropped by with their regular inspections. She braced herself whenever she saw torchlights under the cracks of the basement door. Some of them whispered words of horror at the conditions, she says. Others came in drunk, and asked why she was so old; they wanted young girls for sex, they said. One rotation tried to make them sing the Russian national anthem; the villagers refused, and they recollect this moment of solidarity with laughter and with pride. �We counted the days right up until they left,� says Ms Martienko. �It was like being born again when we saw they had gone.�

The Russians left quickly on the night of March 30th, bolting the door and ordering Yahidne�s residents not to leave the basement until morning. In their rush, the soldiers left behind equipment and stark insights into their primitive ways. Cigarettes, bottles, human waste and stolen clothes�bras included�still litter their dugouts and sleeping quarters in the school�s ground floors. Outside the school, just beyond six white body bags, is a crate of military propaganda. The �military patriotic preparedness� boxes were apparently used to explain to the soldiers why they were fighting in Ukraine: teaching aids sketch key dates of glorious Russian history and the Russian military oath; a map shows most of Ukraine as historic Russia. Another crate contains reading materials: a book of the Dalai Lama�s teachings, and a magazine from Tuva, the Buddhist region of southern Russia where some of the units came from.

The villagers say that the Tuvan soldiers were the most cruel of all�especially when they started drinking. �They couldn�t handle their alcohol and didn�t understand us,� says Natalya Cherepenko, a small-scale farmer. �We did our best to avoid any contact with them.� The Tuvans lived away from the school, commandeering the villagers� ramshackle but proudly kept huts in five parallel streets. Those streets were no-go areas without an armed escort, says Mrs Cherepenko. Ethnic Russian soldiers, generally more �understanding� of the Ukrainian villagers, would occasionally offer that protection, allowing the villagers to their homes to collect a change of clothes and medicines. They even kept guard as Mrs Cherepenko milked her cows, which she was allowed to do once a day. �One of the young lads kept saying sorry to me. He said he was from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, that he thought he would be doing military exercises, and that his mum had no idea he was in Ukraine.�

The villagers tell stories of soldiers and commanders making ethical choices inside a lawless military structure that expected nothing of them. One type of soldier killed and ransacked their homes, they say, stealing expensive laptop computers, alcohol, chickens, and everything else they could lay their hands on. But another category went out of their way to make life easier for the villagers, allowing them out when commanders weren�t looking. They were the ones who brought water, and doctors to them during nights of the worst bombardment. �Of course, we all understood we were human shields locked in a basement at their pleasure,� says Nadezhda Tereshchenko, �but they told us they were taking responsibility for our safety while we were there, and I think there is some truth to that.�

Halyna, a villager whose missing brother-in-law was found buried with gunshot wounds to his head, is less charitable. She says the majority of the soldiers belonged to a third category: oblivious to the destruction they were creating, yet arrogant enough to believe they were doing God�s work. �The most upsetting thing was seeing them bring you water, and thinking they were doing you a good deed,� she says, �while you realise they are wearing your kid�s brand new trainers.�■

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/04/11/a-ukrainian-village-tries-to-make-sense-of-russian-occupation

# ? Apr 12, 2022 12:08

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

I really appreciated this recent piece from the LRB investigating conditions for Ukrainian refugees in Poland:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n09/azadeh-moaveni/women-on-the-brink

# ? May 26, 2022 01:45

Man Musk: Jan 13, 2010

quote:

In 1985 gilbert gauthe, a cowboy-boot-wearing showboat of a priest in southern Louisiana, was convicted of abusing dozens of altar boys. It was one of the first of the sexual-abuse scandals that for three decades have rippled through the Catholic church, devastating the institution. Millions of Americans and Europeans have left it. After a fresh round of scandals in 2018, concerning abuse of children in Pennsylvania, 37% of the remaining American Catholics said they were considering doing so.

America�s biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists, now faces the same reckoning. In 2019 the Houston Chronicle revealed 380 allegations of sexual abuse in the denomination�s 47,000 affiliated churches. In response, its national executive stonewalled and prevaricated, leading to demands for an independent investigation. Its findings, made public this week, are even more shocking than expected.

Abuses within the denomination appear to have been widespread, often committed by church leaders and systematically covered up. The report includes a �credible� allegation of sexual assault by a former president of the national executive, Johnny Hunt, against the wife of another pastor. It describes efforts by Southern Baptist officials to intimidate and denigrate as �opportunists� victims of assault and an overriding concern to stop them suing for compensation. A senior Southern Baptist leader is quoted denouncing victims� complaints as a �satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism�.

It amounts to a familiar story: of privileged men exercising power with grubby and sometimes criminal impunity, then denying having done so to protect their institution and themselves. Secular institutions have seen plenty of that, of course. But it is probably no coincidence that the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches are among the most male-chauvinist Christian traditions. Nor is it by chance that some of their most censorious figures have turned out to be among the biggest abusers.

Those named in the report include Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, once-revered architects of the �conservative resurgence� of the 1970s and 80s that propelled Southern Baptists into politics. Mr Patterson, another former Southern Baptist president, was sacked from a leading seminary in 2018 after it was revealed that he had allegedly instructed one student not to report a rape and met privately with a victim of abuse in order to �break her down�. Mr Pressler, a former vice-president of the denomination, is accused of raping a boy.

Southern Baptists will discuss the report, which is already receiving pushback from conservatives, at their annual meeting in California next month. But even if their leadership accepts it contritely, the revelations seem likely to accentuate a decline in the white evangelical tradition that is already advanced.

Since 2006, when Southern Baptist membership peaked at 16.3m, the group has lost 2.6m members, including over a million in the past three years. Formerly seen as an American bulwark against irreligiosity, white evangelicalism, of which Southern Baptists are the dominant strain, now looks to have been a brief holdout. It has been losing congregants at the same rate as the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. In 2006, almost a quarter of Americans were white evangelicals; only 14% are today.

The decline has been most pronounced among those aged 18-29. Anecdotal evidence suggests they dislike the partisan alignment as much as the scandals Messrs Patterson and Pressler have wrought. Leah Boyd, a 23-year-old Southern Baptist seminarian and victim of assault within the church, estimates that of her 30 school friends in the Alabamian Bible belt, only ten attend services. �I�m an outlier,� she says. �It�s not just the sex-abuse scandals. People of my age are turned away by the positions on race, sexuality and gender.� And also, she adds, by white evangelicals� embrace of Donald Trump, another alleged sexual predator. Southern Baptists �were supposed to be part of a moral majority�, she says.

The group�s politicisation has on the face of it provided a counterweight to secular decline. Voting in lock-step, white evangelicals have punched well above their dwindling numbers. They represent a plurality of the Republican coalition and are by far the country�s most powerful special interest. If America is about to lose the right to legal abortion, it will be by order of a conservative Supreme Court majority assembled to please them. Yet a cultural minority will struggle to win a culture war. And the damage white evangelicals� political overreach is storing up is already obvious.

The Catholic church has survived the dire failures of its priesthood in part by emphasising other strengths, including the vigour of its charities, its growth in developing countries, and their ability to replenish dwindling rich-world vocations and congregations. In their partisan fury, America�s white evangelicals seem more intent on kicking their tradition�s crutches away.
A secular decline

Southern Baptists� core strengths are their decentralised structure and commitment to evangelising. Both attributes, emblematic of America�s singular religious tradition, contain the potential for rethinking and regrowth. Yet politicisation has blunted them in favour of groupthink and hostility to outsiders. Black and immigrant Southern Baptists, possible sources of renewal, have joined progressives in the rush to the exit. Dissident thinkers such as Russell Moore, a critic of the church�s response to the abuse scandal, and Beth Moore (no relation), one of its few notable women, have been driven out. New baptisms are close to record lows.

The sexual-abuse scandal is emblematic of these wider institutional failures. Conscientious evangelicals consider it proof of the persistence of sin. An alternative reading is that it indicates an institution that has abused its power over its own vulnerable members, just as it has in the public square.■