Will Americans Stay Free or Sell Their Birthright For A Dozen Eggs?

Authoritarians gain power because we let them. Fascists are frightened people - frightened by reality shredding their vanity; frightened of not being up to snuff; frightened by their knowledge they lack the talents to compete on a level field with those they disdain.

Therefore, read Resist Authoritarianism by Refusing to Obey in Advance (Literary Hub).

Digital culture and entertainment insights daily: Post-internet art (Dirt) seems to be a warning along these lines. Fear keeps us from opposing authoritarians. Art has always been a danger to dictators. But what art comes when artists fear the blowback from the authoritarians?

Crypto certainly wanted to be the next avant-garde. But if there were ever a formulaic medium, it’s web3. Tell me, what can’t you sell as an NFT? I’m sorry—how is fartcoin not kitsch? The identitarian left certainly thought it was an avant-garde, but that was a movement which dared not speak its own name. Can you image the outrage if a museum did a retrospective on ‘woke art’? What no one wants to admit is that you cannot produce an avant-garde in a climate of fear.

 The Creative Mind in Captive Times (The Hedgehog Review) seems relevant to what artists and writers need do in this Age of Trump.

Miłosz’s clearest statement on creativity comes toward the end of the second-to-last essay: “The creative act,” he writes, “is associated with a feeling of freedom that is, in its turn, born in the struggle against an apparently invincible resistance.” It is not in the struggle itself that creative capacity is born but in one’s insistence on freedom in the face of this struggle. The reason this is hard to achieve, however, appears elsewhere, in the third essay, where he puts it fairly starkly: “Fear of freedom is nothing more than fear of the void.” When faced with repression, it is not only a fear of survival that takes away our creative abilities but fear of the void, which, in its turn, strips our thinking of the quality of freedom. Once we can face the unknown—once we can harness a sense of faith—we can regain our creativity even under repressive regimes.

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When Czesław Miłosz’s book about the enslavement of consciousness by totalitarian powers was published in 1953, translator Jane Zielonko, working closely with Miłosz, rendered its English title as The Captive Mind....

And the authoritarians seem to be working together: Trump-Putin call: US relations with Europe will never be the same (CNN Politics). What comes next? 

• An anti-American Europe? 
• A more unified democratic Europe? 
• Putin annexing Europe after a war? 
• Western Europe giving themselves to Putin? 

I find the latter unlikely unless the Europeans find America so perfidious that the far right-wing European parties can shift from being pro-Putin to anti-America, and then do this to gain power.

War in Europe will be disastrous for America - economically and morally. Neither economics nor morality will be understood by Trump and his acolytes.

Time is coming when you will need to make a decision - America free or America ruled? Trump’s illegitimate power grab brings US closer to dictatorship | Trump administration (The Guardian):

David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, said Trump’s ambitions extended far beyond the imperial presidency that many believe reached its apotheosis under Richard Nixon before being curtailed by congressional legislation in the wake of Watergate.

“What Trump is trying to do is steal all the power to administrate government from Congress, and then use the judiciary to unravel the law,” he said. “Trump is challenging just about every constraint on his power and then hoping the courts will declare all the statutes that constrain him unconstitutional.”

sch 2/13 

And now for some relevant updates:

Volodymyr Zelensky calls for creation of 'army of Europe' to face Russian threats (BBC)

Trump's ethnic cleansing plan: No option left for the Palestinians but to stay and fight  (Middle East Eye)

‘We no longer go out alone’: what happens after Trump revokes temporary protected status? | US immigration | (The Guardian)

Trump's Palestinian Plan Has Triggered a New, United and Angry Arab Front - Opinion (Haaretz.com)

Trump’s Gaza takeover ‘plan’ puts Egypt in a tough spot | Israel-Palestine conflict News (Al Jazeera)

For every action, there is a reaction.

sch 2/15

Meanwhile, the United States has the chance to either stand up for democracy or replace Czechsolvakia with Ukraine as the poster child for failed appeasement: Marco Rubio Is Walking into a Trap.

THE MEETING BETWEEN RUBIO AND LAVROV will not be one of equals. As a senator, Rubio was, until late in his tenure, a strong supporter of aid to Ukraine. But he now must represent a more transactional president whose skepticism of Ukraine and friendliness to Russia go back years. Lavrov represents a paranoid, aggressive, authoritarian regime that still sees itself as engaged in a long-term war against the United States and Europe. The hastily announced meeting being held in Saudi Arabia—an authoritarian Gulf Arab state—may have repercussions far from the war that is ostensibly being settled. The Trump administration and Ukraine must both be struck by the parallels to a previous Trump peace agreement in which another inexperienced secretary of state made a deal with a more seasoned enemy to end a war without any American allies in the room—Trump’s Doha Agreement with the Taliban.

Trump has claimed that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan—which his Doha Agreement guaranteed—inspired Putin to invade Ukraine. If that’s the case, he should consider what lessons others, like Xi Jinping, might take from an American abandonment of Ukraine.

sch 2/18