Category Archives: Arsenal Essay

Nosferatu (2024): The Changing Political Economy of Late 1830s Central Europe

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(This essay contains plot details.)

Nosferatu is the latest gothic horror film from the director and screenwriter Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman), whose films often viscerally evoke a popular mindset and sensibility of a bygone era that we cannot genuinely grasp or relate to from our 21st century world. Where so many “period pieces” released in the present-day simply project backward a present-day worldview and belief system without regard to anachronism, Eggers typically goes to great pains to try to depict a past that is completely alien to us and whose people would not be able to understand any of the ways in which we comprehend or parse our own world today.

An unfamiliar familiarity

His new film, ostensibly about a vampire moving to Germany at the dawn of the Victorian Era, adapted from the 1922 German film of the same name (itself a reinterpretation of the 1897 Bram Stoker novel Dracula) lands in a particularly interesting setting for us as modern viewers. His 2015 film “The VVitch: A New England Folktale” is set in the 1630s, early in the age of Modern English (the language of the film), which is only fleetingly legible as “modern” because it takes place beyond the periphery of “civilization” in the second century of Modernity. By contrast, Nosferatu is set (in part, at least) much closer to a world we feel we can recognize and understand in the form of urban Germany in 1838. But even in these scenes – before we get to the rural Carpathian settings – something remains completely “off” to our 21st century eyes. There is a discomfort here that might even read to the audience as erroneous filmmaking, in contrast with our ability to integrate the discomfort more readily with 1630s New England or 10th century Iceland because they are so overtly unfamiliar.

We think we know life in the late 1830s. The fictional German city of Wisborg, one of the two settings of the film, is a modern capitalist city in Europe on the brink of heavy industrialization. The late 1830s is just about within the family memory of many of us living today. So, as the film unfolds and we see certain portrayals on the screen, it feels out of time and place in a peculiar way. But the reality of Victorian Era society is that it was rife with the type of contradictions that feature so prominently in the popular gothic fiction of the day. Despite the constant self-juxtaposition of the modern, enlightened rationalism of urban, capitalist Europe with the backwards agrarianism of the barbarous lands of the Balkans and the Russian Empire, the high society of cities in Europe and the United States were obsessed with the occult and faeries and all manner of supernatural throwbacks.

Certainly, they managed to industrialize, systematize, and mass produce what was once colorful local folklore and superstition over the course of the 19th century, and perhaps they were not as ready as medieval and early modern counterparts to sincerely blame things on witchcraft, but they were nevertheless completely fascinated by these ideas. And they never stopped thinking about and talking about death – perhaps unsurprising in an increasingly urbanized world where cities still killed more people than they birthed each year, only continuing to grow by strangling the traditional way of life in the surrounding countryside and sucking economic migrants into the core. Young women and girls were especially vulnerable – and usable – in this shifting world.

Ellen

Our heroine of the film, the newly married Ellen Hutter, is perhaps the most challenging and complex role in the story, and it can be difficult to say conclusively whether Lily-Rose Depp pulls it off successfully, although she does deliver some incredible performances in a number of scenes. Her character is a layered figure who has been incredibly lonely for much of her life, with decidedly mixed results in trying to fill that loneliness. 

Like many Victorian women of society, even beyond any possible supernatural abilities or difficulties with seizures, Ellen is always on the verge of an explosive emotional outburst – either because of a lifetime of traumatic and controlling abuse or the constant, ambient social repression of her true nature and desires, or all of it together. Throughout the film, there is a tension between physically restraining or incapacitating someone against their will for their own safety (and social conformity) versus allowing them to do what their instinct tells them, a literal representation of the implied social repression. She feels very deeply about everything, and she seems to feel emotions that are not always aligned to what she understands is the socially correct emotion for a given situation. Prof. Franz tells her that maybe in an ancient world, she would have been a venerated and powerful priestess by virtue of all the animalistic characteristics and supernatural connections that make her struggle so much in 1838. Instead she is at the mercy of everyone else in all but a few fleeting moments, with all her choices constrained or coerced. From childhood abandonment and manipulation to her cruel confinements against nightly sleepwalking to the systematic annihilation of her friends, and at last to her final exsanguination, it is not fair or deserved what happens to her, but it simply is. Her husband, Thomas, constantly attempts to have an effect on his situation through bold personal action, typically in vain (subverting what another director/writer might have depicted), while she accepts that she cannot overcome the forces acting upon her. In about 10 years from the events of this story, everyone like him will be crushed in the failed 1848 German Revolution and flee to the United States, leaving behind a much more fatalistic German population.

Ellen would have grown up shortly after the Napoleonic Wars in the era of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the German Romanticism movement to define a German national culture in opposition to both the French Enlightenment and the former Holy Roman Empire’s fragmentary feudalism. She is born into a socially patriarchal “Fatherland” that has not yet come together as a singular nation-state, a realm that is a hodge-podge of bustling trade centers and heavily forested principalities still operating under the old ways. A consciousness is emerging that this collection of territories, still recovering from two centuries of other states’ armies ravaging and pillaging back and forth from all four compass points, would be better off (and treated better) together, but so far it is still not taken seriously. Its modernizing impulses are explicitly set against the continued backward features that middle class and wealthy German people of the age know still remain but wish to be rid of.

Ellen notes that her father lost patience with her childhood development and peculiarities and eventually denounced her for communing with faeries – a popular fixation of the 19th century urban middle class as they became increasingly disconnected from the countryside, which was seen as the reservoir of distinctive national identity. (Later in the film, her host Friedrich denounces her several times for her apparent occult connections, again making reference to faeries.) She also says that her father accused her of being a changeling. The 19th century saw a fresh wave of hysteria around the notion that supernatural beings were routinely swapping out ordinary children for mentally defective substitute children who had intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses, things along the lines of her epilepsy. It’s hard for us today to think back six or seven generations to a seemingly modern setting and understand that many educated people believed this as fervently as a medieval peasant.

Like any good gothic horror, the subtext of the supernaturalism in this story is that the past is not really dead, that there is no linear progression of human development, and that education alone cannot account for everything.

Thomas

Ellen’s new husband, the young striver Thomas Hutter, represents the emerging class of highly educated clerks and agents who (along with junior attorneys) grease the wheels of capitalism but are not themselves owners of capital or members of the bourgeoisie. Karl Marx, who published The Communist Manifesto just 10 years after the setting of this film, largely neglects to comment on or analyze the role and importance of this class in his descriptions of the rising world order of places like Germany, Britain, and France as industrialization enters full swing. Marx wrote much of his work when clerk-type employees and middle managers still represented a pretty marginal segment of the population. Their importance exploded with the rise of telegraphy, cheap paper production, filing cabinets, and typewriters a bit later in the 19th century. His analysis took place in an era where clerks were still more like the titular character of Melville’s 1853 “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” tasked with copying records by hand, and it is perhaps easy to overlook their growing critical function.

Back in 1838, our somewhat hapless would-be protagonist Thomas, is seeking to enter this world of clerks. He has received a good education, but he is not wealthy. He is from the liberal intelligentsia, not the conservative bourgeoisie or landowners, but he will be working on their behalf and doing their bidding, as his career. What he desperately wants is financial security, steady employment, and career advancement. His new wife, Ellen, begs him not to take the special mission appointed to him by his new employer, a real estate broker, to travel to the Carpathian Mountains to hand-deliver a contract for a property sale in Wisborg. He insists on leaving her behind to undertake this task because the boss, Herr Knock, has explicitly promised that it will guarantee his job and better compensation. But here is the fundamental problem of the role of the clerk: although they are white-collar, educated workers and not owners of capital or titles, they are totally controlled by the ruling classes and in thrall to them, not only serving those interests but greedily acting against their own long-term self-interests for the prospect of short-term monetary advantage. Marx didn’t realize just how many of these guys there were about to be across Europe and the United States within just a few decades, as capitalism jumped to national and multinational corporate scales. (When you see Franz and Sievers rifling through stacks of hand-copied papers and books to find information on Knock’s demonic master, it’s easy to see why the administrative middle management seemed somewhat less important to an early analysis of capitalism and class struggle.)

Thomas and his boss (who, along with his shop full of other old white-haired clerks, stands in for the earlier age of fixers and contract facilitators of feudalism) are quite literally servants to a demonic figure, the Nosferatu, Count Orlok. But a man like Thomas is also just as much in hock to his creditor and benefactor, the wealthy capitalist Friedrich Harding, a shipyard owner. Long before Thomas signs a nefarious, supernatural contract with Count Orlok (either under the influence of hypnosis or induced by a simple bag of coins), he is already locked into some kind of financial arrangement with Friedrich. Ellen expresses at various points of the film, with characteristically strong emotions, that she doesn’t feel they needed more income or material possessions, but her protests are unable to penetrate the striving avarice of her husband, who justifies his singular focus as being for her benefit.

Count Orlok

Thomas journeys to one of the Romanian lands – perhaps Habsburg Transylvania or one of the Danubian Principalities recently occupied by the Russian Empire as protectorates after centuries of Ottoman protection – where he encounters a kaleidoscope of truly “Old World” cultural practices from Roma peoples and Romanian peasants to a semi-Asiatic feudal lord (who is also a vampire, of course) to the local Eastern Orthodox priest and nuns. All of this Carpathian hinterland, located at the crossroads of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, a place where slavery itself still lingers for the Roma, stands in contrast with his familiar world of a modern, Lutheran city like Wisborg, with its merry Christmas trees and Christmas markets and women who dress in the fashions of the newly reigning Queen Victoria of Great Britain, herself soon to be one half of a young, besotted German couple. 

The grotesque and rotting Count Orlok – in contrast with the latest courtly trends of the liberal, modern nobility to the north – sports a 15th century Balkan boyar moustache and mouldering fur hat inspired by early portraits of the Wallachian Voivode Vlad III (the real Dracula), whose notorious purges included brutal impalements of ethnically German villagers in his Romanian lands and thousands of Turks and Bulgarians nearby. (Bill Skarsgård delivers an unforgettable performance from start to finish.) This is a fitting historical personality to emulate so closely in this remake, quite distinct from the 1922 appearance and manner of the Nosferatu character, because the salacious tales of that ruthless Romanian ruler were an early popular print subject in Germany by the end of the 1400s.

The educated, liberal Thomas struggles to maintain the conventions of feudalism, being admonished by Count Orlok for failing to address him as “my lord” instead of “sir.” This is where he begins to understand the trap he has walked into. He has underestimated the continued death grip of the dying relics of feudalism and serfdom in 19th century Europe and its ability to cause damage. It should be a decrepit throwback that is powerless and only formally titled, yet it holds hypnotic power and never seems to die away. One of Orlok’s supernatural abilities is control of plague-bearing rats, which he soon brings with him to Wisborg by sea, an apt metaphor for the unending cyclical recurrence of something medieval well into the modern era.

Karl Marx was quite fond of gothic fiction metaphors in his own commentaries on political economy of Europe in the mid-19th century, not only comparing communism to a haunting specter, but also frequently describing the capitalist class as parasitic, blood-sucking vampires feeding off the labor of the workers and most especially feeding off children who are forced to work. (In one reference in Das Kapital, mentioned in the previous linked paper, Marx actually makes a non-supernatural reference in passing to the aforementioned Vlad “The Impaler” Dracula’s forced labor practices with Romanian serfs.) Marx was also quite interested in the length of the working day and the division of daytime and nighttime hours because he saw the exploitation of the laboring classes as robbing them not only of fair wages or their health, but also of their time and their personal lives. The plot of Nosferatu certainly hinges upon daylight and nighttime, although inverting them in terms of when people’s lifeforce is being drained.

In this film’s story, of course, the literal vampire is the feudal Count Orlok, whose hold over the local peasantry (whose work has created his wealth) is beginning to slip, and he is prepared to make the jump to modernity and move to the big city to feast upon his new favorite, a middle class girl, instead of exasperatingly superstitious and defensive peasants and Roma nomads. But also figuratively, the other rich, parasitic ruling class, the one whose burghers built these cities, are apparently prepared to accommodate his arrival, especially since it won’t inconvenience them for him to move into a derelict mansion. Money is money.

Friedrich

Friedrich, the wealthy shipyard owner portrayed superbly by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, represents the actual capitalist bourgeoisie, unlike clerk Thomas. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is quite socially conservative. He also stands in for the attitudes of many of the powerful capitalists towards feudal figures like Count Orlok. The aristocracy poses an acknowledged problem for the capitalists, but not one that they are prepared to overthrow if they can simply wait it out and supplant its role in society. He will never be a revolutionary. This foreshadowing of the capitalists taking the place of the feudal lords is depicted in the way Friedrich behaves toward his socially inferior friends and his wife, Anna, especially after she dies and he violates her in the crypt in a manner that is functionally the same as and visually similar to the sexual violations committed by the Nosferatu. His rising ruling class will be the new vampires, regardless of the fate of the feudal lords.

Throughout the film Friedrich engages in noblesse oblige, up to a point, but he is entirely self-interested if generosity causes him any trouble, and he will just as soon turn out his friends. Had things worked out even a little differently in the film, he probably would have called in the loan to Thomas that he previously said not to worry about.

Friedrich is also intriguingly differentiated from the feudal Count Orlok in his indicated willingness, as all grand bourgeois capitalists are, to relocate at a moment’s notice if things go sideways, in contrast with Orlok whose feudal power and success is so literally tied to the land that he must travel (with great difficulty) by bringing his home soil with him.

Sievers and Franz

Dr. Wilhelm Sievers and his mentor Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz, represent, together, the contradicting push and pull of the modern and anti-modern tendencies of the emerging German national identity. They are both educated and both working to find breakthroughs to solve society’s problems, but Dr. Sievers is looking for modern, rational, scientific methods (such as his humane asylum plans) to soften but not overturn the status quo and Franz is looking for alchemical ideas in the past that could fundamentally transform things as they are into something else, in response to a gnawing feeling over many years that something terrible is developing. They do not always agree on the approach but their goals are broadly similar, and they work well together. They both do not have much time for 18th century French Enlightenment. Although Voltaire is not mentioned in the film, that sarcastic Parisian commentator of the Enlightenment wrote a scathing dictionary entry on the absurdity of persistent belief in vampires by people who should know better. But as Prof. Franz repeatedly points out, clearly this vampire is real anyway. Karl Marx would see his point (and in fact Voltaire also commented on the same parasitic, blood-sucking tendencies of the wealthy).

Prof. Franz is more explicitly critical than Dr. Siever of the forward march of early industrialization, perhaps fairly deriding the modernity of gas lamps as giving people a false sense of the dark and mysterious world of the past being dead and gone. 1838, as it turns out, is not so close to our modernity as we might have imagined. It was a cruel and blood-drenched backwards place where the supernatural could be both sincerely believed and eagerly consumed in marketable fiction by the same people.

What gothic horror always reminds us is that however incomprehensible and distant the past might seem to us, it can always return again. We in our cities are not more immune, at the end of 2024, to the resurgence of and latent persistence of backwards and superstitious beliefs. It’s getting dark out there again.

The Battle of the Bulge in 2017

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My theme this week, and especially today with the healthcare vote in the US House, is about late battles that went the opposite direction of an overall war.

History is written largely as a linear flow, and by the victors. Certain points of the US Civil War or World War II are declared to be the point at which it was “inevitable” that eventually the US would prevail, even if it took a while. But at the time, in the moment, you have no way to know.

Maybe the next big counteroffensive by the enemy will actually turn the tide in their favor and deprive you of victory that seemed inevitable so recently. Until it doesn’t — and you realize it was just the horrid last gasp. It is ferocious and massively fatal to those bearing the brunt of it, but then it’s over and the war winds down.

What if we’re currently experiencing our version of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944? That was when the Nazis made one last overwhelming push with the possibility of encircling four Allied Armies and forcing an armistice on the Western Front (which might have allowed the Nazis to win the war at least as far as remaining in power within Germany, even if not all across Europe).

In 2017, it would be the Republicans making one last massive counteroffensive that will claim a lot of lives and cause immense damage but ultimately be defeated. Ideally also leading to their annihilation, aided by a resurgent left. Maybe that’s pure fantasy, but it’s a dark hope that is better than no hope.

During the Battle of the Bulge, many U.S. units sacrificed to the last man to block certain roads and critical access points that prevented the German armored divisions from making the planned rapid encirclement. Every point the Nazis failed to take immediately then stalled their advance on other points, saving lives there, and ultimately they failed completely.

Today it is our duty to hold every defensive point to the last person, knowing that even if it falls, that sacrifice will have stalled the Republican counteroffensive from advancing on five, ten, twenty, or fifty other points of policy by which they would kill millions if they ultimately prevail. Eventually, we will stall them long enough in enough places to break their final effort and turn the tide.

But let me be clear: This will come at a severe cost and it will not happen without a ferocious, pitched battle.

Allow Yourselves The Politics of No Course But The Good One

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statue-of-liberty-Daniel-Schwen
I know things look really bleak and hopeless right now. But give me a few minutes – forgive me if you’ve heard the spiel already, but many of you are newer to me – to paint a different picture about the road ahead if we fight for it and keep our hope burning as we surge forward.

This alternative picture is about building a movement to articulate a bold, collective vision for our society. This is a vision where government is a force for good at every level. Where government represents all of us, not just some of us. Where government works to achieve three simple words: “Justice for all.”

That’s not just a slogan. That’s not a meaningless phrase. It’s the most profound notion in the lexicon of American politics.

Justice is a fascinating word, if you think about it, in the way it carries positives and negatives in a single word. It means fair treatment and restitution for mistreatment, but it also means appropriate and proportionate punishment where deserved.

The whole phrase taken together is a statement of principles, of values, and of society’s highest aspiration: Justice for all.

I’m asking all of us to dare to dream a little bit bigger about the meaning of justice. I’m asking all of us to lay out big ideas that can reform and transform our small corner of American governance on a fundamental level.

We are committing to the proposition that every branch or level of government affects every other branch or level of government, and touches the lives of all our people. Our elections – and our action between elections in the streets and in the halls of power – are the way we choose how this impact on people’s lives plays out.

Despite the devastating last gasp unfolding at the presidency and Congress and state governments right now, there is a sea change occurring in this country all the same.

There are movements for climate justice, for racial justice, for economic justice. There is a movement for clean and responsive government – a government that is neither our enemy, nor beholden to powerful individuals.

These new movements are led predominantly by young people, but they are supported by people from all ages and walks of life.

These movements are why still have a fighting chance today. It’s why we’re going to win in the end, and in our lifetime. We are a new generation for justice.

Nothing, I should stress, is automatic or guaranteed. This is not “the secret,” where visualization alone will deliver us our bright future. But it does help focus the mind and it does help dig in our last line, behind which we shall not voluntarily retreat.

We can see justice in our lifetimes, only if we fight for it every day. And we know, although it may be the hardest work we ever undertake, we have no other choice but to do just that.

Often, when I’m talking about the action required to stop climate change, I point out that it doesn’t matter if you think that action is too ambitious. The reality of the level of carbon emissions already in the atmosphere dictates that we have no other choice. You can’t compromise with 410 parts per million. You just have to do what has to be done. There is no course of action but the course that will actually fix this.

That attitude frames my approach to society and politics on the whole. Once you understand the stakes and the urgency and once you understand the body count associated with inaction or insufficient action, there is no alternative. So let me be plain:

Everyone deserves the right to a clean and healthy environment. Everyone deserves the right to healthcare. Everyone deserves the right to affordable quality food. Everyone deserves the right to housing. Everyone deserves the right to public pre-school, public K-12 education, and public higher education. Everyone deserves the right not to be condemned to a life of poverty. Everyone deserves the right not to be discriminated against because of their identity or their ability. Everyone deserves a democracy that cannot be bought by the wealthy. Everyone deserves the right to a living wage. Everyone deserves the right to organize for collective bargaining. Everyone deserves the right to break the cycle of incarceration. Everyone deserves the right to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions.

These things are universal human rights, and we can achieve them in our lifetime.

That’s not naive idealism but rather, they are morally required. We can and will make this a reality, because I know our society cannot afford not to make this a reality. Just as we cannot afford to compromise with the atmospheric carbon.

Every single level of government and every person in our government must fight for these principles every single day until we as a society are lifting up every person equally. Because our government is not “We The People,” until not one person is left behind by the promise of “justice for all.”

But we have to light this fire now. We have to send a signal that a new era is dawning, and that we are proud of and uncompromising in our bedrock, collective principles that can transcend and repair in solidarity the past errors and abuses and horrors.

This is a struggle once again, in the words of the Mayflower Compact, “to covenant and combine ourselves together – into a civil body politic – for our better ordering and preservation.”

Organize according to your ability

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I know there’s much debate on the left about the value of engaging in electoral politics. All year I argued we should variously specialize. Before the November election, my contention was that electoral and non-electoral organizing both have value, and that some of us are good at one versus the other.

Immediately in the days after the November 2016 election results, my initial reaction was to wonder if there was even any point to me or anyone continuing to think about future elections. That initial reaction was based on a consideration of the sheer amount of defensive non-electoral work that will be required to protect people.

However, it remains true both that some of us are better at non-electoral versus electoral politics (and vice versa) and that we cannot afford (as well) to assume that was the “last” election or that in crisis we can all put all future elections out of mind. If we get to the next election and didn’t do anything to try to clamber out of this hole … well, defensive triage isn’t a permanent fix.

The vast majority of time, energy, and effort should be put into non-electoral organizing for defensive triage to protect people. But those of us whose core competency is more in the electoral realm should be furiously preparing electoral brakes on this freefall.

While we need a national shift on messaging, platform, etc, we need state and local candidates in 2017 and 2018 who can shield people against abusive Feds.

Consider, too: Conservatives have hijacked and perfected a system of state-level obstruction, rights violations, and disturbing ballot referenda. Counter-consider: All of these tools are available to advance the social and democratic rights – or protect them against Federal Trump. Liberals have been very hesitant to use the tools original Progressive Movement set up in most states because Conservatives abuse them. At this point, that ship has sailed. Within the electoral politics realm, if you are not using every tool you can to shield people, quit.

On the electoral politics side, we should be using every single legislative race and every referendum to force head-on ideological debates. Conservatives use local races and ballot campaigns to question people’s humanity and promote new incendiary “values” to the public. The electoral left should similarly be actively using local races and ballot campaigns to sell voters on our (non-abusive) positions.

So, the debate on electoral versus non-electoral politics is a false choice. We need to fire on all cylinders, “From each according to his ability” and so on. As a side note on resources: 2016 was the year of the establishments lighting tons of money on fire and losing to smarter cheap oppositions.

Some of us are good at non-electoral work. Others of us are probably better at amplifying it and – hopefully – backing it up in government. Be careful of potential co-opters of this energy. But if you or someone you know from the grassroots wants to run, make it happen. I wouldn’t presume to know how to teach/train people on most non-electoral organizing, but I can help you on how to be a candidate.

Every single election, no matter how small, can be made into an affirmative campaign for a value non-electoral organizers are working on. If you’re not working on defensive triage right now, as discussed above, you can be building networks daily to win races that affect people.

Adapted from a series of tweets I posted in mid-November 2016.

Op-Ed | Trump: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

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The subtitle of the 1964 classic Stanley Kubrick nuclear war farce “Dr. Strangelove” is “or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

While that subtitle is part of the film’s satire – nuclear weapons are indeed very serious and frightening and cannot be brushed aside – there is something to be said for knowing when to keep a level head about the problem.

Many of my fellow Democrats have expressed that they might prefer the equally conservative but more mainstream Vice President Mike Pence to Donald Trump, due solely to the president’s authority to launch U.S. nuclear weapons.

To me, the risk of a nuclear war still remains fairly small, while the Pence agenda – in concert with Paul Ryan – remains a very high risk with huge ramifications as well.

So, how have I found a way to “stop worrying and love the bomb” or at least relegate it to a lower-tier fear?

Regarding Russia

A recent public remark by President Trump and a glance back toward Ronald Reagan, his predecessor in the Oval Office as a television aficionado turned conservative tribune.

At a recent press conference, rambling well past an hour, Trump said that the best way to show his independence from Russia would be to fire missiles at a Russian Navy submarine off the U.S. coast – but that he would not do so, of course.

By way of explanation or proof, Trump uttered the incredible (and accurate) phrase:

I’ve been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we’re allowed to say, because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other.

By this remark, Trump meant that launching a (nuclear) World War III by attacking Russia directly would end poorly for everyone, which is why he could not even consider it.

Nuclear holocaust

Back in 1983, President Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were given an advanced screening of the made-for-TV sensation, “The Day After.” That film, which rocked the nation, depicted exactly the scenario Trump described, in as horrifying terms as possible.

Ronald Reagan, in his diary and memoirs, said that he began shifting the country’s nuclear war policies in response to the film, which had made him “depressed.”

It is almost certain that Trump himself has seen the film as well – probably at the time – considering his voracious consumption of television.

True, Trump is known for his uncontrolled and impulsive remarks. True, he clearly did not hesitate to authorize smaller, ill-conceived military actions such as the recent failed raid in Yemen.

But it is probably reasonable to believe him when he says that he would not be starting World War III because a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

The real threat

Trump and his agenda are absolutely a threat, but most of that threat is a very real and already very present one. The damage will be less instantaneous and less visible than a nuclear war, but it is exceptionally much more likely.

Vice President Pence shares that agenda and a record to back it up. But he won’t generate the matching level of opposition that both men deserve, and so I don’t prefer him to Trump.

And at any rate, as “Dr. Strangelove” shows – after all the arguing is over, the other outcome is over pretty quick.

Originally published at The Globalist.

Op-Ed | (Non-) Nuclear Trump: The Ahmadinejad of the West?

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This past weekend, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad abruptly launched an English-language Twitter account and released a video, in English, of himself announcing the account.

It was an unlikely development from someone who was nearly toppled from office by street protests in 2009 organized via Twitter – especially given the U.S. government’s request at the time for the company to ensure smooth operations of the service.

But on the other hand, Ahmadinejad has likely felt muzzled since leaving office in 2013 due to term limits. His relationship to the state had deteriorated anyway in his second term between the protests and the sanctions on the country.

Supreme Leader Khamanei also recently suggested that it would be bad for the country if Ahmadinejad were to seek a new term in 2017.

Trump and Ahmadinejad

Twitter, as demonstrated by the new U.S. President, Donald Trump, allows totally unfettered messaging to supporters and the media, without interference by anyone.

Perhaps the former Iranian president decided to follow suit.

In February 2017, Ahmadinejad sent a lengthy letter to Trump, officially objecting to the Muslim ban, which affected Iran, but also offering advice and personal experience on leadership – from one “human to another human.”

He noted that Trump’s election had been an upset:

It can be inferred from the political and media atmosphere in the US that the result of the election has been (in spite of) the status quo, and beyond the will and prediction of the governing body and the main system behind the scene of the U.S. political stage.

Like Ahmadinejad in 2005, Donald Trump was elected as the hardliner candidate. Both rose to win an upset victory from the back of the pack, running on a conservative but populist and nationalist message.

Similar loose talk

In Ahmadinejad’s case, his policy pronouncements and speeches were not the final word in policy, subject to the Supreme Leader’s support ultimately.

To some degree, that appears to be the case with Trump as well, surprisingly. (Sometimes, someone like Steve Bannon sticks an order in front of him and Trump signs it without reading it.)

What is certainly true for both men, of course, is that their off-the-cuff remarks or deliberated provocations still terrify half of their respective home countries and most of the countries around the world.

For all his loose talk about nuclear weapons, it was always a bit difficult to tell whether Ahmadinejad was really perpetually hovering over the launch buttons on the country’s (non-nuclear) arsenal or just blustering. Trump keeps everyone guessing in much the same way.

Would he or wouldn’t he?

At a recent press conference Trump said unprompted that the best way to show his independence from Russia would be to fire missiles at a Russian Navy submarine off the U.S. coast – but reiterated that he obviously would not do so.

Change a few nouns and it would be Ahmadinejad threatening to reduce Strait of Hormuz sea traffic – including U.S. vessels – to smoking wreckage.

Trump also added, as justification for his restraint:

I’ve been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we’re allowed to say, because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other.

A hidden restraint?

That attitude, too, is familiar to fair-minded Iran observers. Throughout Iran’s controversial nuclear energy program development, Iran’s leaders have been very careful to point out that they believe nuclear weapons are immoral and proscribed, and that the program is peaceful.

Ahmadinejad, himself, was a staunch defender of the civilian nuclear program on the grounds of sovereignty and anti-colonialism, but he also called nuclear weapons “illegal” and immoral and supported global non-proliferation.

Typically, Iran’s leaders point specifically to the Iran-Iraq War and Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons on young Iranian soldiers as a reason Iran does not want WMDs. They also sometimes cite religious reasons for a ban.

At one point, in 2008, the Supreme Leader even indirectly urged Ahmadinejad to dial back his over-enthusiastic rhetoric on the nuclear issue, which (unlike in the United States) is not really under presidential authority anyway.

One must hope along similar lines, therefore, that when the White House under Trump “considers all options” in situations such as North Korea’s recurring threats, it is not seriously contemplating the literal nuclear option.

Originally published at The Globalist.

The Lie of the ‘Age of Scarcity’

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The big lie is that we’re living in an age of scarcity and that the only path forward is to trim the fat and get our economy growing so that the rising will lift all boats, blah blah blah. The reality of course is much different. There is more than enough money to fund all of the priorities in the industrialized world.

In the United States, in particular, we have the money. We can do this. This is feasible. We can pay for all the things that we need to pay for, for everyone — but we have to go get the money.

Then people say “well you can’t get the money because people will just move overseas and the wealthy will just avoid taxes further.” But the reality is that they are dependent on us as a whole and we have no need to be dependent on their whims.

The reality is that the wealthy in this country would not be wealthy and could not continue to be wealthy without the benefit of the American system, which we largely let them use without strings attached. Their wealth derives from the U.S. legal code and U.S. courts, the U.S. banking system, the U.S. highway system, massive federal investments in technology research, all kinds of water infrastructure — really any of these things and more.

It’s up to us to exercise the political will to go get this money to fund these priorities. To go get this money and make it so that they cannot leave the country with their wealth or move it offshore but still benefit from all these systems.

They cannot continue to hold this wealth and participate in the United States economy with all the advantages that that brings to these wealthy people, unless they are paying a share necessary to sustain and stabilize the needs of the population of the United States of America.

It is an absurd proposition that these people should be allowed to continue to accrue infinite amounts of money without strings attached. It is absurd that the private and public sector keep “trimming the fat,” affecting the lowest in our society as well as the ordinary people in our society, at every possible opportunity — all so that the wealthy can continue to a mass fortunes that are truly beyond all human comprehension, beyond any possible need, beyond wealth itself.

We have enough money to fund all of priorities that we need to fund in our country if we go get that money. No one – no one – should be turning to right-wing populism or other evil answers to their problems just because they have been offered no other solutions to their legitimate grievances within the system.

The reality is that there are billions and billions and billions of dollars being hoarded offshore by wealthy individuals and enormously rich corporations, which should be taken back by the state and re-distributed to the people.

There are folks dominating the media narratives who have a great stake in perpetuating an existing system and saying that there is no alternative, that this scarcity is inevitable, and that we must be “realistic” and cut back, cut back, cut back, down to the bone until they have decided that they are satisfied.

But there will never be any point of satisfaction and there is no reason to insist upon some fictional claim that ordinary people cannot have these programs that are “overly generous.” There is no such thing as overly generous in the systems unless you are talking about the vast fortunes that are accrued to the wealthy for no reason. Out of all rational proportion.

We may live in an age of scarcity of certain natural resources, but we do not live in an age of scarcity in terms of budgets and social spending, except in a manufactured one.

Dispense with this false framing about hard choices when it comes to vital social needs. Dispense with this false framing that the objective of a 21st century civilization is to promote an arbitrary annual economic growth rate that is purportedly the only solution to lifting living standards and is somehow only achievable by cutting back any social spending that was making real gains in living standards.

We don’t live in a hard-scrabble subsistence society. We live in a society where there is no reason not to set, as the primary objective, a mission of raising living standards and life comfort for all our ordinary everyday people. The tangible and real things in life, that is. Not some national growth figures on a chart.

We can do this. If we choose not to, or if we choose to prioritize other things like wealth accumulation and meaningless growth figures, it is entirely a choice, not a forced decision.