A warning from Garry Kasparov

The link is very long, but if you plan to live in the United States for the next 20 years, you need to read it. Here's a teaser:

"My past experience obliges me to give warnings, not predictions. As when I marched against Putin in 2005, raising the alarm about his turn toward despotism, I want to be proven wrong. I would like nothing better than to be called hysterical, a crank, a chessplayer who couldn’t see five moves ahead—if it meant that the American people had heeded the warning signs and acted in time to avoid a repeat of the painful recent history I witnessed.
Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate will send a message to the country and the world; the only question is what that message will be. No matter what Trump does, his GOP defenders will never abandon him if he looks politically invincible, and he will spawn more imitators, both at home and abroad. Back in 1974, Richard Nixon’s resignation in the face of impeachment proceedings so stunned Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership that they thought it might be an American ploy of some kind. I remember how it shocked my family in Baku in a very different way—because we saw it as evidence that in a democracy even the top man was not above the law. How could we not imagine what it would be like to live in such a blessed place ourselves?
But for Trump to stay in office, especially if he wins reelection in 2020, will inspire authoritarians and dishearten their subjects. It will set a negative example for both US political parties that there are no consequences for cheating and lying. The downward spiral will accelerate. The only remedy is to mobilize public opinion and for the American people to hold not only Trump accountable, but his defenders as well. And that will have to happen the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box in November."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/28/a-popular-front-to-stop-trump/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Shakespeares%20Timon&utm_content=NYR%20Shakespeares%20Timon%20CID_290c59d112a10ae1fdcdc6d05a879cd7&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=A%20Popular%20Front%20to%20Stop%20Trump&fbclid=IwAR3Amj7Hbmoq5MwqHlgOAbsVcSIgJwB48DhWDvxCR0phsq-yystSVOPg4I8

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more