Bernie Sanders Time as an Educational Filmmaker: Watch His Documentary on Socialist Activist Eugene V. Debs (1979)

in Film, History, Politics | February 27th, 2020

If you grew up in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, you’ll remem­ber the name Eugene V. Debs from his­to­ry class. And if you grew up dur­ing a cer­tain era in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, you might have learned about Debs from Bernie Sanders. Try to recall one of Debs’ speech­es; if you hear it in Sanders’ dis­tinc­tive Brook­lyn accent, you have at some point or anoth­er seen Eugene V. Debs: Trade Union­ist, Social­ist, Rev­o­lu­tion­ary. A film-strip slideshow with an accom­pa­ny­ing audio track, it came out in 1979 as a prod­uct of the Amer­i­can People’s His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, Sanders’ own pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny.

That ven­ture con­sti­tutes just one chap­ter of a sto­ried life and career, which includes peri­ods as a high-school track star, a folk singer, and the may­or of Burling­ton, Ver­mont. Now that Sanders, junior Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor from Ver­mont since 2007, has pulled ahead in the race for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, peo­ple want to know what he’s all about — and he has long been giv­en, cer­tain­ly by the stan­dards of U.S. politi­cians, to clear and fre­quent expres­sion of what he’s all about. He has made no secret, for exam­ple, of his admi­ra­tion for Debs, a social­ist polit­i­cal activist who five times ran for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. You can see it come through in Eugene V. Debs: Trade Union­ist, Social­ist, Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, which Jacobin mag­a­zine has recon­struct­ed and made avail­able on Youtube.

Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Nathan Smith writes that the doc­u­men­tary frames Debs “as a lost prophet before explain­ing how he end­ed up where he did ide­o­log­i­cal­ly. It opens with Debs’s final pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, con­duct­ed in 1920 from prison. If a mil­lion peo­ple vot­ed for this man while he was behind bars, if more peo­ple went to hear him speak than Pres­i­dent Taft, then how could his­to­ry have for­got­ten him?” Sanders explains Debs’ social­ism “as a response to issues which still res­onate today: the exploita­tion of work­ing peo­ple, seg­re­ga­tion and vio­lent racism, vot­ing rights, and the sup­pres­sion of free speech and dis­sent dur­ing World War I.” More so than see Sanders’ admi­ra­tion for Debs — Jacobin hav­ing had to use visu­als oth­er than the ones on the film strip at the time — you can hear it: as in all the shoe­string pro­duc­tions of the Amer­i­can People’s His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety’s shoe­string pro­duc­tions, Sanders him­self plays the roles of the his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters involved.

In this case, that means we hear Sanders give Debs’ speech­es, and in cer­tain moments we view­ers of 2020 could eas­i­ly mis­take Debs’ indict­ments of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, goods, and the means of pro­duc­tion in Amer­i­ca as Sanders’ own. A self-described social­ist, Sanders has in his polit­i­cal career placed him­self in Debs’ tra­di­tion, and hav­ing made a doc­u­men­tary like this more than 40 years ago shores up that image. The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Philip Bump points out that, before becom­ing a U.S. sen­a­tor, Sanders did a cou­ple more act­ing jobs in fea­ture films, once as a man stingy with Hal­loween can­dy and once as a Dodgers-obsessed rab­bi. As much as those roles might have suit­ed his demeanor, it’s safe to say he played Eugene V. Debs with more con­vic­tion.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts Pres­i­dent

Spike Lee Inter­views Bernie Sanders: Two Guys from Brook­lyn Talk About Edu­ca­tion, Inequal­i­ty & More

Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endear­ing­ly Bad Spo­ken Word Album, We Shall Over­come

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

Albert Ein­stein Writes the 1949 Essay “Why Social­ism?” and Attempts to Find a Solu­tion to the “Grave Evils of Cap­i­tal­ism”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Bertrand Russell’s Prison Letters Are Now Digitized & Put Online (1918 — 1961)

in History, Philosophy, Politics | February 18th, 2020

Boethius, Hen­ry David Thore­au, Anto­nio Gram­sci, Mar­tin Luther King, Jr…. It’s pos­si­ble, if one tried, to draw oth­er com­par­isons between these dis­parate fig­ures, but read­ers famil­iar with the work of all four will imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize their most obvi­ous lit­er­ary com­mon­al­i­ty: all wrote some of their most impas­sioned and per­sua­sive work while unjust­ly con­fined to a cell.

In the case of Bertrand Rus­sell, how­ev­er, per­haps one of the most famous fig­ures in 20th cen­tu­ry phi­los­o­phy and intel­lec­tu­al life more gen­er­al­ly, peri­ods of incar­cer­a­tion in Brix­ton prison in 1918 and, forty-three years lat­er, in 1961, play a min­i­mal role in the larg­er dra­ma of his writ­ing life, despite the fact that he did a good deal of writ­ing, includ­ing some sig­nif­i­cant philo­soph­i­cal work, behind bars.

Even schol­ars well-read in Russell’s work may have lit­tle knowl­edge of his prison writ­ing, and for good rea­son: most of it has been inac­ces­si­ble. “Now, for the first time,” writes Eri­ca Balch at McMas­ter University’s Brighter World blog, “Russell’s prison letters—part of McMaster’s Bertrand Rus­sell Archives—are being made avail­able online through a new dig­i­ti­za­tion project devel­oped by the Bertrand Rus­sell Research Cen­tre. Com­plete with detailed anno­ta­tions and ful­ly search­able text, the project is pro­vid­ing schol­ars from around the world with access to these rarely seen mate­ri­als.”

The con­tents of the let­ters reveal oth­er rea­sons that Russell’s prison writ­ing isn’t bet­ter known. He did plen­ty of impas­sioned and per­sua­sive writ­ing for the pub­lic out­side of a prison cell—publishing fiery books, essays, and lec­tures against war and pro­pa­gan­da and in defense of free thought through­out his life. Behind bars, how­ev­er, Russell’s writ­ing turned almost sole­ly pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al, in let­ters addressed pri­mar­i­ly to “his then lover Lady Con­stance Malle­son (known as ‘Colette’) and his for­mer lover, aris­to­crat and socialite Lady Otto­line Mor­rell.”

The 105 let­ters “reveal the pri­vate thoughts of one of the 20th century’s most pub­lic fig­ures and pro­vide an inter­est­ing win­dow on Russell’s inner life,” says Andrew Bone, Senior Research Asso­ciate at McMaster’s Bertrand Rus­sell Research Cen­tre.  Most of the let­ters “were writ­ten in secret,” Balch notes, “and smug­gled out of Brix­ton by Russell’s friends, con­cealed between the uncut pages of books.” Rus­sell was only allowed one let­ter per week; offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned cor­re­spon­dence is writ­ten on prison sta­tion­ary and bears the Brix­ton governor’s ini­tials.

A life­long paci­fist, Rus­sell was first jailed for six months in 1918 for a speech oppos­ing U.S. entry into World War I. “I found prison in many ways quite agree­able,” he lat­er wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “I had no engage­ments, no dif­fi­cult deci­sions to make, no fear of callers, no inter­rup­tions to my work. I read enor­mous­ly; I wrote a book, ‘Intro­duc­tion to Math­e­mat­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy’… and began the work for ‘Analy­sis of Mind,’” a project that nev­er reached fruition. In 1961, at age 89, he was jailed for sev­en days for par­tic­i­pat­ing in a Lon­don anti-nuclear demon­stra­tion.

Dur­ing his first stay as a pris­on­er of Brixton’s “first divi­sion,” Rus­sell was “allowed to fur­nish his cell, wear civil­ian clothes, pur­chase catered food, and most impor­tant­ly, be exempt­ed from prison work while he pur­sued his pro­fes­sion as an author,” as the Bertrand Rus­sell Research Cen­tre points out. It’s lit­tle won­der he looked for­ward to the expe­ri­ence as a “hol­i­day from respon­si­bil­i­ty,” he wrote in a let­ter to his broth­er, Frank, four days after he began his sen­tence.

Rus­sell may not have suffered—or acquired a height­ened sense of polit­i­cal urgency—while behind bars (at one point he was heard laugh­ing out loud and had to be remind­ed by the war­den that “prison is a place of pun­ish­ment”). But his prison let­ters offer sig­nif­i­cant insight into not only the deeply emo­tion­al rela­tion­ships he had with Malle­son and Mor­rell, but also his rela­tion­ship with oth­er mem­bers of the famous Blooms­bury group and “lit­er­ary celebri­ties such as D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot,” writes Balch, “many of whom are ref­er­enced in the let­ters.”

The 104 let­ters from 1918, includ­ing Russell’s cor­re­spon­dence with his broth­er, his pub­lish­er, The Nation mag­a­zine and oth­ers, are all avail­able in orig­i­nal scans with tran­scrip­tions and anno­ta­tions at the McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty Bertrand Rus­sell Research Cen­tre site. The final let­ter, num­ber 105, the sole piece of cor­re­spon­dence from Russell’s week­long stay in Brix­ton in 1961, is addressed to his wife Edith.

My Dar­ling,

The lawyer’s nice young man brought me cheer­ing news of you and told me I could write to you, which I had not known. Every one here treats me kind­ly and the only thing I mind is being away from you. At all odd min­utes I have the illu­sion that you are there, and for­get that if I sneeze it won’t dis­turb you. I am enjoy­ing Madame de Staël immense­ly, hav­ing at last got round to read­ing her. At odd moments I argue the­ol­o­gy with the chap­lain and med­i­cine with the Doc­tor, and so the time pass­es eas­i­ly. But sep­a­ra­tion from you is quite hor­rid, Dear­est Love, it will be heav­en­ly when we are togeth­er again. Take care of your­self, Beloved.

B.

As in most of the ear­li­er let­ters, Rus­sell avoids pol­i­tics and keeps things per­son­al. But as in near­ly all of his writ­ing, the prose is live­ly, evoca­tive, and poignant, reveal­ing much about the per­son­al­i­ty behind it. While these let­ters may nev­er achieve the sta­tus of great lit­er­a­ture, by virtue of their pri­vate nature and their minor role in Russell’s major canon, that does not mean they aren’t a joy to read, for stu­dents of Bertrand Rus­sell and any­one else who appre­ci­ates the work­ings of a bril­liant philo­soph­i­cal and eth­i­cal mind. Enter the Brix­ton Let­ter archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Inter­ests Grad­u­al­ly Wider and More Imper­son­al”

Bertrand Rus­sell Author­i­ty and the Indi­vid­ual (1948) 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Look at the Charade of the Global Elites: Claiming They Want to “Change the World,” They End Up Preserving the Unjust Status Quo

in Animation, Current Affairs, Politics | January 8th, 2020

From Peter Kropotkin to Leo Tol­stoy to Noam Chom­sky, some of the most revered anar­chist thinkers have exhaust­ed page after page explain­ing why pow­er over oth­ers is unjus­ti­fied, no mat­ter how it jus­ti­fies itself. To those who say the wealthy and pow­er­ful ben­e­fit soci­ety with char­i­ta­ble works and occa­sion­al­ly humane pol­i­cy, Tol­stoy might reply with the fol­low­ing illus­tra­tion, which opens Time edi­tor Anand Girid­haradas’ talk above, “Win­ner Take All,” as ani­mat­ed by the RSA:

I sit on a man’s back, chok­ing him and mak­ing him car­ry me, and yet assure myself and oth­ers that I am sor­ry for him and wish to light­en his load by all means pos­si­ble… except by get­ting off his back.

The author of Win­ners Take All: The Elite Cha­rade of Chang­ing the World, Girid­haradas doesn’t make the case for anar­chism here, except per­haps by the slight­est impli­ca­tion in his choice of epi­graph. But he does call out the “win­ners of our age,” no mat­ter how much they deter­mine to make a dif­fer­ence with human­i­tar­i­an aid, for being “unwill­ing to get off the man’s back.” Unwill­ing to pay tax­es, close loop­holes and tax shel­ters, pay high­er wages, or stop lob­by­ing to slash pub­lic ser­vices. Unwill­ing to rein­vest in the com­mu­ni­ties that made them.

“What does it look like to imag­ine the kind of change,” Girid­haradas asks, “that would involve the win­ners of our age step­ping off that guy’s back? Or being made to step off that guy’s back?” Here, he leaves us with an ellipses and moves to cri­tique the idea of the “win-win” as a means of mak­ing change, rather than just exchange.

The mar­ket econ­o­my has import­ed the cri­te­ria of exchange into pol­i­tics and social action. Every­thing is trans­ac­tion­al. But in order to address the gross inequities that result in peo­ple fig­u­ra­tive­ly sit­ting on the backs of oth­ers, some must gain more pow­er and oth­ers must have less. The par­ties do not meet in a state of ceteris paribus.

One might take issue with the very terms used in “win-win” think­ing. Rather than win­ners, some would call pow­er­ful cap­i­tal­ists oppor­tunists, prof­i­teers, and worse. (The term “rob­ber baron” was once in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion.) To claim that good works and good inten­tions obvi­ate mas­sive pow­er imbal­ances is to pre­sume that such imbal­ances are jus­ti­fi­able in the first place. Answer­ing this the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tion doesn’t, how­ev­er, address the prac­ti­cal prob­lem.

In the cur­rent sys­tem of cor­po­rate mis­rule, says Girid­haradas, “when every­thing is couched as a win-win, what you are real­ly say­ing… is that the best kinds of solu­tions don’t ask any­one to get off anyone’s back.” Unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism has brought us the “pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic prob­lems.” That is to say, com­pa­nies prof­it from the same issues they help cre­ate through pol­lu­tion, preda­to­ry schemes, and undue polit­i­cal influ­ence.

You don’t have to be an anar­chist to see a seri­ous prob­lem with that. But if you see the prob­lem, you should want to imag­ine how things could be oth­er­wise.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Cre­at­ing Mean­ing­ful Social Change

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Teach­ing Tol­er­ance to Activists: A Free Course Syl­labus & Anthol­o­gy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

in History, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | December 6th, 2019

Those of us who are deeply dis­ap­point­ed to learn we won’t be see­ing Har­ri­et Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tub­man tea tow­el… or could if the revered abo­li­tion­ist and activist wasn’t one of the fam­i­ly-owned Rad­i­cal Tea Towel’s hottest sell­ing items.

The pop­u­lar design, based on one of Charles Ross’ murals in Cam­bridge, Maryland’s Har­ri­et Tub­man Memo­r­i­al Gar­den is cur­rent­ly out of stock.

For­tu­nate­ly, the com­pa­ny has immor­tal­ized plen­ty of oth­er inspi­ra­tional fem­i­nists, activists, civ­il rights lead­ers, authors, and thinkers on cot­ton rec­tan­gles, suit­able for all your dish dry­ing and gift giv­ing needs.

Or wave them at a demon­stra­tion, on the cre­ators’ sug­ges­tion.

The need for rad­i­cal tea tow­els was hatched as one of the company’s Welsh co-founder’s was search­ing in vain for a prac­ti­cal birth­day present that would reflect her 92-year-old father’s pro­gres­sive val­ues.

Five years lat­er, bom­bard­ed with dis­tress­ing post-elec­tion mes­sages from the States, they decid­ed to expand across the pond, to high­light the achieve­ments of “amaz­ing Amer­i­cans who’ve fought the cause of free­dom and equal­i­ty over the years.”

The descrip­tion of each tow­el’s sub­ject speaks to the pas­sion for his­to­ry, edu­ca­tion  and jus­tice the founders—a moth­er, father, and adult son—bring to the project. Here, for exam­ple, is their write up on Muham­mad Ali, above:

He was born Cas­sius Clay and changed his name to Muham­mad Ali, but the name the world knew him by was sim­ply, ‘The Great­est.’ Through his remark­able box­ing career, Ali is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and cel­e­brat­ed sports fig­ures of the 20th cen­tu­ry and was an inspir­ing, con­tro­ver­sial and polar­is­ing fig­ure both inside and out­side the ring. 

Ali start­ed box­ing as a 12-year-old because he want­ed to take revenge on the boy who stole his bike, and at 25, he lost his box­ing licence for refus­ing to fight in Viet­nam. (‘Why should they ask me to put on a uni­form and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bul­lets on brown peo­ple in Viet­nam when so-called Negro peo­ple in Louisville are treat­ed like dogs and denied sim­ple human rights?’ He demand­ed.) It was per­haps the only time he sur­ren­dered: mil­lions of dol­lars, the love of his nation, his career… but it was for what he believed in. And although his views on race were often con­fused, this was just exam­ple of his Civ­il Rights activism.

Ali became a light­ning rod for dis­sent, set­ting an exam­ple of racial pride for African Amer­i­cans and resis­tance to white dom­i­na­tion dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. And he took no punch lying down – nei­ther inside the box­ing ring nor in the fight for equal­i­ty: after being refused ser­vice in a whites-only restau­rant in his home­town of Louisville, Ken­tucky, he report­ed­ly threw the Olympic gold medal he had just won in Rome into the Ohio Riv­er. So, here’s an empow­er­ing gift cel­e­brat­ing the man who nev­er threw in the (tea) tow­el.

The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el blog is such stuff as will bring a grate­ful tear to an AP US His­to­ry teacher’s eye. The Fore­bears We Share: Learn­ing from Rad­i­cal His­to­ry is a good place to start. Oth­er top­ics include Abi­gail Adam’s Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion advo­ca­cy, the bridge designs of rev­o­lu­tion­ary philoso­pher Thomas Paine, and Bruce Springsteen’s love of protest songs.

(The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el design team has yet to pay trib­ute to The Boss, but until they do, we can rest easy know­ing author John Steinbeck’s tow­el embod­ies Springsteen’s sen­ti­ment. )

Lest our edu­ca­tion­al dish­cloths lull us into think­ing we know more about our coun­try than we actu­al­ly do, the company’s web­site has a rad­i­cal his­to­ry quiz, mod­eled on the US his­to­ry and gov­ern­ment nat­u­ral­iza­tion test which would-be Amer­i­cans must pass with a score of at least 60%. This one is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, geared toward pro­gres­sive his­to­ry. Test your knowl­edge to earn a tea tow­el dis­count code.

Begin your Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el explo­rations here, and don’t neglect to take in all the rad designs cel­e­brat­ing the upcom­ing cen­ten­ni­al of wom­en’s suf­frage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

in Philosophy, Politics | November 26th, 2019

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two of the most tren­chant and endur­ing crit­ics of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Han­nah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both Ger­man Jews who emi­grat­ed to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marx­ist Adorno saw fas­cist ten­den­cies every­where in his new coun­try. Decades before Noam Chom­sky coined the con­cept, he argued that all mass media under advanced cap­i­tal­ism served one par­tic­u­lar pur­pose: man­u­fac­tur­ing con­sent.

Arendt land­ed on a dif­fer­ent part of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, draw­ing her phi­los­o­phy from Aris­to­tle and St. Augus­tine. Clas­si­cal demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and an ethics of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty informed her belief in the cen­tral impor­tance of shared real­i­ty in a func­tion­ing civ­il society—of a press that is free not only to pub­lish what it wish­es, but to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for telling the truth, with­out which democ­ra­cy becomes impos­si­ble.

A press that dis­sem­i­nates half-truths and pro­pa­gan­da, Arendt argued, is not a fea­ture of lib­er­al­ism but a sign of author­i­tar­i­an rule. “Total­i­tar­i­an rulers orga­nize… mass sen­ti­ment,” she told French writer Roger Errera in 1974, “and by orga­niz­ing it artic­u­late it, and by artic­u­lat­ing it make the peo­ple some­how love it. They were told before, thou should not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very dif­fi­cult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behav­ior.”

This break­down of moral norms, Arendt argued, can occur “the moment we no longer have a free press.” The prob­lem, how­ev­er, is more com­pli­cat­ed than mass media that spreads lies. Echo­ing ideas devel­oped in her 1951 study The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Arendt explained that “lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows.”

Bom­bard­ed with con­tra­dic­to­ry and often incred­i­ble claims, peo­ple become cyn­i­cal and give up try­ing to under­stand any­thing. “And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.” The state­ment was any­thing but the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s an empir­i­cal obser­va­tion from much recent 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Arendt’s thought devel­oped in rela­tion to total­i­tar­i­an regimes that active­ly cen­sored, con­trolled, and micro­man­aged the press to achieve spe­cif­ic ends. She does not address the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in which we find ourselves—though Adorno cer­tain­ly did: a press con­trolled not direct­ly by the gov­ern­ment but by an increas­ing­ly few, and increas­ing­ly mono­lith­ic and pow­er­ful, num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions, all with vest­ed inter­ests in pol­i­cy direc­tion that pre­serves and expands their influ­ence.

The exam­ples of undue influ­ence mul­ti­ply. One might con­sid­er the recent­ly approved Gan­nett-Gate­house merg­er, which brought togeth­er two of the biggest news pub­lish­ers in the coun­try and may “speed the demise of local news,” as Michael Pos­ner writes at Forbes, there­by fur­ther open­ing the doors for rumor, spec­u­la­tion, and tar­get­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion. But in such a con­di­tion, we are not pow­er­less as indi­vid­u­als, Arendt argued, even if the pre­con­di­tions for a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety are under­mined.

Though the facts may be con­fused or obscured, we retain the capac­i­ty for moral judg­ment, for assess­ing deep­er truths about the char­ac­ter of those in pow­er. “In act­ing and speak­ing,” she wrote in 1975’s The Human Con­di­tion, “men show who they are, reveal active­ly their unique per­son­al iden­ti­ties…. This dis­clo­sure of ‘who’ in con­tradis­tinc­tion to ‘what’ some­body is—his qual­i­ties, gifts, tal­ents, and short­com­ings, which he may dis­play or hide—is implic­it in every­thing some­body says and does.”

Even if demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions let the free press fail, Arendt argued, we each bear a per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty under author­i­tar­i­an rule to judge and to act—or to refuse—in an ethics pred­i­cat­ed on what she called, after Socrates, the “silent dia­logue between me and myself.”

Read Arendt’s full pas­sage on the free press and truth below:

The moment we no longer have a free press, any­thing can hap­pen. What makes it pos­si­ble for a total­i­tar­i­an or any oth­er dic­ta­tor­ship to rule is that peo­ple are not informed; how can you have an opin­ion if you are not informed? If every­body always lies to you, the con­se­quence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes any­thing any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows. And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.

via Michio Kaku­tani

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Schoolhouse Rock-Inspired Guide to Impeachment

in Current Affairs, Politics | November 12th, 2019

How does a bill become a law? You can’t hear the ques­tion and not hum a few bars from School­house Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill.” The groovy car­toon civics les­son was for mil­lions the first they learned about the leg­isla­tive process. Ask anoth­er ques­tion, how­ev­er, like “how does impeach­ment work,” and you may hear more crick­ets than 70’s edu­ca­tion­al TV jin­gles.

Sure­ly we took some­thing from Bill Clinton’s impeach­ment tri­al besides cig­ars, stained blue dress­es, and the spec­ta­cle of moral­ly com­pro­mised politi­cians wag­ging their fin­gers at a moral­ly com­pro­mised politi­cian? Sure­ly we’ve all read the Water­gate tran­scripts, and can quote more from that his­to­ry than Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” (mut­tered before he resigned instead of fac­ing the charges)?

Maybe not. Despite the talk of closed-door hear­ings and con­flict­ed jurors, many of us have not paid close atten­tion to the par­tic­u­lars of the process, giv­en that impeach­ment tri­als can make for such com­pelling­ly broad polit­i­cal the­ater. And we nev­er got our School­house Rock impeach­ment episode. Until now.

See­ing as how the pres­i­dent faces pub­lic, tele­vised impeach­ment hear­ings next week, there may be no more oppor­tune time to get caught up on some details with Jonathan Coulton’s School­house Rock-inspired “The Good Fight.” Its ani­ma­tion style and catchy tune recalls the 70s edu­ca­tion­al series, but Coul­ton doesn’t address the kids at home as his pri­ma­ry audi­ence.

“Your tiny hands may scratch and claw,” sings Coul­ton, “but nobody’s above the law.” You won’t win any prizes for guess­ing who this means—a per­son in need of a child­like explain­er on basic gov­ern­ment, it seems. More ver­bal jabs are thrown, and the alleged crimes enu­mer­at­ed, end­ing with trea­son (and a mis­placed, anachro­nis­tic ham­mer and sick­le by ani­ma­tors Head Gear Ani­ma­tion). The video final­ly gets into the impeach­ment process over a minute in, past the halfway mark.

View­ers might find the first half emo­tion­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing, with its char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of impeached pres­i­dents as way­ward chil­dren in need of cor­rec­tion by a swag­ger­ing Con­sti­tu­tion and a sassy band of founders. It’s cute but leaves pre­cious lit­tle time for learn­ing how this account­abil­i­ty process is sup­posed to work. Coul­ton rush­es through the expla­na­tion, and you may find your­self skip­ping back to hear it sev­er­al times.

Nev­er fear: Google—or the search engine of your choice—is here to fer­ry you to thou­sands of guides to the impeach­ment process. “The Good Fight” isn’t, after all, actu­al­ly a School­house Rock ad, but a fun civic-mind­ed reminder to every­one that the pres­i­dent is not above the law, and that Con­gress is enti­tled by the Con­sti­tu­tion to hold the hold­er of that office, whomev­er they may be, account­able. An explain­er by Vox appears below:

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

School­house Rock: Revis­it a Col­lec­tion of Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Edu­ca­tion­al Videos

I’m Just a Pill: A School­house Rock Clas­sic Gets Reimag­ined to Defend Repro­duc­tive Rights in 2017

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Difference Between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England: A (Pre-Brexit) Video Explains

in History, Maps, Politics | November 6th, 2019

I once played in a New York pub band with an Eng­lish­man, a North­ern Irish­man, and a Scots­man. This is not the set­up for a joke. (We weren’t that bad!) But I had ques­tions. Were they all from dif­fer­ent coun­tries or dif­fer­ent parts of one coun­try called Britain, or Great Britain, or the grander-sound­ing Unit­ed King­dom?

British his­to­ry could be a con­tentious sub­ject in such com­pa­ny, and no won­der giv­en that the vio­lence of the Empire began at home, or with the neigh­bor­ing peo­ple who were absorbed—sometimes, part­ly, but not always—against their will into a larg­er enti­ty. So, what to call that ter­ri­to­ry of the crown which once claimed one fourth of the world as its own prop­er­ty?

CGP Grey, mak­er of the YouTube explain­er above, aims to clear things up in five min­utes, offer­ing his own spin on British impe­r­i­al his­to­ry along the way. The Unit­ed King­dom is a “coun­try of coun­tries that con­tains inside it four coequal and sov­er­eign nations,” Eng­land, Scot­land, Wales, and North­ern Ire­land. “You can call them all British,” says Grey, but “it’s gen­er­al­ly not rec­om­mend­ed as the four coun­tries gen­er­al­ly don’t like each oth­er.”

Like it or not, how­ev­er, they are all British cit­i­zens of “The Unit­ed King­dom of Great Britain and North­ern Ire­land.” Still con­fused? Well, Britain and the Unit­ed King­dom name the same coun­try. But “Great Britain” is a geo­graph­i­cal term that includes Scot­land, Eng­land, and Wales, but not North­ern Ire­land. As a “geo­graph­i­cal rather than a polit­i­cal term,” Great Britain sounds sil­ly when used to describe nation­al­i­ty.

But it gets a bit more com­pli­cat­ed. All of the coun­tries locat­ed with­in Great Britain have neigh­bor­ing islands that are not part of Great Britain, such as the Hebrides, Shet­land and Orkney Islands, and Isles of Angle­sey and Wight. Ire­land is a geo­graph­i­cal term for the land mass encom­pass­ing two nations: North­ern Ire­land, which is part of Britain, or the Unit­ed King­dom, and the Repub­lic of Ire­land, which—as you know—is decid­ed­ly not.

All of these coun­tries and “coun­tries of coun­tries” are part of the Euro­pean Union, says Grey, at which point it becomes clear that the video, post­ed in 2011, did not antic­i­pate any such thing as Brex­it. Nonethe­less, this infor­ma­tion holds true for the moment, though that ugly saga is sure to reach some res­o­lu­tion even­tu­al­ly, at which point, who knows what new maps, inde­pen­dence ref­er­en­da, and bor­der wars will arise, or res­ur­rect, on the British Isles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of the British Isles Ani­mat­ed: 42,000 BCE to Today

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The His­to­ry of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Ani­mat­ed in 12 Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

in Art, Design, History, Politics | October 17th, 2019

This year marks the cen­ten­ni­al of the Bauhaus, the Ger­man art-and-design school and move­ment whose influ­ence now makes itself felt all over the world. The clean lines and clar­i­ty of func­tion exhib­it­ed by Bauhaus build­ings, imagery, and objects — the very def­i­n­i­tion of what we still describe as “mod­ern” — appeal in a way that tran­scends not just time and space but cul­ture and tra­di­tion, and that’s just as the school’s founder Wal­ter Gropius intend­ed. A for­ward-look­ing utopi­an inter­na­tion­al­ist, Gropius seized the moment in the Ger­many left ruined by the First World War to make his ideals clear in the Bauhaus Man­i­festo: “Togeth­er let us call for, devise, and cre­ate the con­struc­tion of the future, com­pris­ing every­thing in one form,” he writes: “archi­tec­ture, sculp­ture and paint­ing.”

In about a dozen years, how­ev­er, a group with very lit­tle time for the Bauhaus project would sud­den­ly rise to promi­nence in Ger­many: the Nazi par­ty. “Their right-wing ide­ol­o­gy called for a return to tra­di­tion­al Ger­man val­ues,” says reporter Michael Tapp in the Quartz video above, “and their mes­sag­ing car­ried a type­face: Frak­tur.” Put forth by the nazis as the “true” Ger­man font, Frak­tur was “based on Goth­ic script that had been syn­ony­mous with the Ger­man nation­al iden­ti­ty for 800 years.” On the oth­er end of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum, the Bauhaus cre­at­ed “a rad­i­cal new kind of typog­ra­phy,” which Muse­um of Mod­ern Art cura­tor Bar­ry Bergdoll describes as “polit­i­cal­ly charged”: “The Ger­mans are prob­a­bly the only users of the Roman alpha­bet who had giv­en type­script a nation­al­ist sense. To refuse it and redesign the alpha­bet com­plete­ly in the oppo­site direc­tion is to free it of these nation­al asso­ci­a­tions.”

The cul­ture of the Bauhaus also pro­voked pub­lic dis­com­fort: “Locals railed against the strange, androg­y­nous stu­dents, their for­eign mas­ters, their sur­re­al par­ties, and the house band that played jazz and Slav­ic folk music,” writes Dar­ran Ander­son at City­lab. “News­pa­pers and right-wing polit­i­cal par­ties cyn­i­cal­ly tapped into the oppo­si­tion and fueled it, inten­si­fy­ing its anti-Semi­tism and empha­siz­ing that the school was a cos­mopoli­tan threat to sup­posed nation­al puri­ty.” Gropius, for his part, “worked tire­less­ly to keep the school alive,” pre­vent­ing stu­dents from attend­ing protests and gath­er­ing up leaflets print­ed by fel­low Bauhaus instruc­tor Oskar Schlem­mer call­ing the school a “ral­ly­ing point for all those who, with faith in the future and will­ing­ness to storm the heav­ens, wish to build the cathe­dral of social­ism.” In their zeal to purge “degen­er­ate art,” the Nazis closed the Bauhaus’ Dessau school in 1932 and its Berlin branch the fol­low­ing year.

Though some of his fol­low­ers may have been fire­brands, Gropius him­self “was typ­i­cal­ly a mod­er­at­ing influ­ence,” writes Ander­son, “pre­fer­ring to achieve his social­ly con­scious pro­gres­sivism through design rather than pol­i­tics; cre­at­ing hous­ing for work­ers and safe, clean work­places filled with light and air (like the Fagus Fac­to­ry) rather than agi­tat­ing for them.” He also open­ly declared the apo­lit­i­cal nature of the Bauhaus ear­ly on, but his­to­ri­ans of the move­ment can still debate how apo­lit­i­cal it remained, dur­ing its life­time as well as in its last­ing effects. A 2009 MoMA exhi­bi­tion even drew atten­tion to the Bauhaus fig­ures who worked with the Nazis, most notably the painter and archi­tect Franz Ehrlich. But as Ander­son puts it, “there are many Bauhaus tales,” and togeth­er “they show not a sim­ple Bauhaus-ver­sus-the-Nazis dichoto­my but rather how, to vary­ing degrees of brav­ery and caprice, indi­vid­u­als try to sur­vive in the face of tyran­ny.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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