For much of the twentieth century the appeal of communism was simply a sociological fact; by now it is something that needs to be explained. Communism promised a future that was far better than the present and offered a way to achieve it; it presented a world full of darkness that could be broken by small circles of people who could see the light; and it provided those oppressed around the world with a beacon for their imaginations and hopes. The story of the appeal of communism is a reflection of the reality of suffering and atrocity; it is also one of betrayal, trauma, mass murder, and rethinking.

Welcome to the sixth lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “Why was Communism appealing?”

Below are the readings that go along with this week:

Thinking the Twentieth Century

As always, thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy and consider sharing them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men’s mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death. Between 1933 and 1945, the most dangerous place in the world was Ukraine. All this, as I seek to show in the lecture, was the latest stage in an ancient history. Ukraine has been less a crossroads and more a source of human innovation for centuries and millennia and indeed tens of thousands of years. Ancient history associated with Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome very often only makes sense in connection with lands that are now Ukraine. With the globalization associated with modern history, Ukraine became for the first time an object rather than a subject of history, as its special position at the connection of steppe and salt water became less important, and as empires with global reach sought to base their power in its resources.

Welcome to the fifth lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “What is Ukraine?”

Below are the readings that go along with this week:

Historical Roots of Modern Ukraine

The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War

As always, thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy and consider sharing them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:

On Freedom

On Tyranny

Hard as it is to believe, today marks 164 days since President Trump dragged the United States into war with Iran — a war that has produced devastating and deeply humiliating consequences.

To make sense of where we are, Tim recently sat down with former U.S. Ambassador and Domestic Policy Advisor Susan E. Rice () for a wide-ranging thirty-minute conversation about the war, American power, and what this moment says about the state of our democracy.

They began with a fundamental question: Does this administration have a coherent conception of the national interest at all — or was this war undertaken without one? Along those lines, Susan made a striking case for just how unnecessary the war was, which led Tim to frame the conversation around three words that once defined the practice of American statecraft: Diplomacy. Doing the Work. Deterrence.

1. Diplomacy requires diplomats. Susan pointed to the two years of painstaking, expert-driven negotiations that produced the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — including the involvement of a Secretary of Energy who was himself a nuclear scientist. She contrasted that process with the reportedly rushed June memorandum of understanding negotiated by figures including Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, which she described as poorly drafted and sufficiently vague that both sides could walk away with fundamentally different understandings of what they had agreed to.

2. Doing the work. Tim raised the idea that expertise, relationships, and sustained effort — the kind of career Susan has had — used to be the basis of American power, and that the current leadership treats governance more like opportunism than genuine effort.

3. Deterrence: Both Tim and Susan agreed that American military power was used extensively in the war, yet failed to achieve its stated goals, which Susan argued undermines the credibility of future threats. Tim added that broadcasting military plans publicly and fighting with munitions the U.S. can’t quickly replace reflects an outdated approach to modern warfare—one that hasn’t absorbed the lessons of Ukraine.

Tim closed by asking whether the war might ultimately help Americans see the connection between what he described as American fecklessness abroad and what is happening here at home.

Susan’s answer was one of my favorite parts of the conversation.

She pointed out that the money, attention, and political capital being spent on war are resources that could instead be devoted to the things Americans actually need: healthcare, Medicaid, rural hospitals, and Social Security — programs she argued this administration has moved to cut or undermine.

She also spoke candidly about a political moment in which dissent is being suppressed and rights are being curtailed. But she ended on a hopeful note, identifying three principles she believes Americans across political lines can still rally around: the Constitution, the equal application of the rule of law, and the founding belief in equality.

There was no better place to end.

I hope you’ll tune in, enjoy the conversation, and share it with anyone else who might be interested. There is a lot here to think about, and I think you’ll learn a great deal from Susan and Tim’s conversation.

Thanks, as ever, for being part of this community of thinkers.

Until next time,

Victor

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Communism was a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century and remains a lived reality for many in the twenty-first century. It is based in an analysis of capitalism and a theory of history proposed by Karl Marx, which is the main subject of this lecture. Marx's ideas were revised by Vladimir Lenin so as to allow the individual (or the party elite) much greater latitude to choose the timing and the place of revolution. Lenin's very success in making a revolution in a country that Marx regarded as backward led to the Stalinist program of accelerated development and associated starvation and mass terror. That model was then copied in China and elsewhere.

Welcome to the fourth lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “What is Communism?”

Below are the readings that go along with this week.

Comparative Fascist Studies

How Fascism Works

A few remarks on democracy

Thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:

On Freedom

On Tyranny

For about twenty years, fascism seemed like the future for millions of people. It was a way of appealing to the past that was mystical and inspiring; it was a way of seizing the future by taking technology and pushing it towards dreams of rapid military conquest. Fascism reacted to and in some ways admired Bolshevism: it borrowed the idea of the one-party state and of a revolution based not so much on interests and history as on will and conjuncture. Fascism was a way of seeing the world that denied reason—preferring conspiratorial thinking and the arbitrary choice of enemies—and so is hard to define precisely; but what cannot be denied is that this way of seeing the world is gaining followers now.

Welcome to the third lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “What is Fascism” and is taught by my colleague, Marci Shore.

Below are the readings that go along with this week.

Comparative Fascist Studies

How Fascism Works

A few remarks on democracy

Thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:

On Freedom

On Tyranny

Welcome to the second lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “A World of Empire.”

Totalitarianism did not emerge from nowhere. It was a response to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more particularly to the empires that Europeans had created during the previous four or five centuries. To understand the aims of Hitler and other fascists, of Lenin and Stalin, we must first understand the world in which they matured, one in which Europeans dominated others and applied law only to themselves. In some ways the fascists and the Leninists sought to break this world order, in that they wanted to transcend other empires; in some ways they took imperial practices to a radical extreme.

Below are the readings that go along with this week.

Colonization: A Global History, p. 1-23

Black Skin, White Masks, Ch. 5

Thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:

On Freedom

On Tyranny

Today, I am publicly releasing the first lecture of a ten-lecture course I taught at the University of Toronto this past year. The course is called “Hitler and Stalin Today.” Consider this a public resource for students, researchers, and anyone interested in understanding the relationship between history and contemporary democracy.

Throughout the ten lectures, I examine the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instructs us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. Ultimately, the course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century, and what we should.

The first lecture (video above) is titled “What is history?” We speak often about history, but we are careless with the past. When we choose not to know what has happened before, we are also choosing not to influence what will happen after. If we don’t care about history, we find ourselves in an eternal present, denied any sort of imagination about the future, and nurtured on lies about a past in which we were innocent. History does not mean these misleading tales; it means a search for knowledge, using a certain set of tools; it means a process that enriches and humanizes, one that allows us to name things by their proper names.

There are two readings to go along with this lecture:

Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz

The War on History is a War on Democracy

Hope you enjoy this brand new lecture series! Every Wednesday, I will release a new lecture, paired with readings.

From the early scenes we learn that Supergirl is a slob. Her residence -- the inside of a spaceship she is taking on a pleasure tour-- is a mess. Her dog eats licks the unwashed bowls and then urinates inside. The medium of film -- just sights and sounds -- protects us from the stench of her life.

Supergirl is messy, we are told, because of trauma. Her own planet Krypton slowly perished in a natural catastrophe and she (along with her cousin Superman) is one of the two survivors. This is perhaps unfair to survivors of disasters and atrocities, who react in various ways, but not in general by refusing to wash dishes.

But then the story offers us a different reaction to trauma. A much younger person, native to the planet where Supergirl has come to party for her 23rd birthday, sees the murder of her brother, mother, and father. Ruthye, a girl of thirteen, has to bury the three of them. Unlike Supergirl, she keeps her composure, and her things in order. She has a clear idea of what she must do: avenge her family.

After the two meet, Ruthye asks Supergirl questions about her past and her family; Supergirl never asks Ruthye anything. Supergirl tells he that she should not avenge her parents, although she is vague as to why not.

The story flounders here on a question that troubled the Greek tragedians, the authors of Icelandic sagas, and the founders of the French and English contractarian traditions: how does one seek justice when there is no law? The planet on which Supergirl has chosen to party is lawless. If there is a murder, what next then?

The Greek and the Scandinavian storytellers, like many many others, were aware that revenge killings, no matter how apparently justified, could have consequences that spiraled our of control, over communities and over generations. They were also aware that the alternative was law, and that law is not easy and takes orderly work to build.

Supergirl does not represent order, and so her opposition to revenge does not rest on any alternative that she is able to present to Ruthye. Nor does Supergirl have an alternative way of dealing with the situation -- spoiler alert, she later kills the murderous brigand herself from motives that look a lot like revenge (and she kills quite a few other people).

At that first meeting between the two, Supergirl does save Ruthye when the girl appears at a bar seeking information about the murderer and loses her sword. This sequence of events is unrealistic, since the plot conceit is that Supergirl is on a planet with a red sun in order to get drunk, and so would not have been able to defeat a powerful entity who has stolen Ruthye’s sword.

In the conventions of these stories, the color of a sun determines the level of a Kryptonian’s powers. Under a yellow sun, as on Earth, Supergirl is very powerful. Under a red sun, as on her native Krypton and on Ruthye’s planet, Supergirl has no powers. Under a green star (yes, I know), she will sicken and die.

The plot, unintentionally I think, hinges on a difference between carelessness and care. Ruthye’s family are killed despite being prepared for intruders, whose spaceship they destroy. Ruthye then tries to care for their memory by avenging them. This no doubt would have failed, but the effort represents an attempt to act within and reinforce a certain moral universe. Supergirl, by contrast, enters the main story because of carelessness.

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Because Supergirl is nonchalant about her possessions, the interplanetary criminals (”brigands”) who killed Ruthye’s family are able to walk through her spacecraft’s open door and steal it. Because she has not trained her dog, it ignores her commands, and attacks the thieves, one of whom shoots it with a poison dart.

This makes no sense. There was no reason to shoot the dog, who posed no threat to a brigand “with the strength of a thousand men.” The poison turns out to be a valuable chemical. The brigands, who also have its antidote, use to torture people by first administering the poison and then demanding information in return for the antidote. Why would they use this agent on a dog?

Supergirl is brought into the main story by her unclean residence and untrained dog. If she had kept her doors closed or gone to the trouble of training her pet, none of this would have happened. Rather than reflecting on any of this, our heroine gives Ruthye to understand that the sick dog is more important than the girl’s murdered parents. This is another point where the audience can feel understandably uneasy.

Supergirl has to gain the antidote for the poison, which requires her to follow the brigands to another planet. She does not make appropriate preparations for the journey, unless we count further lectures to Ruthye about how the girl should manage her grief. She should stay at home. While one takes the point that direct revenge has its moral and practical problems, Supergirl is wrong that doing nothing and being lonely is the best reaction to trauma. People do better when they find a way to recover their own agency and take action with others.

Fortunately for Supergirl, Ruthye ignores the platitudes, and joins her on an interstellar bus. The two of them reach a planet where the brigands are kidnapping girls and women for mass rape and reproduction, which involves killing the female children in an unspecified way. Like the treatment of trauma, the treatment of mass sexual violence and femicide seems careless, even trivializing.

We now know that Ruthye, if captured, will live a life of repeated rape and forced childbirth, involving the murder of any girls she might bear. But this knowledge is somehow both there and there at the same time. On this planet, with a yellow sun, Supergirl is very powerful. Given the setting, we might think that the dog mission would give way to the mission of saving hundreds of girls and women from rape and slavery, but it doesn’t. The issue of rape and femicide is there to establish that the brigands are evil, but neither the plot not nor the heroine takes the evil seriously.

Instead, Supergirl then proceeds to put Ruthye at risk by trusting the first person who talks to her at a bar. She allows herself to be poisoned by this stranger, even though poison is at the center of the story and would presumably have been on her mind. By falling into an obvious trap, she puts Ruthye in an unsafe place; they escape only because the poisoner, somewhat oddly, helps Supergirl to vomit, so that she can defeat the brigands.

The brigands then fly off to a third planet with the enslaved women and girls. Supergirl follows them to get the antidote.

It would seem to make sense for Supergirl to check what sort of planet she was visiting. Only if it is yellow will she be able to use her powers. If it is red, she won’t be able to defeat the brigands, and so her journey would be pointless and self-destructive -- the brigands would either kill her or enslave her. If the sun is green she will just die.

In keeping with character, Supergirl does not pay any attention to where she is going. And so when she steps off the spaceship, she falls down and begins to die under the planet’s green sun. The brigands have set a simple trap and she blunders into it.

Fortunately for her, if again implausibly, Ruthye has stowed away on the transport and is able to slip out; she pulls Supergirl into a cave, where she will survive longer. Supergirl is now thirsty but has brought no water. So Ruthye has to go look for water (among many plot failures this one stuck out: Ruthye is exactly the kind of person who would have a water bottle).

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Because Supergirl doesn’t take the trouble to check what sort of planet she was visiting, she forfeits her life; because she doesn’t pack water, she puts Ruthye’s in danger. Once the girl leaves the cave to search for water, Ruthye is discovered by the brigands and imprisoned. Mysteriously, the brigands, who are looking for Supergirl, do not then apply the poison which is at the center of the plot in order to torture Ruthye for the information.

What sort of story is this? It is a quest story, in which oddly-matched people must seek a totem in a faraway place. But Is it a tragedy, or a comedy? For the story to make sense as a tragedy, Supergirl would have to die in that cave. She is there because of her tragic flaw: she is too self-involved to take care of her possessions, to make plans, or to listen to anyone else.

It is instead a comedy (in the traditional sense of the word), because something miraculous happens to bring about a happy ending. The planet has a second, yellow sun; it rises as a deus ex machina; Supergirl becomes powerful; she kills the bad guys; she seizes the antidote (miraculously undamaged in a colossal battle in which countless armored vehicles are tossed into the air and explode) from the corpse of the brigand who shot her dog; the dog is saved.

I fear that this was not a film about the importance of keeping your room clean, at least not in the intentions of those who made it -- although I am going to insist that this reading of the film works better than the one that is forced upon us by its ending. The message is that it does not matter how unprepared and narcissistic you are; you win in the end because you are strong and the stars align for you.

This is an American way of seeing things. Our disastrous war in Iran was fought on Supergirl principles: our house was not in order; we made no preparations; we condescended to people who were making more sense than we were. In the real world, of course, being strong does not mean that you win the war. The tragic flaw (hubris, say) matters more; and so Iran won the war.

Supergirl as a story is comedy; as a movie production, though, it is a tragedy.

It probably wasn’t meant to be a film about carelessness and care, but at a deeper level it is, malgré soi. The plot turns out to be comic but the plotting is tragic-- again, in the technical sense that it emerges from a flaw that the flawed person or people cannot themselves see.

Because the makers of this film were so careless in the plotting, they cannot have seen that carelessness is the center of their story.

We are meant to understand Supergirl as an anti-hero; but she isn’t; she’s a slob who mindlessly endangers herself and others. An anti-hero is someone who represents virtues that are in tension with the established order; it is not someone who is just unhappy and who, when the stars align, can beat up everyone else.

The Athenians who gave us the notion of tragedy believed that art allowed us to see a flaw in others and thereby recognize the possibility of unseen flaws in our own character; we should therefore be careful in our judgements, because the reality of freedom depends upon the practice of self-criticism.

Later, in their decadence, the Greeks gave way to the idea that everything was written in the stars, that gods and heroes rise or fall with this heavenly body or that. Gilbert Murray called this the “failure of nerve.” We are meant to be joyous when the yellow sun emerges, but should we celebrate our submission to careless powers?

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PS: Please also see my positive review of Superman).

PPS: Next week, likely Wednesday July 15th, will see the rollout of the public version of my University of Toronto course “Hitler and Stalin Today.” The ten-lecture class will be accessible free of charge to anyone around the world.

Our official commemorations, organized by the White House, will instead.

We are told today, by the men who would humiliate us, that America was founded in a spirit of innocence, that its leaders never did anything wrong, and that patriotism means insisting on our own blamelessness and assigning all evil to others.

If we accept that offer, we not only get history wrong, but we cede our own power to change things for the better. We let the oligarchs steal our money and the fascists rob the greater treasure of our liberty.

If the republic has lasted so long, it is because it was radical in its beginnings. Insofar as it has thrived, it has been through successful and continual struggles against its own limits.

And that has only been possible because Americans have seen those limits, because they have chosen to see the truth about their history and themselves. I was thinking of self-recognition and self-correction ten years ago when I wrote On Tyranny; today, as a small part of a celebration our two hundred and fifty years, some friends of freedom have joined me to read its lessons aloud.

On Tyranny (the book)

On Tyranny (free resources)

In On Tyranny, I wrote that “the precedent set by the founders demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny.” The truth on which this country was founded is not that people are perfect, but that they are not. They -- we -- are vulnerable to those who amass wealth and deploy propaganda. We can be turned against one another. Because we are imperfect, said the founders, we place our trust not in any one person -- no kings, no tyrants -- but in a system of laws, checks and balances, and civic representation by voting that allows us to live in the dignified understanding that power arises from consent.

The rebellion of 1776, in other words, arose from ideas of what was right -- “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness“ -- but no one thought that those good things could be established once and for all. The point was to create conditions under which we could see, at every moment, the problems that we tend to create ourselves, and under which we could find solutions to those problems. This included -- with time, with work, with suffering, with pain borne by some more than others -- the ability to see the humanity in one another, to see the horror of slavery for what it was, and to recognize that we all deserve an unhindered voice and an unhindered vote.

On the Fourth of July, 1776, nothing was completed. Something was undertaken, at great peril and risk. The founders did not think of themselves as great men whose faces should be on mountains, as demigods whose stone faces should invite us to submit to future tyrants. When, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, they pledged to one another “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” it was in a cause that they believed was right, but it was also in a cause that was difficult, even desperate.

After victory in the Revolutionary War, the founders debated how to found a republic, conscious of the failures of liberty in history. They knew from the ancient Greeks that oligarchies -- rule by a few wealthy men -- easily coalesce. They understood from the Roman Stoics that freedom requires a self-discipline that defied the immediate circumstances. They saw from the failed republics of their own times that wealth easily captures institutions. And so in a second moment of insight, they added a Constitution to the Declaration of Independence.

Sadly, those who lead our official celebration today represent every threat to liberty that the founders named: arbitrary rule; indifference to law; undue accumulation of wealth; corruption of the government to attain that wealth; collusion with foreign powers to attain power. And we confront a spirit that is contrary to freedom, one that tells us that we should trade a history of freedom for the smoke of fireworks and a face mirrored on a mountain. The past is being used to tell us that we have no choice but to accept the present.

As Frederick Douglass reminds us, in a great speech on another Fourth of July, “the cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.” That is, sadly, exactly what is happening today. That is the essence of today’s official commemoration. As he understood, the founders, though wrong about many things, were rebels in their own time, people who took risks. To celebrate them justly is not to wish that the past return, or to worship them as flawless, or least of all to accept the aspiring tyrant who is undoing the best of their work.

To celebrate a rebellion means not to obey in advance, not to accept any of this as normal: not the lies told about the history by the people destroying our future, not the saccharine veneration of the Constitution by people who violate it every day, not the seizure of the mantle of revolution by a band of reactionary oligarchs. It is to be as courageous as you can: to speak the truth, to protect the elections we still have, and above all to organize in a great a joyful coalition.

History is not something that our oligarchs and fascists can take, try though they will today. History is what we make. It does not come to us. We come to it -- with what we know, what we say, and what we do. Nothing in history dooms us; and nothing in history saves us. In the months between now and the next elections, there will be much forecasting, speculating, and worrying. None of that matters. All that matters is organizing a great and joyful coalition.

All that matters is the work. If my words are useful, if the beautiful reading here of my words is useful, it is only because those words bring you to act.

To celebrate a rebellion is to know that, from a flawed world, we can make new things. We can hold on, we can find each other, and not just imagine but create a much better America.

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PS: The lessons: (1) Do not obey in advance; (2) Defend institutions; (3) Beware the one-party state; (4) Take responsibility for the face of the world; (5) Remember professional ethics; (6) Be wary of paramilitaries; (7) Be reflective if you must be armed; (8) Stand out; (9) Be kind to our language; (10) Believe in truth; (11) Investigate; (12) Make eye contact and small talk; (13) Practice corporeal politics; (14) Establish a private life; (15) Contribute to good causes; (16) Learn from peers in other countries; (17) Listen for dangerous words; (18) Be calm when the unthinkable arrives; (19) Be a patriot; (20) Be as courageous as you can.

On Tyranny (the book)

On Tyranny (free resources)

On that better USA: On Freedom

PPS: Joyful thanks to those who pronounced the lessons: Isabel Allende, Judd Apatow, Margaret Atwood, Joan Baez, Sophia Bush, Misha Collins, Kimberlè Crenshaw, Ted Danson, Ron Funches, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Holder, Jenifer Lewis, Leslie Odom Jr., Sarah Jessica Parker, Billy Porter, Maria Ressa, Lisa Rinna, Molly Ringwald, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron, Holland Taylor, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Bradley Whitford.

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Back in February, when I first wrote on this subject, the city was on the brink of a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis, in the context of the racially hateful language of the president. The deportation was halted by a district court in February on the correct ground that the decision to deport them was based on race. Ethnic cleansing has now been endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Before the district court and the the Supreme Court, Haitian plaintiffs claimed, with much evidence, that race was one of the motivating factors of the decision of the executive branch to terminate the protected status that allowed them to remain in the United States. The Supreme Court majority just chose, in a ruling that was openly counter-factual, to imagine that what was patently racist might not have been, and that the transparent motivations of the president and his administration “could have” have been different from what they were.

Self-lying by the powerful is often element of an ethnic cleansing campaign.

The Supreme Court majority rightly insisted that a decision about equal protection depends upon “context.” Context means two two things: the lexical context, the words that were actually said by relevant actors around a matter in question; and the the historical context, the events during which or about which words were uttered. Both point towards the racial motivation of the executive branch. Both were ignored by the majority.

The Haitian plaintiffs drew attention to the following statements of the president (cited by a minority in a dissent). Haitians are “eating the dogs… They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live (in Springfield, Ohio).” Haitians are also eating, the president claimed, “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” Haitians in the United States, he said, “probably have AIDS.” Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, (and) disgusting.” Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of America.

This lexical context should have been more than enough to show that race was one of the motivating factors.

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The historical context, which the Supreme Court also set aside, reveals a very specific campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, initiated by JD Vance, American Nazis, and Donald Trump.

During the last presidential campaign, JD Vance, then the vice-presidential nominee, put the Haitians of Springfield at the center of national attention. Temporary Protected Status had been granted to non-citizen Haitians in the US after an earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people; it was extended after the Haitian president was assassinated. This allowed ten thousand or more Haitians to gather in Springfield, a small city between Dayton and Columbus, and to work. Vance heard about Haitians in Springfield, from a city manager who wanted federal assistance for housing. He turned a reasonable request into a racial crusade. In his own phrase, he made up a story.

In a speech of 10 July 2024, Vance claimed that “Springfield, Ohio has been overwhelmed” by Haitian immigrants. Although there was certainly friction over schools and housing, there was no basis for such a judgement. Vance is from Ohio; it would not have been hard for him to figure out that Springfield was doing better economically than in any moment in his lifetime. In the months to follow, he would return again and again to the theme, publishing a number of inflammatory claims about Haitians in Springfield, not a single one of which was true. As we will see, Vance’s goal was not so much to get individual lies on the record; it was rather to create a self-sustaining story, in which a real place and its real people could become the raw material for an alternative Nazi reality -- I use the word advisedly. Vance had help in expanding his theme, and crucial helpers were Nazis. All of this history is in the public record; the fact that the Supreme Court ignored it does not make it go away.

In American terms, Haitians are Black; and the American group Blood Tribe are white-supremacist blood-obsessed Nazis. After Vance’s speech, Blood Tribe took its cue. Blood Tribe had marched in other cities in the previous two years, wearing masks, distinctive uniforms, and carrying banners with swastikas. These marches were unmistakably Nazi. Vance’s speech drew the attention of Blood Tribe to Springfield, Ohio. On 10 August 2024, members of Blood Tribe carried out their usual performance in the city’s downtown, two of them carrying banners with swastikas and another two brandishing automatic rifles. Mayor Rob Rue called the march “an attempt to disrupt our community by an outside hate group.” Blood Tribe responded on social media: “We hear that you have a real problem with Haitian ‘refugees.’”

And from whom did they “hear” this? JD Vance. It is worth noting that Mayor Rue (a Republican) as well as Ohio governor Mike Dewine (also a Republican) denied that Haitians were a problem, characterizing them as hard workers who had improved the local economy. But Vance was not interested in the the local reality; he was trying to change it by deliberately introducing fiction. His lies brought more lies, and those lies brought hatred.

Later in August 2024, a local Springfield (self-described) social media influencer named Anthony Harris attended a meeting of the Springfield City Commission. He claimed that Haitians were “flipping cars in the middle of the street,” which was not the case. He then introduced a colorful new element to Vance’s image of a Springfield “overwhelmed” with refugees. He claimed that Haitians went to Springfield parks, seized ducks by the necks, cut off their heads, and then devoured the headless fowl. This was untrue, but it of course invoked an image of a barbarous other. Vance’s lie led to more lies, which he would himself then spread.

Five Blood Tribe members also attended that same 27 August City Commission meeting. One of the Nazis, Drake Berentz, stood up to say that “I come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you are doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian that you bring in.” Haitians had been living in Springfield for years. The only novelty was that Vance had drawn attention to them. After the City Commission meeting, Blood Tribe took to the internet to spread the lie that “Haitians eat the ducks out of city parks.”

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This business of purported animal abuse would become very important. A month later a version of the story would be spread to tens of millions of people by a former (and future) president of the United States, Donald Trump, who would use a tale of barbarism as a justification for a “large deportation.” It began with Vance, it spread through Nazis, it reached Trump, and eventually it defined policy.

The question of who is human and who is not can be defined by animals. In a predominantly rural society, the claim that people are beasts is a suggestion that they can be slaughtered. In an urban or suburban setting, in which animals are companions, the idea that others mistreat animals can be the signal that they are not like us, barbarians, not fully human. Among the many other accelerating repressions, Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed to keep pets at home. In the US, the slur of eating pets has traditionally been applied to Asians. The idea that Black people eat the wrong things in the wrong way is a staple of American racism.

In early September 2024, a Springfield woman posted on Facebook about a lost cat. She had heard from someone — who had heard from someone else —who had heard from yet someone else — that a cat had been abducted and eaten by Haitians. The fourth-hand story had no basis. But once online, it could be used, and it was. The fascist-friendly Twitter account @EndWokeness posted that “ducks and pets are disappearing,” with a screenshot of the cat post and a photo of a man holding a Canada goose. The photo was taken in another city, and the man in the image complained that his image was being used in a campaign of lies. The baseless notion that Haitians were mistreating or killing animals, spread to make them seem like barbarians, was then quickly shared by prominent far-right figures such as Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk.

When Vance then posted about Haitians on 9 September 2024, two months after his first speech, a circle was closed. He had drawn attention to Springfield, including the attention of Nazis. This led to the portrayal Haitians as criminals and barbarians, first by Nazis whom he drew to Springfield and then by far-right influencers on the internet. Vance now repeated the specific claims, to which he himself had given the general impulse, as evidence that his initial slander had been true. “Reports now show,” he wrote, “that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who should not be in this country.”

There were no such reports; there was only the campaign of obviously racial aggression that Vance himself had initiated. Cat-eating now became a favorite topic among national elected Republican officials. Often this took a joking tone, with cat memes. This levity is a tactic of the on-line far right: even as we demean other people and deny their humanity, it is all somehow just a joke. But of course the consequences are real: an advocate of the Haitian community was harassed after Vance’s post.

This was just the beginning. The alternative reality that Vance and Nazis co-created was bleeding into the real world. The next day was the presidential debate between Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee, and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

On the stage in Philadelphia on 10 September 2024, before a national televised audience of sixty-seven million people, Trump led with racial abuse of Haitians in Springfield: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what is happening in our country and it’s a shame.” One of the moderators pointed out that there was no evidence for any such claim. Trump then said that he had seen “people on television” complaining that their dogs had been eaten. There were no such television reports.

After the debate, Vance revealed that he was deliberately lying: saying one thing that was not true (the pets) in the service of spreading even bigger lies (some general catastrophe). He essentially granted to an interviewer that the story about cats and dogs was not true, but “whatever the case may be,” it was legitimate to spread a lie because it drew attention to the general “carnage” in Springfield, of which of course there was none. Small lies are acceptable, for Vance, when they help build up a big lie. Vance’s stance might be summarized thus: “Where there is the smoke that I made up, then there must also be the fire that I also made up.” In other settings, Vance was more specific than “carnage,” claiming increased rates of disease and crime. All of these claims were also baseless and false.

A spurious alternative reality, built from Nazi marches, internet memes, and Vance’s and Trump’s lies was consciously created and spread. The day after the presidential debate, the leader of the Nazi group Blood Tribe understandably declared victory, expressing his pride that Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.” What the Nazis and Vance and Trump said about Haitians at this time is part of the lexical context that the Supreme Court majority invoked only to ignore. It is also part of the historical context of which their ruling is now part. In ignoring all of this history, the majority has pushed history in a certain way: towards ethnic cleansing

In the moment, in autumn 2024, Ohio politicians did make an effort to protect the truth. Governor Mike DeWine spoke up to contain the lies that Vance and others had spread. DeWine acknowledged the very real challenges created by rapid immigration to schools and housing, and described state-level measures designed to address them. He described the Haitian immigrants as a “positive influence.” He elaborated: “People who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.” Mike DeWine, who was born in Springfield, knew what he was talking about. But he was reaching thousands of people. Social media had reached millions, Trump tens of millions. The damage had been done. The historical event that the Supreme Court’s majority chose to ignore entirely was underway.

Vance’s Nazi-propelled propaganda had won. And a propaganda victory of this sort, involving degrading claims about crime, barbarism, and disease, can lead directly to threats and violence. Two days after the presidential debate, Blood Tribe doxed Springfield residents, while several public buildings in Springfield had to be closed due to bomb threats, at least one of which involved hate speech about Haitians. The day after that, on 13 September 2024, three Springfield schools had to be closed after bomb threats. Amidst the chaos that he himself had sown, Vance blamed the immigrants and Kamala Harris.

Having created the problem, Trump and Vance had a “solution,” That same day, Trump claimed that immigrants had “destroyed” Springfield, and promised that, were he to become president, he would order an ethnic purge of the city: “I can say this, we will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio — large deportations. We’re going to get these people out.” Trump’s words were as magnetic as Vance’s: on 28 September, the Nazis of Blood Tribe returned to Springfield, this time waving a swastika flag in front of the mayor’s house. Trump announced in September 2024 what would in fact become his policy, and in the historical moment it was absolutely clear that it was based upon a racist fantasy and racist emotion. The Supreme Court’s majority ignored this obvious and known set of facts.

And, of course, these kinds of facts, observable in the United States in 2024, themselves fall into a larger historical context, that of the rhetorical preparation for ethnic cleansing. The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” the notion of “carnage,” the dehumanization of immigrants— all of this creates the impression that their promised ethnic cleansing action would be a response to something, rather than a simple choice to exercise state violence against an invented racial enemy. These reversals are very important. It is important to consider this carefully.

First, Vance reported that the Nazi propaganda campaign that he had himself inspired amounted to factual evidence. Mental chaos has been created where there was none before. And then that mental chaos becomes the justification for physical chaos: Trump’s “large deportations,” ICE raids now enabled by the Supreme Court that would, in fact, wreck an improving local economy.

And once that physical chaos has been created, it will be blamed on the immigrants who are no longer there. Most of this has already played out. A key threshold, which the Supreme Court has now allowed the president to cross, is the application of the state violence. At that point, so to speak, the lie is supposed to become “true.”

Hitler gave very specific propaganda guidance in Mein Kampf: a Nazi leader should tell a lie so big that his people cannot accept that they could be deceived on such a scale. And that is one logic, for those predisposed to believe a cat-eating-scale liar like Vance and to accept that the violence was justified. Others, those who do not trust Vance, might still find it hard to believe that their own government, however untrustworthy, is really about to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation just because Nazis march and the vice-president messages. That is, however, the origin story of this policy; and by ignoring it, the Supreme Court takes part in what comes next.

But if we lose time in incredulity at the horror of Vance and Trump’s preparations and the faux naïveté and po-faced politics of the Supreme Court, we risk becoming complicit. Once a big lie has led to violence, violence in which we are implicated because it is our government, it becomes harder to deny the initial lies — we do not want to think that we are complicit in an act of state terror that was based on absolutely nothing except Vance’s lies and Nazi marches. And so some kind of resistance now, even if it is not completely effective, is not only politically but ethically very important.

One answer to a big lie, to a Nazi alternative reality, are the small truths. When I visited Ohio in October 2024, after the presidential debate, and then again in October 2025, I was told that the narrative imposed by Vance and Trump on Springfield was irritating and wrong. To be sure, Springfield had problems, like most cities in my home state. But when I stopped there last October, my impressions were in line with what the Ohio governor has been saying. The city, which I have known since childhood, is clearly on the upswing.

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When I was growing up in the area, Springfield was much rougher than it is now. When I was finishing middle school, in 1983, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to Springfield, a gentle case study of the decline of the American dream. When I was in high school, the city (still) had two high schools, and so two football teams, which meant that I visited several times (to watch). It was a tricky town. Things got worse in the 1990s, as the main local employer, International Harvester cut back production, and industry in nearby Dayton also retreated. Between 1999 and 2014, median income in Springfield fell by more than in any other metropolitan area in the country. By 2012, Springfield self-rated as the unhappiest city in the land, and in 2016 it was presented in national media as the nadir the rust belt trajectory. But the city presented itself as a good place to do business, and in 2017 a big Japanese auto parts maker moved in. And suddenly there were more jobs than people seeking them. Soon the Haitians, who could legally work, starting coming.

By the 2020s, the city has visibly improved. The downtown, which had gone almost dark, is much more bright and functional: the Museum of Art and the Heritage Center Museum are still inviting, and there are good restaurants in the center — in part thanks to Haitians. Looking out into the sunshine of a perfect fall day from the pavilion of a Mexican place, it seemed grotesque to imagine that restaurants and other sites of employment could be raided by federal agents, that the city could be laid to waste on the lying logic that it had already been laid to waste. There was nothing here, nothing among the small truths of Springfield, that could justify such an action.

But even as I was visiting Springfield in autumn 2025, Vance’s mendacity was doing its political work under the new Trump administration. The fiery racial lies were becoming cold bureaucratic power. A few weeks later, in late November, the federal government took the actions necessary to establish the institutional preconditions for an ethnic cleansing of Springfield. In late November 2025, the Department of Homeland Security issued an unpersuasive finding of improved conditions in Haiti. It did so without the consultations required by law.

This was the step needed to deprive Haitians of the official Temporary Protected Status that allows them to live and work legally in the United States. Read attentively, the text reveals that conditions in Haiti remain disastrous. At most, there is some weak gesturing towards the future possibility of some improvement — which, in normal times, would be obviously insufficient to deprive Haitians of their status. There is no sense of such improvement in State Department documents, such as the current travel advisory strongly discouraging Americans from visiting Haiti.

The concluding claim of the finding is that the presence of Haitians “is contrary to the US national interest.” This assertion, which is presented as dispositive of all other issues, goes unexplained and undefended. What national interest, exactly? How? The only answer is a vague reference to Trump’s beliefs. In the context of the previous events, the meaning is clear enough. The beliefs that Trump had expressed, following Vance, were all about race. The president and the vice-president had repeated that Haitians eat domestic animals, cause diseases, commit violent crimes, and wreck cities. These very specific dicta about Haitians originated with JD Vance and American Nazis. Given the lack of any other explanation, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the motive of the policy is the racial hatred expressed by the president and the vice-president. This was the determination of a district court that cited some of these facts; it was overturned by a Supreme Court majority last week that cited none of them.

This expression of state of mind is one reason why, should a major ICE operation go forward in Springfield, it would have to be seen as the ethnic cleansing of an American city. To be sure, the appearance of racial difference drives ICE raids all over the country. But in the case of the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, we have a particularly clear trail from public racism to practical policy. This is what lawyers and historians concerned with genocide try to ascertain: was there the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”? It is not easy to settle questions of intent, or of genocide generally; but the expression of racial fantasy about “carnage,” “destruction,” and barbarism by the vice-president and the president weighs on one side of the scale.

Will there now be such an operation? Earlier this year, before the district court ruling, local authorities indicated that one would begin on 4 February and last for thirty days. Today the general expectation is the same.

Up until now, the major ICE raids have taken place in states and cities with reliable Democratic majorities. In Springfield, Ohio, the politics would be different. Republicans dominate a wildly gerrymandered Ohio state legislature. Ohio’s two Republican United States senators are unlikely to contradict the president on his signature issue. Mayor Rue and Governor DeWine unsurprisingly say that the law is the law; even these local and state-level Republicans, for whom the issue is close at hand, cannot be expected to use a language of opposition. That said, their expressions of concern have been unmistakable; and, in DeWine’s case, thoughtful and detailed. Dewine is far more informed about both Springfield and Haiti than any of the federal authorities.

DeWine has disputed the two justifications given by the Department of Homeland Security for the federal action: that Haiti is safe and that Haitians in Springfield somehow compromise “national security.” He said earlier that the decision to remove their Temporary Protected Status was “wrong.” His description of Haiti is, sadly, quite accurate: “it’s extremely violent, the economy’s in shambles, the government does not function, the police are virtually worthless.” He contradicts the Department of Homeland Security finding: “it doesn’t qualify as the situation changing for the better in Haiti.” DeWine is an informed observer, not only of Springfield, but also of Haiti. He and his wife Fran DeWine helped to fund a school in Haiti, named in honor of their deceased daughter, Becky. This charitable effort became unsustainable in 2024.

The direction of federal deportation policy really rests on claims about Springfield. Here DeWine’s statement was equally clear: “Springfield and Clark County are coming back, they’ve been doing a very very good job. It’s an upward movement. Part of that upward movement comes about because, frankly, of Haitians who are working and contributing to the economy and buying things and opening restaurants and doing all the things that working people (do). These people are working, and they’re hard workers, so I think from a public policy point of view, it is a mistake, it is not in the best interest of Ohio, for these individuals who are workers and working to lose that status.” The Ohio governor still says, after the Supreme Court ruling, that the president’s policy is wrong in its claim that Haiti is safe and harmful to the people of Ohio.

DeWine’s description of workers helps us to imagine the realization, in an actual city, of the inhuman, nonsensical language of the Supreme Court’s ruling. There are at least ten thousand men, women, and children who will be subject to arrest and deportation in Springfield alone. These are those men and women at work, “who one day will be able to work, and the next day will not be able to work,” as the governor put it -- the Supreme Court ruling means that people who try to work will be seized in their workplaces, and if not seized in their home.

Those are adults; we also have to imagine the children. Roughly twenty percent of the children in Springfield Public Schools do not have documentation that would establish their citizenship. All of these boys and girls, about fifteen hundred children, are vulnerable. As in other cities, they can be taken from schools and away from their parents, or return home to find their parents gone. The Ohio Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, “strongly opposes” any presence of ICE agents in schools, which “undermines trust, disrupts learning, and creates trauma for children and families.”

Although the Supreme Court majority tries to persuade us that it is simply applying the law as it must, its nonsensical prose is on the side of chaos, not of order. Sad though it is to contemplate, trauma is a goal of ethnic cleansing. The stages that we have seen in Ohio are all too familiar: the fiction of the subhuman enemy; the false details that are used to introduce the stereotypes; the organized use of the propaganda of racial hatred in media; the capture of government by people involved in all this; and then finally the Court’s endorsement of the application of violence to thousands of human bodies. At every stage we have been offered the reasons that we should find this normal: on the one side, the fiery talk about subhumans; on the other, the Court’s Kafkaesque boilerplate suggesting that all is normal and inevitable and that no one need take personal responsibility for what is simply happening and must happen.

The work to normalize racist and Nazi language looks exactly like the Court’s ruling; the overwrought performative neutrality of the Court is not only dishonest in itself, but constructive in its outrageous mendacity of an atmosphere of unreality that favors violence. The Court, in other words, in not only permitting the executive to undertake violent actions; by doing so on the basis of transparently obvious falsehoods, it is actively creating the conditions in which such violence can be rationalized and escalated.

The violence, once it comes, changes normality: first of all, for the people who are rounded up and held in the concentration camps we call “detention centers,” preparatory to being sent either somewhere they do not want to go, or dying in custody. And this leaves trauma among the survivors in the most obvious, incontestable sense.

But everyone who observes also partakes in the trauma. The kids who remain in Springfield schools after their friends disappear will need to tell themselves something. Their parents will need to think of what to tell them. Everyone around has to ask how it came to this. The trauma becomes a political resource. The perpetrators of an ethnic cleansing use the emotion to reshape how we see our neighbors — and ourselves. Most people, I expect, would be appalled by an ethnic cleansing in Springfield. The ethnic cleanser, though, rules with the help of those who are not, those who comply, agree, take part. And in this way ethnic cleansing itself is a step away from democracy and towards minority rule by a police state served by those willing to wear the mask.

Those who dispense the trauma are aware of what they are doing. In this whole Springfield story, it is the statements of Blood Tribe and the the vice-president that reveal the most self-awareness. They are guiding a process that they recognize, understand, and approve: the generation of an alternative reality with a clear definition of the detestable other, and then the mobilization of state power to eliminate that imagined enemy. If this process is completed, as there is every sign that it will be, they will have succeeded: and they too will be altered. Blood Tribe, and groups like them, will have seen how they can move the national conversation and the federal government.

If there is a Springfield pogrom, JD Vance will have his first namesake policy. Although he has been outspoken during the first year of the Trump administration, and has gotten himself in the way of various endeavors, there is, as of yet, no clear instance of a policy of which he is the author and the executor. The ethnic cleansing of Springfield would be the first. “JD Genocide,” or perhaps “Genocide Vance” -- if all this happens, the sobriquets will write themselves.

And what history will the rest of us write for ourselves? When we are confronted with street terror, concentration camps, and mass deportations, as now in the United States, the thought of historical precedents arises — and is usually suppressed. “It can’t happen here,” we think, so this must not be “it.” When we take the focus down from the national to the local, to the story of Springfield, this is a bit harder to maintain. The “it” is right there in front of our faces.

We confront here no historical analogy, but actual twenty-first century American Nazis who took their cues from the man who is now vice-president, acted in the public sphere, shaped the public conversation, and are now getting the policy outcome that they desired from a Supreme Court that whitewashes the history in which they played a central part. As the mayor noted after Blood Tribe marched in Springfield, the aim was to “disrupt the community” — and now, thanks to the Supreme Court, that disruption can take on a catastrophic scale.

Having followed the genealogy of events in Springfield, we might find ourselves more open to broader interpretations of what is happening around us, at a national level. After all, the social media feeds of the Department of Homeland Security are ever less distinguishable from those of Blood Tribe, and of course incomparably more influential. The motives given for the deportation operations as a whole, the notion of “criminal aliens” and the like, are essentially those of Springfield writ large. Springfield, far from being the exception, might help us to see the general rule. When I see masked ICE agents I can’t help remembering the masks of Blood Tribe -- and asking myself if there might be some overlap in personnel...

For me, as a historian of atrocity who was raised in Ohio, it is uncanny to consider this evidence. Usually I am reading the sources years or decades after the fact, not along with the events themselves. Usually I visit sites of memory, not cities at risk, which is what Springfield is right now. I wish that what I know about other times and places was not quite so applicable. But insofar as is historical patterns are of any use, it is in naming what might well happen before it does happen -- which, perhaps, makes the horror less likely.

An ICE surge in Ohio is not inevitable. Trump does not have to order his promised “large deportation.” In April the House of Representatives passed legislation extending protected status for Haitians. But the Senate would have to agree and the president would have to choose not to exercise his veto.

In the five months between the district court ruling and the Supreme Court ruling, Trump has become even more unpopular. It is possible that he wiIl avoid a single dramatic cleansing action and instead try to get rid of Haitians in smaller groups, or by taking actions that make their lives here intolerable. Whatever policy he chooses, it can be resisted, recorded, given its place in history by those with the courage to be present and to speak about what they see. There will be other Courts, and other Americans, who will care about this history, and how we choose to make it and see it. The seeing, just the seeing, is of huge importance, for all of us. When we see, we can feel and we can act. We can empathize, communicate, shelter, protest, help.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

PS For a sense of how how you might help, please follow the links in the final paragraph.

PPS In this essay I cite local reporting from the Dayton Daily News, the Ohio Capital Journal, and the Springfield News-Sun. Please consider following the links to subscribe.

PPPS In this essay I do not raise another issue about the majority ruling: it ignores the statute in question, or rather on the basis of some adventurous wordplay claims that the law does not say what it clearly says. The Secretary of Homeland Security, then Kristi Noem, was statutorily required to consult about the safety of Haiti before issuing a determination that Haitians could be denied their protected status. She did not do so. But the majority found that this was acceptable, because (for example) “consulting” can mean just the intention to consult and not an actual exchange of information. As ever the Court majority’s “literalism” proves to be specious, or indeed Orwellian: Congress can write any statute it wants, and then the Court can decide that the executive branch need not follow it, because of some improvised semantic fantasy that reads as though it arose from a late-night competition of Supreme Court clerks to see who could come up with the most embarrassing formulation to put in the mouths of their justices.

PPPPS This is an updated and expanded version of a post that I originally published in early February 2026, right before the district court ruling. I am updating in June 2026, after the Supreme Court ruling (TS 29 June 2026).

In the late second century AD, the Roman Empire confronted armies that had crossed the border at the Danube River and even broached the Alps in northern Italy. Among them were the Iazyges, speakers of an Iranian language, who hailed from the Ukrainian steppe.

In Ukraine this February, I was learning about an archaeological find which reveals the interactions of the Romans and the Iazyges, which included alliance as well as enmity. The Roman war against the Iazyges allies was commanded personally by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who spent the years between 171 and 180 AD at the front. During that time he kept a philosophical diary, probably written at night in his tent. Discovered after his death, that text, known as the Meditations, is a great work of Stoic philosophy.

I turned to the Meditations to see if I could learn anything that would help me to understand the work of Ukrainian archaeologists about the interactions between Romans and Iazyges. I found something else: perspective on the wars of today, and a sense of why, beyond his obvious incompetence in military matters, Trump had to lose his.

It was shaming to read the bombast of Trump: (”no president was willing to do what I have done tonight”) alongside the reflections of Marcus (“when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.”) Trump broadcast his arrogance to millions of people; Marcus wrote for himself.

Despite the fact he was commanding an army at the front, Marcus never mentioned the war in his Meditations. War was simply something he had to do; he had no difficulty seeing the other side as people, or understanding their motivations. He mentions the Iazyges only once in the text: to make a broader point about hubris, to suggest that it was wrong for Romans to take pride in taking a prisoner of war.

Although Marcus did not broach the subject of my interest, I could not stop reading his Meditations. The contrast with Trump’s utterances was astounding, and vertiginous. The one could spend nine years in command and write a philosophical diary in which he did not even mention the war; the other immediately leapt to praise himself for a war he would lose in weeks.

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Trump had felt pleasure after the intervention in Venezuela; he wanted more of that feeling. The Americans were bound to lose because there was no human thought involved; Trump regarded technology as magic and a first strike by missiles as definitive. People were killed, including schoolchildren, but there was no front as such, since the war was conducted from a distance. Trump’s frivolity made it easy for his chosen enemy.

Rather than remaining in post until their deaths, as did Marcus Aurelius, the Americans never took up a post in any meaningful sense. Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was, if possible, even more boastful than the president: “Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We are playing for keeps. Our war fighters have maximum authority granted personally by the president and yours truly. This was never intended to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Such words were uttered by men who began a war in February and, despite a missile here and a drone there, essentially capitulated before summer.

Their elation had nothing to do with any real prospect of victory, but rather with the palpable pleasure they took in killing. Hegseth quite wrongly equates the high he feels when others die with the political phenomenon of victory in war. The embrace of what he calls “lethality” is a flight from something which we all share, which is mortality. By killing others he is displacing the acceptance of one’s own death, which Marcus regarded as the first step towards thinking: “in a short while, you will be nobody and nowhere; and the same of all that and all who are now alive. It is the nature of all things to change, to perish and be transformed so that in succession different things can come to be.”

Trump enjoyed the killing from day to day, but never had any idea what victory would require. Hegseth reveled in “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” He claimed that the war had been won, even as it was clear that the US had failed to achieve any meaningful objective: “never in recorded history has a nation’s military been so quickly and effectively neutralized.” As the weeks passed, both he and Trump fell back onto a purely internal, psychological notion of victory: what mattered was not the actual war in the actual world, but their ability to continue to say words in front of microphones that made them feel good inside. Even that feeling, grounded in nothing, faded quickly after February.

Stoicism is a manner of making connections with the world that help us to avoid elementary mistakes. Writing in his tent, Marcus Aurelius reflected on hubris and history: Each life, says Marcus, must be seen in the perspective of the entire cosmos: “What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us, and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod on which you keep.” We might be deluded to believe in our own grandeur, but the truth is elsewhere. Pride is an error from which the boastful person himself suffers: “Why then this stress, why not be content with an orderly passage through the brief span you have.”

What we as mortals can know is very limited: “In man’s life, his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a whirlygig, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear.” Starting from such cosmic humility, we can build up our own ethical steadfastness. Everything is in flux, but we can project calm outwards into our small corner of the world: “Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.” From this idea of self-creation comes confidence about one’s own purposes: “Dig inside yourself,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “inside there is a spring of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging.”

Goodness is possible, despite everything; or rather by seeing one’s own small place in everything. If you can see your limits, you have a chance of seeing others and the world. If you can accept mortality, you need not take refuge in lethality. If you are seeking the good in yourself, you will not mirror an enemy. Revenge is an error that bespeaks a lack of courageous inquiry about oneself and the world. Indeed, says Marcus Aurelius, “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

During the war, Trump and Hegseth fell back upon the idea of revenge: in a blasphemous tirade which he plagiarized from a movie, Hegseth said: “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.” If you do not know who you are, you model yourself on your enemy, and claim that what is evil when they do it is good when you do it. There is not much difference between Hegseth’s fundamentalism and that of the people he calls “mullahs.” He refers to them as “barbaric savages”; but when he looks at the mirror of the makeup studio he installed for himself in the Pentagon, what does he see?

The American leaders had no idea of who they were or what they wanted, aside from the satisfaction of their emotional needs by the killing of others. They were unable to imagine that people on the other side might have ideas about their own interests and plans for their own behavior. The could not see the world, even in its plainest representation as geography; whereas Marcus exploited a bend in the Danube River to tactical advantage to win a battle; Trump chose to ignore the physical limit the Straits of Hormuz can place on world trade. As soon as the war began, the Iranians did the obvious: they responded to American long-range attacks with the same; and they blocked the Straits.

Because the Americans were operating without a sense of themselves, of the world, or other people, this came as a surprise. Marcus Aurelius offers this mild comment: “How absurd -- and a complete stranger to the world-- is the man surprised at any aspect of his experience in life!”

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The Americans, strangers to the world, reacted to their feelings of surprise with fantasies of destruction. The pleasure they took in killing became a vision of annihilation. Rather than confront the errors they made about war, the Americans leapt to visions of violence in which no one would ever have to think again. Trump lost control on Easter Sunday when he tweeted: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He then promised that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong” and said that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” In our modern legal and ethical language, this is of course genocidal language. The American bombast was followed by American surrender.

Marcus Aurelius won his war against the Iazyges. He combined victory and prudence, and for this he was and will be remembered. The defeated Iazyges returned to their previous role as Roman clients, offered thousands of cavalrymen as soldiers of Rome, and opened trade routes to the east. Marcus’s philosophical diary has been read for the better part of two millenia; so long as we are present as a literate civilization, it will be read. Despite Marcus’s certainty that we will all be forgotten, others built a victory column in his honor after his death; it still stands in Rome, more than one thousand eight hundred years later.

Another legacy of Marcus’s victory also touches the center of what we think of as Western culture. As part of the peace accord, he dispatched 5,500 Iazyges cavalrymen, taken into his service, to the north of what is now northern England, to defend the Roman border at Hadrian’s Wall. Their first commander was a man named Arthur, and it is possible that the Iazyges and some of their Iranian-speaking kin incorporated his name into stories of their own -- of a lady in the lake, of a sword in a stone, of a quest for a golden cup -- which, with time, became the legend of Christian chivalry. That is another story, and one worth telling.

But it is also part of the story of Marcus Aurelius, which, despite the fact that he chose not to tell it himself, or rather precisely for that reason, is instructive about our predicament today. Stoicism is a way not to be a stranger to the world; it can protect the powerful from vanity and folly. To fall into a stupor of self-absorption, as Trump has done, is to flee from reality. Few wars are worth fighting; those that are fought can only be won in the world, and not within the tortured confines of estranged minds. Trump hastens now towards our shared horizon of death, seeking honors that only posterity can accord and will not.

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The quotations of Marcus Aurelius are drawn from this excellent edition: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond, introd. Diskin Clay, London: Penguin, 2006. The quotations of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are linked to sources in the text.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

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Hope you have a cup of coffee in hand for this one. Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration and host of on Substack, to talk about what language to describe our moment, democracy, and civic participation look like today.

Tim and Joyce started off by talking about how “sugarcoating” political realities can become a form of collaboration, because it delays the public response necessary to defend democratic institutions. They both also reject the idea that democracy inevitably self-corrects, stressing that there is no political “pendulum” that guarantees a return to normalcy. Tim also emphasized that democracies survive only when citizens actively participate in shaping their future.

The rest of the discussion explored everything from the aftermath of the Iran war to threats against democratic norms at home, including debates over executive power, habeas corpus, voting rights, and the Supreme Court. Tim mentioned, regarding Iran, that authoritarian movements are often fueled by the illusion that force can solve complex problems, while history repeatedly shows that violence creates consequences its architects cannot control, which he writes about in his recent essays on Iran.

To me, the most striking part of the conversation focused on what comes next. Tim and Joyce both urged Democrats and democracy advocates to think beyond simply winning the next election. Success, as Tim said, requires a broad coalition, a compelling vision of the future, and a willingness to pursue ambitious democratic reforms—from voting rights and anti-corruption measures to structural changes that will strengthen democratic institutions.

Throughout the conversation, both Tim and Joyce returned to a common theme that has helped guide me as I try to navigate these times: history is not a script. There is no singular arc of the universe. The future remains unwritten. Whether America emerges stronger from this moment depends not on inevitability, but on the deliberate choices and actions citizens make now—and with each other.

As Tim and Joyce put it in their closing messages, the answer is always action.

Until next time,

-Victor

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Earlier today, Tim talked with and , two former senior national security aides to President Biden on their new show, “The Long Game.:

They began with Iran — and, specifically, the power the United States has effectively surrendered through this war. As Tim put it during the conversation: “We’ve lost this war, and we lost it a long time ago.” The deeper question, he argued, is not simply how leaders can be so incompetent, but how we build institutions and a political culture that make radically incompetent leadership impossible.

If you'd like to read more on this theme, Tim explored it further in his recent essays, Utopias of Violence and Capitulation Day.

The conversation then turned to Ukraine: where the war stands today, why Russia is failing to achieve its objectives, the remarkable technological innovations Ukraine has developed under pressure, and what the Trump administration continues to misunderstand about the conflict. Tim also highlighted two organizations doing vital work in support of Ukraine: United24 and Razom.

They concluded with a discussion of freedom — a subject Tim examines at length in his book On Freedom. One of the central ideas is that freedom cannot simply be freedom from something. We must also strive for freedom to, creating the conditions and world that will lead to true freedom.

It was a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, and one that speaks directly to many of the challenges facing democracies today.

Until next time,

Victor

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The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

To be sure, the inherent unpredictability of violence was joined by other factors in this foolish war. It originated in the human incompetence and strategic ignorance in the White House. The chief executive is, sadly, a superloser bent on superpower suicide. In the long term, the lesson for Americans is that our domestic politics will have to be restructured such that no aspiring tyrant can fight wars of whimsy.

But there is a more pressing concern for Americans. Will the tyrannical emotional state that brought us the war now be applied inside the United States? The emotional state, the utopia of violence, is not closely tethered to reality, and has to be considered in its own right. It has causal force, as we have just seen in Iran. There was no thinking behind the decision to go to war. There was however a vision, a feeling about how the world works, a utopia of violence.

The war began not with a plan, or a strategy, or for that matter any sense of the national interest. The attack on Iran began with a longing -- a subjective sense that violence is pleasurable and can bring a utopia in which desires become reality. In the statements of President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth, such a utopia of violence is palpable.

Donald Trump is having such a moment. Having deployed the American armed forces to aid one Venezuelan faction against another on January 3rd, he decided that there was no limit to what violence could achieve in politics. Given the modest goal of the Venezuela operation and the prior work done by Venezuelans, this was a curious conclusion: but the utopianism is a mental state that doesn’t rest on reason. For those of us who listened to Trump call in to Fox and Friends right after the operation, it was clear that he was elated and wanted more. “I watched it,” he said, “literally like I was watching a television show.” Indeed he did, transfixed: “And this is something that, gee, I don’t know, it’s amazing.” And he wanted more of the amazing feeling: “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”

This language was very close to something his Secretary of Defense had said: “Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.”

Nobody can stop us. Nobody can touch us. Violence is amazing, war is divine. This is how it feels inside a utopia of violence.

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Secretary Hegseth’s view of war also has to do with primal urges, which he expresses in terms of God and the male body. In one of the weirdest episodes in military history, Hegseth last September gathered America’s highest-ranking military officers into one room -- absolute insanity from the point of view of national security -- to deliver a screed that was largely about groomed and muscular white male bodies. He recited his utopia of violence: “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

The fantasy is that overwhelming violence will always bring about what you desire, and that the only problem is that people will try to hold you back. “Lethality,” said Hegseth at Quantico, “is our calling card and victory our only acceptable end state.” From there he went straight on to God, as he is wont to do. Setting aside the Christian question -- was Jesus really a fascist? -- there are logical problems that Hegseth fails to see. Killing people is just not the same thing as victory in war. This is utopian language. There might be dysregulated longing for a sense of domination and righteousness on the part of those with the power to start wars, but these emotional states are in disaccord with the capacity to choose the right wars and win them.

Once the attack on Iran began, Hegseth’s longings blinded him to what was actually happening: “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.” This was laughable, but it was also illogical, an expression of faith. Even in sports there is no such thing as “winning”; in war certainly not. As always, Hegseth conflated killing people with victory: “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Such descriptions of the war no doubt matched his internal mental landscape, but they had nothing to do with the external mathematics of power.

“We will keep pushing,” he told us, “keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” To say this as secretary of defense was probably a war crime; “no quarter,” as Hegseth might or might not know, means executing people who have surrendered on the battlefield. But of course no Iranians actually surrendered on the battlefield, because there was no battlefield; the war in Iran was executed by American and Israeli missiles, bombs, and torpedoes. This too can lead to war crimes, as when we destroyed a school and killed more than one hundred girls. The point is that, in the absence of any ground operation, any “pushing” took place only in Hegseth’s mind. The utopian celebration of the bodies of “warfighters” was in tension with the Trump-Hegseth way of “warfighting,” which was to fire weapons from a distance, boast about victory, and then capitulate.

But will anything be learned from this? The correct historical lesson is that violence does not in fact generate a new pristine state of human interaction in which all of your dreams are fulfilled. Instead, it simply takes politics to another level, where terrible and unpredictable things can happen. It is more likely to be tawdry than to be ennobling, and very unlikely to lead where you think it will lead.

The war in Iran confirms this. The question for American political life in the next five months is whether this basic lesson will be learned. Because the next obvious move for our utopians of violence will not be to accept this reality; it will be to preserve the utopia of violence and apply it not to Iranians but to their fellow Americans.

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Trump’s capitulation before to Iran leads us back to what Trump really cares about: not losing any of his power in the congressional elections of this November.

He had to surrender for the basic reason known to all serious students of war: the Iranians were able to affect his political situation more than he was able to affect theirs. Now, the “deal” is a mess, and the “process” is a mess, and the war in some way might continue. But the terms to which Trump has already agreed are a capitulation; and as time passes he will, if anything, have to settle for something even worse. He might be irritated by this or that, or disrupted by yet another Israeli attack in Lebanon (or Gaza), or delayed by all the money made by his friends. But he will surrender as quickly as he can (as he has now shown) because the clock to the November elections is ticking.

As an aspiring tyrant in a flawed democracy, he has to be concerned about the economy in general and gasoline prices in particular. The Iranians knew this and exploited it. But the fact that Trump capitulates to Iranians does not mean that he will abandon the utopia of violence as such. He has never really had a problem with subordinating himself to foreign dictators; lacking any sense of personal shame or any notion of American patriotism, he can shrug off defeat to Iran, just as he accepts everyday obedience to Russia. What matters to him is the convenience and comfort that comes from the presidency, and that logic leads directly to another use for the American armed forces: to intervene in the midterm elections this November or the presidential elections two years from now.

Such a move would be in keeping with Hegseth’s career and thought. Like Trump, Hegseth lacks any sense of what the interests of the United States as such might be. His ideological purge of the top officer ranks is inconsistent with battlefield success; it is consistent with the aim of creating a Trumpian praetorian guard whose only mission is to intimidate Americans. Indeed, the natural trajectory of the Department of Defense under a complete incompetent such as Hegseth (whether he explicitly wishes this or not) is to render the armed forces capable of little more than civil war against fellow citizens.

Hegseth is concerned only with the general idea of enemies, and for him the main enemies are Americans. He does not believe in the Constitution: for him, any rights come from God, and he decides whom God protects. “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.” He tells us that “the Left” plans “utter annihilation” for everyone else, which of course would justify annihilating Americans defined as “the Left” first. Hegseth makes it quite clear that the violence he wants is directed against other Americans: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”

Reasonable people can draw a reasonable lesson from defeat in Iran: even putting ethical questions aside, violence will not lead where you think. History, however, instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.

That is where the minds of Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are likely to go. Vance, too, is a utopian of violence; he believed that invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying troops in Minnesota would have crushed protests and brought stability. This is unlikely; the use of violence, at home even more than abroad, opens new avenues of unpredictability, and almost never goes where you think it will go. But Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

And so the rest of us have a simple duty: to recognize the utopias of violence, to note the risk to the republic. The fact that Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are thinking about using violence at home does not mean that it will actually happen. Seeing a utopia of violence for what it is makes it far less likely to be realized. Indeed, the only way we get to soldiers at voting booths is by determinedly looking away and pretending that this isn’t what Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) wish for.

Utopian thinking can be a sign of weakness rather than strength, as it is in this case. Trump is extremely unpopular, as was his war, as are his policies generally. His charisma depends on a televisual projection of strength, but he just lost his whimsy war and looks terrible. The men who stand behind him are still less popular. Their utopianism is unappealing; and their desire for personal power is naked. It should not be hard to recognize all of this and to agree, recognizing that we will disagree about other matters, that there is no place for American military action at home, and that our elections should be held in peace.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

PS Although I am using terms in a different way than any of these three scholars, whose work is far more profound than this essay, I want to take the opportunity to mention Utopia of Terror, edited by Rory Yeomans; Purify and Destroy by Jacques Semelin; and Violent Utopia by Jovan Scott Lewis.

The US-Iranian talks that were supposed to begin today were cancelled, so today is as good a day as any to discuss the signed “memorandum of understanding” and mark the completion of the disaster. We have what we have: humiliation.

War, as some people apparently needed to learn, is not about the pleasure one takes in watching things blow up. It is politics by other means. To win a war means changing the politics of the enemy such that they must surrender. That is what Iran just did to the United States.

This war was a parade of Trump’s incompetence at every possible level from the beginning. To win a war requires understanding the politics of the other side and how it might be changed. Trump, Hegseth and the others treated the Iranian leadership as cartoon characters who would immediately do what Americans wanted as soon as the bombs fell. The Americans had no strategy -- no sense of how violence could change politics -- and it did not occur to them that the Iranians would have one. Once the Iranians did the obvious, which was to respond to American long-range strikes with their own, and close the Straits of Hormuz, the war was over, and they had won. The Americans had no second move, except to claim that they had won when they had lost (which they are, laughably, still doing).

It matters that we no longer employ qualified people to handle matters of war and peace, but leave war planning to entertainers and negotiations to profiteers.

We seem to still be under the sway of the fairy tale that Trump himself can negotiate. He cannot and he never could. That was a character he played on television. He himself, and the people around him, talk big in front of the cameras in the safety of their studios, but know nothing about the actual workings of world power. Trump is vulnerable to flattery, always in a hurry, unable to focus, and indifferent to any issue beyond his own comfort. He started the war for personal pleasure, and then he surrendered to Iran for personal convenience: he wants to stay in the White House forever, and so he wants gas prices down, and so he gave Iran everything.

Until now, I tended to think that Trump’s geopolitical legacy would be as a footnote in the Russo-Ukrainian war, as a wannabe oligarch who artificially extended a real oligarch’s war of aggression. Now Trump has found his way into the main text of the history of Russia’s ally Iran, as the architect of the renewal of the atrocious regime in Tehran. By attacking Iran he generated sympathy for torturers and murderers. By losing to Iran he expanded its power profile in the Middle East. And by capitulating to Iran he created an enduring power base for Iran’s rulers. Iran will charge fees for transit through the Straits of Hormuz, and the United States will unfreeze Iranian assets and pay three hundred billion dollars in reparations. Thanks to Trump, the United States no longer has any leverage to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon.

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We make a mistake, I think, in how we think about evil and folly. We tend to think that one excludes the other: if it is evil, it must serve some intelligent purpose; if it is foolish, it must not be very malicious. The truth, as this war shows, is that evil and folly can march hand in hand along the path to national self-destruction. This war was a strategic disaster, but it was also an ethical disaster. Fighting an undeclared and illegal war of aggression, flouting the laws of war, and killing scores of civilians does not bring victory. Taking pleasure in doing those things is not a sign of canny calculation. It is simply wrong. To be hard-hearted is not to be hard-headed. One can enjoy violence and still be a loser. One can be hard-hearted and soft-headed, as Trump and Hegseth have just proven.

There is, in other words, no consolation. It is not that we used evil means to some good purpose. We used evil means foolishly and left the world far worse than it was before, in every conceivable respect. Aside from the economic consequences that we already feel and the strategic weakness that we have demonstrated, we have created a more disorderly and dangerous globe, one less bound by law and order, one more like the model that the regimes in Beijing and Moscow (and for that matter Tehran) want.

There is, however, a lesson. If evil and folly can march together, then so can good and wisdom. The United States got to a place where a war like this was possible because we allowed too much power to be concentrated in too few hands -- too much political power, too much economic power, too much media power. The capitulation to Iran, in other words, was not just the result of an error by a few self-absorbed incompetents, but of structures in which such people could attain power. Wars of whimsy are a symptom of tyranny, and a warning for those who prefer republics. They must be opposed, but more fundamentally they must be prevented: be removing money from politics, by addressing basic inequalities, by breaking up monopolies, by enabling social mobility.

Iran had no difficulty winning this war, because to do so it had only to prick the self-interest of an aspiring tyrant. To build an America that does not capitulate, as Trump and Hegseth and the rest have just proven, is not a matter of being hard-hearted and soft-headed. It really is the opposite -- and that is on us. We really should have harder heads, valuing leaders who have achieved something good in their lives, and resisting the easy charisma of the people who want their hands in our pockets and our children dying in some desert. And we should have softer hearts, caring more about one another, and thinking of our government as enabling better lives for all of us.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

PS. Today is Juneteenth, a time to reflect on the most profound of injustices, slavery. It is in courageously confronting our moral mistakes that we become stronger as a people.

This afternoon, Tim sat down with for a conversation I think many of you will want to watch with a notebook in hand.

Ruth is one of the foremost scholars of strongmen and authoritarianism — she teaches at NYU and has spent her career studying exactly the kind of moment we find ourselves in now. Together, she and Tim covered a lot of ground, from strongmen to oligarchs, to fascism, but the heart of the conversation was about how to make sense of what’s happening around us.

One concept that stood out to me: the distinction between Superpower Suicide and Superpower Murder — a framework Tim has written about before, but which takes on new dimensions in conversation with Ruth. They also explored other ways of naming and framing this moment, and, crucially, what each of us can practically do in response.

As Tim put it near the end, getting the language right isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s clarifying. It’s even enabling.

Hope you find it as illuminating as I did.

More Thinking Live conversations are on the way — stay tuned!

— Victor

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a defining confrontation of our time, and there is much you can do to help Ukrainians defend themselves -- and thereby affirm much that is of value in our world.

The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War, and there is every reason to think that its outcome will be of comparable historical significance.

By resisting Russia, Ukrainians are defending what is perhaps most basic about decent political life: the idea that people should be who they choose to be, not whom they are forced to become. This can be seen at different levels: as the defense of an independent state, or as the defense of a democracy. But in my experience with Ukrainians and their civil society even these grand words, important as they are, do not quite capture what is essential here: that it is worth taking risks for the dignity of being human.

Ukrainians take risks on the battlefield every day. On a literal battlefield, not a metaphorical one, on a front that stretches for nearly a thousand miles, men and women hold the line. From this substack we co-led a campaign to purchase armored automobiles to help evacuate wounded soldiers. I want to just remind you that this campaign was a success; friends of mine have seen the vehicles in action, and we have the words of thanks of soldiers to those of you who contributed: you can listen here. That campaign, “Freedom as Action,” with Khartiia Brigade and Help99, is complete (but you can always do more by donating to other campaigns at Help99!).

Everyone who chooses to remain in Ukraine takes risks. From the very beginning of the war, Russia has launched swarms of missiles and drones and civilian targets. The Ukrainians lead the world in the technologies of drone defense, and are constantly innovating. In our latest campaign here at Thinking About, Sky Defense, we are raising half a million dollars to support overall Ukrainian air defense in the places where it is most necessary.

I wanted to share two pieces of good news about the campaign

First, I want you to know that of you have made a contribution, your donations are being converted in real time into into drone defense, including P1-SUN interceptor drones.

You are helping to stop Russians drones from killing people and destroying neighborhoods. Here is a look at an interceptor bringing down a Russian Shahed (that’s the Iranian name; the Russians, who have these systems from Iran originally, call them Geran).

Second, we are 80% of the way to completing the campaign!

We have raised more than $400,000, and the goal is $500,000. I am hopeful that we can finish in the next few days. I know that half a million dollars can seem like a lot to one person, but together we will get there! It’s a tiny amount on the scale of, say, the US military budget, which spends this much every ten or fifteen seconds. But the Ukrainians can use these resources well, to safe civilian life and to bring the war closer to an end.

I will write more about this in another post — but, overall, the signs for Ukraine are favorable in this year in this war. By contributing to our campaigns, you are allowing people to survive and helping people to persevere. You are also letting them know that they are not alone, and that you can see a better future, and want to part of it.

Please help if you can, and please share this post with others who might. Thank you.

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This is where all the evidence points. If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off.

And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. No other explanation fits the data.

Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.

The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.

Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power.

Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.”

It’s a military dictatorship budget.

Seeing it in any other way, evaluating it in terms that are transparently inapplicable, makes it more likely to pass, and more likely that a future of American military dictatorship will come to pass.

None of this has to succeed. The military dictatorship budget can and should fail. But to make it fail, we have to see it for what it is.

I do my best to explain in the video. Please feel free to share it.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?

The historian Marci Shore goes to wartime Ukraine because it’s her job, and because she has people to see. She’s been there five times since the full-scale war began. Before her latest visit I asked Marci to take some photos and videos, so you could see a bit of war and resistance through her eyes.

Marci arrived in Kyiv in late May, right after one of the largest Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital thus far, and as Russian authorities were telling “foreign citizens” to leave the city because Moscow planned to destroy “decision-making centers.”

On Marci’s agenda: to give a public lecture, to comment on papers at a history workshop, and to participate in Book Arsenal, Kyiv’s amazing annual book festival. Last year she was one of its curators, under the motto “Everything is Translation.” This year the motto was “Bear Your Freedom.”

Since the war began in 2014, and especially since the full-scale invasion of 2022, book publication has been self-defense. Russia targets Ukrainian publishing houses, archives, libraries, and museums, and in occupied zones Russians collect and burn Ukrainian books. Genocide is about eliminating a people, and it includes the attempt to eliminate their ability to think for themselves, as themselves, in their own language.

Ukrainians defend themselves in many ways, as soldiers and as civil society, and also by reading and writing and talking about books. Ukrainian culture, including book publishing, is undergoing an extraordinary renaissance. More than one hundred publishers gathered at Book Arsenal. From Marci’s photos and video I hope you will catch some of their spirit.

We start, though, by joining Marci at a site of a recent Russian attack on civilians. On May 24th, Russia launched more than six hundred missiles and drones at Kyiv and environs. Ukrainian air defense brought down the huge majority of them, but some sadly got through. The missiles destroyed a historic outdoor market and a shopping mall and damaged a subway station and apartment buildings. Russia also struck Ukrainian cultural sites: the National Art Museum, the Institute of Literature, the Opera Theater. Four people were killed, and a hundred more were injured.

The most serious damage was sustained by the Lukianivka neighborhood in Kyiv. This is Marci’s photo of some of the damage there:

And here is a snippet of Marci with a few words from the site.

Marci’s next video of the Lukianivka neighborhood shows people trying to clean up their damaged apartment, and also gives a further sense of the scale of the destruction.

From Lukianivka, Marci went to the Book Arsenal. The video gives you her first thoughts…

Why have a book festival in the middle of a war?

Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?

“An unbroken city...” Book Arsenal has an excellent bomb shelter, and during air raid alerts, participants go underground. This next video selfie is of Marci in the shelter “waiting for the missiles to pass,” which is a thing that one does.

Air raids are an interruption; when they are finished, participants in Book Arsenal go back to talking about books. People in Kyiv are frustrated by these interruptions, or angry, or sleepless; but after four years these Russian war crimes become a part of life, to which one adapts. In Lukianivka the outdoor market is already open again. The rubble is still there, but the vendors are out. And the rubble will be cleared.

One knows when the air raids are coming from apps and from Telegram channels. The danger can be judged and navigated. The stoic philosopher Seneca, who is much read now in Ukraine, reminds us that life is long enough if we do what is important. Reading good books is important. Tens of thousands of people attended the two hundred and forty events at Book Arsenal. This selfie from outside, on a patch of green called the Literary Garden, captures one side of the mood.

Here is Marci at the train station; lecture was delivered; workshop was attended; and this year’s Book Arsenal was a big success. Brava!

The horrible war goes on, with cowardly Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities with drones, with the missiles they use for nuclear weapons, with anti-ship missiles, with whatever they have to hand. Russia is losing on the battlefield, and so must present itself as a menace and try to intimidate. Last night Russia attacked again, this time firing more than seven hundred missiles and drones at Dnipro and Kyiv, killing at least eighteen civilians, including children.

The US government is doing nothing to help Ukraine stop Russian missiles; this could easily change and should change now, in the interest not only of saving lives but of bringing the war to a close. If the Americans chose to supply missile defense to Ukrainians (and to enforce meaningful sanctions on Russian oil and gas), the war would quickly end. At the moment, the effect of US policy is to keep Russia’s war effort going. But you yourself can help Ukrainian air defense shoot down drones and save lives, with a couple of clicks, right here. You can also help Ukrainian civil society protect Ukrainian soldiers here. Resistance includes shooting down projectiles fired to kill people in a senseless war of aggression; and that is a form of resistance in which you can take part, if you wish.

Resistance can also be about reading, wherever you are, bomb shelter or not, because good books liberate us from the obvious and prepare us for the real. It might seem like, at the edge, where life meets death, we should put the books down; this is not what one sees in Ukraine. The last time I went to the front I rode with soldiers who were bringing books to other soldiers.

The readers and the writers and the soldiers can be the same people. One of the curators of this year’s Book Arsenal, the philosopher and journalist Maksym Butkevych, is a survivor of two years in captivity in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; the other, the poet and novelist Andriy Lyubka, is on active duty in the Ukrainian armed forces.

Above all, perhaps, resistance means being the person you are, not despite everything, but because of everything. Цілую.

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PS: Marci would want me to say that events such as Book Arsenal take place thanks to Ukrainians who put in the work for what they care about, and to the men and women of the Ukrainian armed forces, who make everyday life possible, not only in Ukraine but far beyond. She would also want me to thank Anna Mamanova, who kindly guided her through Lukianivka. Marci has posted Anna’s own description of the missile strike.

We don’t know why we read what we read, nor what a novel will do to us: and that is the premise of Dick’s story. On the surface it is about the aftermath of German-Japanese victory in the Second World War. But its real subject is reading and world-making.

The other night in Prague I had a few minutes to myself, and chanced to see the mint-colored spine of The Man in the High Castle. Something moved my hand. I was planning to run the next morning on a hill called “Vyšehrad,” which means “upper castle.” Was it that? I was about to go on stage and speak about freedom; perhaps I sensed that Dick had something to say about the subject.

I knew that the The Man in the High Castle was about a German-Japanese occupation of the United States. I had always assumed that the titular figure was a German with a secret to keep. I was wrong. He is an American novelist who had written a counter-factual novel that appears within Dick’s counterfactual novel. The dominant story is that of “reality” -- the German-Japanese victory. But the other version -- the “novel” -- asserts itself ever more over the course of the book.

In the beginning, we have no reason to expect this. We are drawn in to the world of defeated Americans in San Francisco. Dick does not directly describe the Japanese occupation regime. We get the the inner experiences, all too plausible, of Americans for whom life was elsewhere. The Americans have internalized their own subordinate position, each in a way that corresponds to a specific set of character traits. Their language adapts to the way the Japanese speak English; even their thoughts do.

Dick makes imperialism in California seem unproblematic. The place has been run from all sorts of distant power centers, so why not Tokyo? By completely normalizing Japanese rule, Dick achieves something very interesting, which is to show us how other novels set in California, let us say a Raymond Marlowe detective story, normalize American rule.

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There is no apparent resistance to the Japanese; what we see is more like the creative protection of individual interests that historians might call “agency.” The Japanese are interested in prewar Americana, much as Americans might have been interested in Native arts and crafts. And so some of the characters produce and sell fake antiques for the Japanese market. A pair of Americans (one of them Jewish) break away from the scam and produce contemporary jewelry and try to sell it as such. A potential Japanese buyer sees the jewelry as suitable only for a global colonial market: as mass-market trinkets, in other words. A lesson is being taught in the relationship between power and taste. The Japanese are themselves buying fake junk, which become masterpieces because they are the masters. Authentic art becomes mass-market trinkets for the same reason.

It all might have been different, Dick seems to be saying, because had it been different it would have been very much the same. Various prejudices can be mobilized to the same effect, different hierarchies can be enforced into the practical invisibility of everyday life, and we would take it all for granted. Most of the culture would simply bend; but perhaps not all of it.

We would need something, a special kind of art, perhaps a book of a different sort, to help us see through our own reality to some sort of other possibility. The man in the high tower, the novelist Hawthorn Abendsen, has written a counterfactual history, a bestselling novel, about a world in which the British and the Americans actually won the war. And so we have a novel within the novel, which turns up everywhere, and of which we are given some striking passages. This book works its magic not only on the Americans but on everyone who reads it, including Germans.

Our view of them is even more askance. We see only a few Germans from the inside. We have very little access to the Nazi puppet regimes in the eastern United States nor Nazi rule anywhere else in the world -- though we are given to understand that the Nazis have continued the Holocaust in America and have tried to exterminate every inhabitant of Africa. Another crime of a similar scale is in the works.

The Nazis are at once sure of themselves and psychologically vulnerable, caught in a cycle of spectacular crimes that distract them from tedious infighting. By 1962, when the book is set, Hitler has gone mad from syphilis, and has been succeeded by Martin Bormann. After Bormann’s sudden death, the remaining Nazi leaders struggle for power, the main contenders being Goebbels, Göring, and Heydrich.

Dick’s counterfactual presentation of Nazism seventeen years after victory is very good. He knew the essentials of what could be known about the mass killing of Jews, about the Hitlerian fixation with Ukraine, about divisions within the regime.

Although Berlin is distant, the succession struggle ripples through across the Atlantic and across North America to the Japanese-dominated west coast. A German from the Abwehr (military intelligence) has come to California undercover (hiding from other Germans, mainly) in order to reach a faction of the Japanese government. The chaos in Berlin makes his mission more complicated. He has to urge the Japanese to support Heydrich, whose enormous crimes he knows very well, because it appears that Goebbels would be more likely to commit the next great atrocity.

The military intelligence officer sees himself as among choices that are worse than imperfect, but that nevertheless must be made. He is pursued by the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, which is ultimately Heydrich’s organization; at their low level, they are just doing their job. He himself sees the Heydrich fraction as the worst of the worst, but it so happens that in one crucial respect that are less awful than the Goebbels fraction, and so in this particular conjuncture must be supported. “We can only control the end by making choices at each step,” he reflects.

The major act of resistance in the book is carried out by someone who has contact with all three zones -- the Japanese, the buffer, the German. She is a woman, a survivor of sexual violence, who over the course of the story moves from being almost mute to the most articulate character in the book. Julianna Crain has left her husband, one of the jewelry makers, for reasons that are private and unclear; they seem to like each other, but something has not worked. That he is Jewish matters to her approach to Nazis. In the Colorado of the buffer zone she encounters, at first unknowingly, an undercover Nazi agent who has been sent to kill the novelist Hawthorn. She does with him what she believes she needs to do.

The puzzling ending is better not described in detail. The gist, though, is that the world in which the story unfolds is one possible view of things, and the world of the novel within the novel is another possible view of things, but that neither exhausts all the possibilities. The last chapter can be understood in various ways, one of which is this: the Americans are, in fact, their own Japanese and their own Germans.

It might be, Dick seems be telling us, that the apparent premise of the book is illusory: it matters not so much who actually won and who actually lost a war as what we do with ourselves afterwards. We don’t need defeat to a foreign power to adapt to everyday authority or to invite atrocious violence; we Americans might do this without any excuse beyond self-delusion.

And while that might seem a dark conclusion, it is also an empowering one: the story, in the end, is ours. Power over us depends on a certain kind of charisma, ultimately on a “bluff.” This does not mean, Dick seems to be saying, that everything is easy; his most effective characters take the chances they are given and are aware that every choice is fraught with risk. It does mean that many of the restraints upon us are the ones that we choose, and that we are more likely to take practical action when we can imagine a world that is very different.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

(PS: I should clarify that this review is of the novel, which I have just read, and not of the miniseries, which I have not seen; I believe that its plot is different.)