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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(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.)

And they are losing wars that make no sense, in an uncanny folie à deux, to the benefit of China.

This video, which I filmed after dozens of meetings and public discussions in Europe this month, supplies an explanatory concept: the superloser.

A superloser is a leader of a great power, or (onetime) superpower, whose disastrous choices lead to a crash. He possesses a combination of skills that allow for a rise to personal power and the collapse of state power.

In the video I spell out the five C’s of the superloser phenomenon:

A conflict that is being lost, in the strong sense of a war: Iran for Trump, Ukraine for Putin.

A concept of power that is betrayed, by the war and generally, such that it is not only defeat that is at hand, but the continuous undermining of structures.

A corruption that makes national interests irrelevant; a shared example, one of many, is giving tax money to billionaires.

Cooperation with the other superloser, which somehow makes matters worse both for the other superloser and for the world; Trump’s nonsensical war, for example, funds Putin’s criminal war of aggression by raising oil prices, but Putin is still unable to win and now lacks excuses for failure.

A special superloser charisma, a subjective sense in society or the media that the superloser is somehow a strong man, which makes it harder to describe losses as such, and allows the damage to continue.

And there is of course a sixth C: China, which despite its own enormous problems is being handed a leading role in the world by the superlosers.

I will write this all out at some point, but for now I hope that this video will help you to make sense of the events of this year — or for that matter of the past few days, as both Trump and Putin have had to pay court to Xi in Beijing.

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At that time Hungary was ruled by Viktor Orbán, who was building what seemed like an unstoppable authoritarian order. Ziobro, wanted in Poland for serious crimes, was welcomed by Orbán. But then Orbán too lost a dramatic election, and had to hand over power on Saturday.

When democracy wins, the losers go to America, it seems.

What was left for Ziobro? The United States. You might not have heard of Ziobro, but Donald Trump has.

One of the sad things about Trump’s attempt to bury American democracy is its lack of originality. The models are foreign, including people you have heard of, like Putin, people you likely have heard of, like Orbán, but also minor figures such as Ziobro.

Ziobro is a wanted man with no passport. The Trump White House just went to a good deal of trouble to bring him to the US.

This teaches us, once again, how much the Trump project us an international one. Americans are punished every day, but foreign authoritarian friends are remembered.

What does that say about us as a country, right now?

I reflect on this and other questions in this little video, filmed here in Poland.

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On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.

2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.

3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function. In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.

4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency. Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution. The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.

5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world. This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.

6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration. Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower. Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.

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7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming book demonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself. Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings. The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.

8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable. While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have. This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.

9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge. Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor. In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.

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10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood. Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power. The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.

11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests. But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world. Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them -- the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.

12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again, and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail. The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world. In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.

The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one. The US lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners. An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.

13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function. More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics -- government as customer service to the very wealthy -- that leads us from power to ethics.

The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide. Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.

But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.

Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery. After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

On Putin and Trump, Road to Unfreedom

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people are undoing. Many of the American fundamentals are still very sound, but a better future, or any kind of future at all, will depend on a sober reckoning with the present moment.

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Ukrainians have reacted with determination and innovation. They have developed an extraordinary set of systems to detect and destroy incoming projectiles and thereby save lives. They are pioneers in this.

Thanks to the fundraisers organized by my friends at United24, readers of this newsletter have contributed to initiatives have helped to build up these systems. In doing so, you certainly saved many lives -- and helped Ukrainians to understand that they are not alone.

At this moment in the war, the need for air defense is pressing. Stymied at the front, Russia has accelerated its attacks on civilians behind the lines. In March alone Ukrainians had to handle several thousand attacks. On certain days the numbers of launches go into the hundreds.

Sky Defense, the initiative I am supporting now, is about bringing all of the components of Ukrainian air defense together. It funds what is needed where it is needed, while building a complete network over the entire country. The Ukrainians know what they need to do; they just need a little help to get there.

The amount that we are trying to raise, $500,000, is tiny by comparison to the military budget of a big country. A superpower at war will spend that in seconds. But because Ukrainians know how to use apply scarce resources to pressing needs, Sky Defense will go a long way

Of course, $500,000 will seem like a lot of money for any one reader! But anything that you can contribute will help. In past campaigns, we have reached such targets thanks to help of thousands of people.

I often get asked what we can do to help democracy. And there are many answers -- and this is one of them. Supporting Sky Defense will save lives and change the way Ukrainians experience life, for the better. But it is also helps defend a country where basic freedoms are observed from unabashed dictatorship that is carrying out a war of atrocity.

The war in Ukraine is the largest military conflict the world has seen since 1945, and that is significance enough. But the defense of Ukraine from Russian invasion is also part of a larger struggle, one that touches all of us. Please contribute if you can, and please share this post with others who might be interested.

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The speech should stand on its own, and the camera helps us to understand that it arose from a time and a place, and that it was in large measure a conversation. There is a lot of joking and back-and-forth that I can’t summarize in prose! After I was done I made a big circle in the crowd for greetings, handshakes, and hugs -- and that took so long that I was late for the march, which was also great. All of that was part of the experience for me, though it isn’t captured here. Seeing what organizers can do and meeting people who want to stand out is a joy on its own.

When you take in the video the themes should be pretty clear! You don’t have to read any of the below -- just watch if you like. The video is right here, at this link, or click on the photo.

One thing I was after was the relationship between opposition and liberation. The slogan « No Kings » creates a big space for agreement to oppose the abuse of power. But opposition makes no sense without a vision of what is better. So with the crowd I wanted to link the idea of No Kings with the idea of freedom: not only freedom from the overweening tyrant, but freedom to become the best people we could be.

What does it mean -- I was asking next -- to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic. To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent. The point -- I went on -- is not that the founders were right about everything, but that they were rebels in their time (I was borrowing this from Frederick Douglass and his famous speech “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?”).

To honor the origins of of our republic doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.

So the way that the Trump people are trying to rule us is about ending the republic. For the republic to survive, it has to be better -- we have to have liberation that includes schools, and health care, and justice, and opportunity, excludes mass incarceration, and concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, and senseless, criminal wars. We have to be able to speak together rather than have our conversations determined by oligarchs and algorithms. We have to work together rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated.

So we are acting -- I wanted to say -- for a new beginning. There is no going back to the distant past or even to the recent past. The future opens when we act. And I was trying by the end to say what forms of action are available: solidarity, defense of the less fortunate, protection of elections and aiming towards big electoral victories, local organizing, and mass action -- by which I meant in particular May Day, which is now just three weeks away -- make a plan!

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, is a central figure in the international far right, and indeed the man, more than any other, who created the networks that normalized what he himself calls “illiberalism.” Should he lose, as all signs indicate he will, this would be blow to far more familiar figures such as JD Vance and Donald Trump, who are Orbán’s pupils. Americans tend to think that history moves from us outward; but in the case of the new oligarcho-fascism, we are the students rather than the masters. Much of what seems American in Trump and Vance came from Hungary, or from Russia via Hungary.

Orbán has been prime minister of Hungary for twenty years, the last sixteen consecutively. He was in power long before Trump was president. He was prime minister when Vance attended school in the Cincinnati exurbs. Beginning long before either man won office, Orbán created a model of post-modern authoritarianism. Inside Hungary he managed, largely by way of constitutional changes, to create an apparently invincible strategic position for one-party rule and his own personal power: the “illiberal state” which he then presented to others as a model for emulation.

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On the European scale, Orbán has done more than anyone else to generate negative propaganda about the European Union, treating it as a hostile enemy even as he personally exploited Hungary’s membership. He worked to normalize his own anti-democratic, far right position within the EU parliament. He took money directed by the EU to assist Hungary and used it to enrich his oligarch friends. His government opened EU territory to Russian and Chinese intelligence operations and indeed directly supplied Russia with confidential information about EU meetings.

On the scale of Russia, Europe, and North America, Orbán has been a leader of transnational efforts to pass dark money from country to country in support of the far right. Budapest has become a hub in a system in which Russian oil money is laundered to become support for far right figures and organizations in Europe and the United States. Many institutions which we presume to be American, such as the Heritage Foundation, are in fact part of this larger international network. Many initiatives that we treat as American, such as Project 2025, are based largely on Hungarian models. The same goes, for that matter, for a number of American politicians. In our American provincialism we often fail to see that Trump and Vance have been involved in a certain kind of international politics from the beginning; there was never a moment when their terrain was purely American. Indeed, that has always been Orbán’s magic: to be an essentially international player who claims to be protecting the little guy at home.

Orbán has helped far right politicians in Europe and the United States (such as Donald Trump and JD Vance) find their feet in the tricky territory of foreign affairs. Much of what passes for Trumpian policy positions -- the claims that Russia is not the aggressor despite having invaded Ukraine, that Russian energy is always the solution and never the problem, that Ukraine is corrupt and suspicious, that the EU is an overbearing bureaucracy, that immigrants are the real threat -- arise in whole or in part from Hungarian sources.

This is why when Vance just traveled to Budapest to support Orbán (as he just did) he essentially says the same things Orbán does. It is also why Orbán comes to the US to be a star of Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas in 2022, when he instructed the American far right to fight a culture war. A special conference of CPAC was held for Orbán in Hungary last month.

At the level of global fascist propaganda memes, Orbán has been a pioneer in the politics of unreality, shamelessly running electoral campaigns (earlier) on the premise that the international Jewish conspiracy was coming for Hungary or (this time) on the premise that if he loses Ukraine will invade. It should be noted that the Ukrainian angle is also antisemitic, in that it portrays the Ukrainian president (who is Jewish) as a warmongering maniac, when in fact he is a democratically-elected head of state who is leading his country in a defensive struggle against a Russian invasion. Orbán’s slogan is “Don’t let Zelenskyy have the last laugh” and the campaign posters present Zelens’kyi as a dark, cackling Jewish enemy. State-run social media propaganda is even worse.

In Sunday’s elections, Orbán and his party Fidesz have two advantages: an apparatus at home built up to ensure that they can never lose, and allies abroad (Vance, Trump, Putin) who recognize Orbán’s importance in the oligarcho-fascist network that is their own source of power. If international dictators and the MAGA minstrels were doing the voting, Orbán would certainly win. But it is Hungarians who will vote. They will vote in the conditions political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism”: with major hindrances, but with the real possibility of changing power. This will be the American situation in November, as Trump and Vance understand.

Orbán has been prime minister for a very long time. In electoral politics this is of course itself a disadvantage. Along with Putin and Trump, he works in the “politics of eternity,” in which one man should rule forever thanks to constant references to eras of past innocence and invocations of external and internal enemies. He has essentially exhausted Hungarian history for these purposes, dwelling on the territorial losses at the end of the First World War, and finally landing on Ukraine as the current enemy. Orbán is good at the politics of endless grievance; but being in power indefinitely also has its shortcomings, as Hungarians see their economy stagnate, their institutions crumble, and their standard of living fall ever further behind that of other Europeans. There is really no one else to blame for that than Orbán. In his recent public appearances he has fallen into the someone desperate mode of saying that people who oppose him are not really Hungarians or are Ukrainian agents.

Over the years, the risk that an act of corruption becomes public also increases. Interestingly, Hungarian right-wing oligarchy had the same problem as American right-wing oligarchy: a coverup of the sexual abuse of children. In the Hungarian case, a director of a state-run orphanage, convicted of abusing children, received a state pardon. When this was revealed by independent journalists, it led to huge protests. The president who issued the pardon felt obliged to resign, as did Orbán’s heir apparent Judit Varga, who was involved as minister of justice. Her ex-husband Peter Magyar, who had been a major figure inside Fidesz, then gave a widely-read interview in which he exposed the corruption of Orbán’s government. That led to the creation of a new political party, Tisza, which quickly gathered a third of the votes in elections to the European Parliament. It is at the center now of a larger opposition movement.

In the creation of an opposition movement, independent media has played an essential role. Like Putin and Trump, Orbán understands that creating public/private media monopolies is indispensable for durable personal power. But in Hungary there are still cracks through which the light gets in, and these have allowed Hungarians, even as they are drenched in government propaganda, to also get a sense of the scandals and the abuses. Hungarian tax money, and money Hungarians were supposed to receive from the EU, have instead been used to build senseless monuments to the bad taste of the wealthy, landmarks on a tour of self-destruction that independent media guides Hungarians to see.

So what happens on Sunday? It is important to always emphasize that politics is not a spectator sport. Orbán is very far behind in the polls -- according to the latest independent polling, by 25 points. But polls do not win elections: people have to vote, and then all too often they have to defend their votes. Orbán has many ways to influence the outcome: gerrymandered districts, a habit of not counting mail-in ballots for the opposition, and a practice of buying votes. And the dirty tricks and intimidation efforts are already on display, with the government persecuting independent journalists and organizing provocations to make it appear that opposition is somehow run by Ukraine.

Most interestingly, and also most ridiculously, Orbán has already reached the last resort of the dirty tricksters, which is fake terrorism. In a highly transparent and widely predicted provocation, Orbán announced that Serbs had discovered explosives on a pipeline that supplied Russian gas to Hungary. No evidence was provided. And then, predictably, Orbán went on to claim that the perpetrators must have been Ukrainians, the purported allies of the opposition party.

Now, this kind of provocation can be effective, if people can be made genuinely afraid: it worked for Putin as he came to power, but in that case Russians used real explosives to kill other Russians and then blamed the self-terrorism on Chechens. In this case, the opposition had correctly forecast that Orbán would try something of the sort, which is the most effective defense. And the fact that the entire escapade depends on taking Orbán at his word makes it unlikely to have much effect one way or the other. Only Russian propagandists seem to be taking much trouble to even pretend that Orbán’s version might be true.

Orbán was making these claims while JD Vance was in Budapest, and the provocation itself reveals the essentially international character of Orbán’s program. It depended on the work of a few people in Serbia and Russia and a few statements by Orbán himself. It had nothing to with anything that actually happened, as far as we can tell. It is consistent with the politics of unreality that Orbán and his allies depend upon. But the failure of this provocation may also reveals the limits of big lies. They can become not only implausible bit boring and predictable.

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Another big lie is almost certainly under way. While Vance was in Budapest, he claimed that the Ukrainian secret services interfere in elections on the United States and Hungary — an activity that is unknown to the scholarship of the subject, to put it mildly. This was reinforcing a campaign message of Orbán: the tall tale that the Ukrainian secret services had somehow penetrated all of Hungary and were preparing a systematic electoral falsification. When, as i likely, Orbán loses the vote count, he will probably revive this story in some form. Americans might endorse it; they might copy it themselves this fall. It is a comfortable story for Trump and Vance because it inverts the historical fact: that Russia always tries to tilt elections their way

When leaders themselves telegraph these stunts, oppositions can also talk about them, and thereby make them seem implausible and even make them self-defeating. This realization is important, because another such attempt cannot be ruled out, either in Hungary or among the politicians who imitate Orbán, which include Vance and Trump. It would indeed be very surprising indeed if Trump and Vance, Orbán’s acolytes, did not take heed of his electoral stunts, and consider trying similar tactics themselves in October or November. We should be as aware of this possibility as the Hungarian opposition was, and deter it by being ready to mock it and use it against anyone who tries it.

Because Orbán is an essentially international rather than national phenomenon, his defeat would have international consequences. It will be painful for Trump and Vance in particular if Orbán loses. They have both gone to a lot of trouble to endorse him personally, and they are both dependent upon international networks of ideas and money which Orbán helped to build. Might they try to help Orbán in some way if he loses the election, an outcome which seems extremely likely?

Their ability to do so would seem to be hampered by the humiliation in Iran, and also by the contradictions in their foreign policy. Hungary under Orbán is part of a set of powers that includes Iran, Russia, and China, that seek to challenge to status quo and upend the traditional legal, ideological, and economic bases of American power. It has never really made sense for the US to try to defeat Iran while also trying to support Putin and Orbán.

But some kind of American intervention cannot be ruled out, especially given that Vance and Trump have already offered Orbán their explicit endorsement (which has not helped him; it may have hurt). If Orbán loses and claims that he has won, Americans will likely join Russians in giving him some kind of at least rhetorical support. Sadly, the days when the United States might stand for free and fair elections as such have passed, at least for now.

But all this, too, is known to the Hungarian opposition. No one in Hungary believes that this is just a normal election. They might be slandered by Chinese, Russian, and American regime propaganda if they win, but they have been slandered for two years at home already. Most likely the outcome of the election will have to be contested, in some way, well after Sunday. But an opposition that has been hard at work for two years is unlikely to give up in one day. And it is not clear, as we see over and over again, that Trump and Vance have the patience or the strength of will to actually implement a foreign policy, however malign may be their intentions, in the teeth of any actual resistance. All but the most tactful of foreign interventions are likely to backfire, depriving Orbán of any claim to represent Hungarians, revealing him as the cosmopolitan player that he is -- and tact has not been the forte of either Trump or Vance. They will support Orbán in some way, but in the face of popular determination it is not clear what they could achieve.

The most important consequence for Trump and to Vance of Orbán’s defeat would be the revelation that history is not in fact going in a single direction, that their power, or the power of people like them, is not assured for all time. In their view of themselves, they are not of course the creatures of historical structure: the power of oil money; the psychology of social media, the perversion of wealth inequality. As they see matters, they are beyond history now, beyond historical change, beyond the actions of the peoples in whose name they rule. This is, if possible, even more true of Vance than of Trump; Trump has at least worked to campaign for president; Vance has no legitimation at all beyond the notion that his ideas, none of which is original, somehow fit the times.

Orbán has helped to create that sensibility, because he has understood those structures. If he loses, if he falls, it means that Trump and Vance lose a guide. It also means that they are exposed to the reality that they, too, can lose, can fall. It turns out not to be true (yet again) that there are no alternatives, that there is only one possible future, and that the people in power happen to be the anointed ones forever.

And so, although Hungary might be a small country, we can draw some larger conclusions. The world has been plagued for a century by various “ends of history,” and those ends of history have arisen disproportionately in central and eastern Europe, in Hungary in particular.

The fascists of the 1930s, in Hungary and elsewhere, said that history was over, that all that remained was a biological struggle directed by a party elite. The communists, who came to power in Hungary after 1945 and elsewhere, said that history was over, replaced by scientific administration directed by a party elite. After the end of communism, speaking about Hungary and other post-communist states, too many of us declared that history was now indeed over, since fascism and communism have exhausted themselves, and all that remained was the imperturbable triad of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

From Hungary, Orbán showed that this was not true: capitalism could be corrupted; liberalism could be replaced by illiberalism (his word); and democracy could be turned into a ritual. Seduced by Hungary’s success, many on the far right came to see the Hungarian alternative as the next end of history, the way that things would be, the way that things had to be.

And they are wrong; history goes on. Just as Hungary once offered the international oligarchical far right the confidence that a formula had been found, it now offers to men such as Vance and Trump the anxiety that voting might actually make a difference, that democracy might actually turn out to be more than a slogan, that unpredictable change is still possible, that the future is open.

For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

On far-right networks, Road to Unfreedom

These are not the words of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Assad, or Putin. These are the words of the president of the United States, today.

Do not be distracted by circumstances. Of course there are emotions, personalities, politics, a war. None of this excuses that sentence. The reason we have a notion of genocide, and a convention on genocide, is to define certain actions as always and definitively wrong.

Are these “only words”? No, they cannot be “only words.” As any historian of mass atrocity knows, there is no such thing as “only words.” The notion of killing a whole civilization, once spoken, remains. It enables others to say similar things, as when another elected representative compared the entire country of Iran to a cancer that had to be removed.

Whatever happens tonight, the president, by saying such things, has already changed the world for the worse, and made acts of mass violence more likely. If we are Americans, he has also changed our country. He has changed us, because he represents us; we voted for him, or we didn’t vote and allowed him to come to power, or we didn’t do enough to stop him. These words are America’s words, until and unless Americans reject them.

Yes, there have been other genocides, and there are other politicians who endorse genocide. That makes the words of the president worse, not better. Yes, the United States has undertaken atrocities before. That makes it all the more important, all the more urgent, that we catch ourselves now. Neither the evil nor the good in our history determines who we are. It is what we do now.

If we do not say something ourselves about this horror, we allow ourselves to be changed.

Around the president there will be people, sadly, who work deliberately to normalize the language of genocide. There will be other politicians who find the right words to reject it. One can hope that there will be politicians who find the courage to remove the man who speaks genocide from office. And these words should lead to resignations by everyone who works closely with the president.

But we cannot count on politicians. This is ultimately up to us, the citizens: for our own sake, for the sake of the future of the country, for the sake of a possibility of new beginnings, we need to say something, to someone else, to ourselves: this is simply wrong.

Whatever happens tonight, or any other night in this war, is now legally defined by the president’s statement. In the practical application of the law of genocide, the Genocide Convention of 1948, the difficulty is usually in proving “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Henceforth the intent is on the record, in the published words of the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces about the death of “a whole civilization.”

Article III of the Genocide Convention makes it clear that not only the person who issues the genocidal order is guilty. Genocide itself is of course a crime, where genocide means the intent that Trump expressed, and actions such as killing members of a group, causing members of a group serious harm, or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” -- which would of course include actions such as destroying access to energy or water. But also defined as a crime are conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.

We all have good ethical and political reasons to reject the president’s words. But those who serve in government, and in the armed forces, have been placed under the legal shadow of genocide by what Trump wrote. To bomb a bridge or a dam or a power plant or a desalinization facility, very likely a war crime in any event, could very well have a different legal significance, a genocidal one, if it takes place after the expression of genocidal intent by the commander and head of state.

The concept of genocide was created by a survivor and an observer of atrocities, Rafał Lemkin, so that we could see ourselves, judge ourselves, stop ourselves. But genocide is not only a concept. It is also a crime under international law, signed by the United States in 1948 as a convention, ratified by the United States as a treaty in 1988. That makes the words I have quoted here the law of the land.

The president speaks genocide. And so we too must speak. Not only about crimes, but about their legal punishment.

On mass atrocity, see Bloodlands

On the Holocaust, see Black Earth

For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth are stuck in the logic of escalation, according to which the feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. Trump is surrounded by people who are making money from the war; each day of war strengthens a warmongering lobby with personal access to the president. As the war lengthens, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases.

Trump tells us that he is chiefly concerned with the permanence of his own comfort and power (think about ballroom and bunker), much of which he will lose when his party is defeated decisively in the midterms. He regularly declares his intention to meddle in the elections. His party backed a bill which would have turned elections into a sham. Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% without any review of what the money is for; this is strategic nonsense, and has to be understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship. Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle.

It is up to us to put two and two together: Trump will seek to exploit the war (or the next one) to alter the elections. We bear responsibility for what comes next.

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The eventuality can seem frightening, but Trump’s position is weak. The gambit of turning a foreign war into a domestic dictatorship is complicated and difficult. Its success depends on us. If the possibility of such a coup is not anticipated and the variants of the gambit are not called out as they emerge, he can succeed. He has attempted a coup (or, technically, a self-coup) once, in January 2021 -- there is no reason to think that he will not try to do so again.

As always, history can help us to imagine the immediate future. History does not repeat, but it does instruct. We know that war offers at least five kinds of opportunities for aspiring dictators. Let us consider the moves that Trump could make, and how they could be stopped. I offer them as five clear types; in practice, of course, they will be mixed and matched from day to day. But if we have the concepts in advance, we can recognize the threat, and turn any sort of coup attempt against Trump.

We are not spectators of this unfolding drama. We are actors inside every scenario. And “we” means journalists who report, judges who follow the law, servicemen and servicewomen who follow the Constitution, and above all citizens who organize, protest and vote. If we know the coup scripts in advance, we know when to take the stage — and where to take the rage.

So here are the scenarios:

1. The Steady Hand. A war is going on, is the claim here, and so we should not change leadership, regardless of what happens in an election. This stance nicely dodges the questions of whether the war was worth starting in the first place, and whether the people in charge are the best qualified to make war (or peace). The steady hand argument has been used countless times; it was the approach that George W. Bush took against John Kerry in the presidential campaign of 2004. But whereas Bush was using such arguments to win an election, Trump will have to use them to overturn the results of an election that his party loses, most likely by huge margins. Given that Trump’s polling on the war is terrible, he is in a weaker position than Bush was, and would have to do much more. It is unclear why a steady hand would rig elections; and, for that matter, Trump’s conduct during this war has made his hand seem (even) less steady. To rig an election, he needs a tight elite consensus around him; he needs allies who are willing to break the law and the Constitution, risking not only prison time but also historical infamy as people who wanted to end the republic. The war is breaking up that consensus and leading to the firing of some of the likely election riggers. The case for a steady hand that should not be hindered by electoral results should be easy to defeat; but we have to see the logic and work to break the ranks of Trump allies who would follow orders to rig elections. They have to know that they will fail and that when they will bear the consequences for the rest of their lives. The one truly steady hand is that of justice.

2. Bonapartism. In this tactic the aspiring dictator says: I know that you would like democracy at home, and so let us prove our ardor together by fighting a war for democracy abroad. This is meant to allow the tyrant to claim the mantle of democracy even while he undoes it at home. This approach was behind the original Napoleonic wars; it was perfected by Napoleon III in the 1850s as “diplomatic nationality.” Trump, however, is not pretending to care about democracy. He prefers dictators; and among dictators, he prefers Putin more then the rest. Trump’s allies though will make the case that war spreads “the American way” or something of the sort. But such arguments can be easily defeated. Whether by insider trading, political bets, arms dealing or (in Putin’s case) higher oil prices and conveniently dropped sanctions, the people around Trump are making money on this war -- they are literally warmongers. What is good in America is bled away in this war; as oligarchs foreign and domestic make billions of dollars, as we are asked to sacrifice everything in exchange for nothing. Trump himself ran for office on an anti-Bonapartist platform: no wars abroad for democracy, spend money instead at home. Instead he is proposing to defund basic domestic services in order to the bribe the armed services with a ridiculous funding increase during a senseless war.

3. Bismarckian Unification. Here the ruler no longer pretends to care about democracy (so far so good for Trump), but speaks about bringing the nation together. This was the great success of Otto von Bismarck in central Europe between 1864 and 1871. Germany before Bismarck was a culture but not a unified state; in the age of nationalism the question was who would succeed in bringing numerous German entities together. By winning three wars (against Denmark, the Habsburgs, and France), the Prussian leader was able to create the conditions for the establishment of a new, united German Reich. Because unification was achieved by force of arms rather than by revolution or elections (as many Germans had hoped in 1848), the new state was a militaristic monarchy from the beginning, with an essentially symbolic parliament. Trump would no doubt like this model; but he has the problem of being unable to win one war, let alone three; also, the war that he is fighting do not address an essential national problem. Instead it seems to be about tearing the American republic apart. Trump’s budget proposal, offered during the war, amounts to this: the wealth of working Americans will be transferred to oligarchs and defense contractors, and the government will no longer provide basic services. It uses war to advance the impoverishment and peonization of everyone but a tiny elite.

4. Fascist Sacrifice. The fascist leader kills enough of his own people in a major campaign so that the survivors begin to accept the worldview: that all is struggle, that enemies are everywhere, that the world is a conspiracy against us, etc. Death on a mass scale becomes a source of meaning, uniting the Führer with his Volk. There is an element of this in Putin’s war in Ukraine, but the classic example is the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The very difficulty of the war after 1941 helped fascist arguments in Germany -- Victor Klemperer’s diaries are helpful here -- for more than three years. Trump, however, lacks some of the attributes of historical fascism: the historical fascists actually did believe in struggle, which he does not. Trump believes in saying words and then having things handed to him on a silver platter. Fascists always believed in war; Trump converted to war late in life, having become convinced that it was a way to easy “wins” abroad that could be translated into dictatorship at home. Having boasted of winning in Iran dozens of times already, he is in a poor position to call for the large-scale land invasion that would be necessary to trigger huge American casualties and the bloody fascist dialectic of events and sentiments. Even if he did order a land invasion, it would probably not work, either militarily or politically. He has not done any of the ideological spadework; no one, listening to Trump, would think that he believed in a struggle for survival. By 1941, Hitler had already won quick wars in Poland and France, which created a sense among previously doubtful military commanders and civilians that he knew what he was doing, which then opened the way for a second, more ideological, stage of the war. Military commanders are presumably dubious of Trump; in any event, they are being fired by Hegseth at an extraordinary rate during a war. It is in this light, again, that one must understand Trump’s strategically senseless notion that we should increase the military budget right now by nearly 50%: it is meant as a payoff for officers, soldiers, and sailors -- people he has openly disrespected his entire life, people whose funerals he treats as an opportunity to sell his own branded merchandise -- to assist him in a coup against Americans. That bribe should fail, for many reasons; but it will not fail unless we notice what is happening.

5. Exploitation of Terror. This gambit (or one variant of it) depends on something happening during a war. A foreign enemy carries out an act of terrorist violence against Americans, providing an aspiring dictator with a pretext for a state of emergency and a suspension of elections. Nothing exactly like this has happened in the United States, although we can recall our self-destructive reactions to 9/11. This is Trump’s best hope among all of these scenarios, which is one reason why it might not happen: Iranian leaders must be aware that Trump would seek to exploit such an event. Iranian propaganda certainly involves threats against individual American leaders, but it seems unlikely that they would carry them out. Teheran has more to gain by mocking Pete Hegseth (as in a recent video) than by seeking to assassinate him. (Indeed, given Hegseth’s particular combination of strategic incompetence and Christian nationalism, he must seem like a God-given enemy for the regime in Teheran.)

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Another possibility is that Iranians do nothing inside US borders, but Trump and his people pretend that they have, or even organize a fake terrorist strike themselves. It is important to understand that such things do happen, and have been done by the people Trump admires the most. Consider the 1999 false flag terrorist attacks in Russia, the bombing of apartment buildings by the Russian secret services, which began a chain of events that allowed Putin begin his march towards dictatorship. Self-terror is a Putinist strategy, and it worked. This means that it can be presumed to have been considered by Trump, Putin’s client in the White House. Putin is one of the people to whom Trump listens.

But Trump unlike Putin does not come from the secret services, and it is hard to imagine him not botching such an operation (even the Russians had some slips); it is also hard to imagine that Americans ordered to do such a thing would not leak such a plan before it could be realized (it did leak in Russia and was reported before it happened -- but it still worked). Even if the false flag attack itself took place, Trump would have to go from self-terror to a state of emergency and some sort of self-invasion to halt the elections. But a self-invasion by whom? ICE is unpopular and untrained. The war has not been run in a way that brings military commanders to trust the president. Again, one has to see Trump’s proposal to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% as a kind of desperate bribe. There are sound strategic reasons why it is a terrible idea, but there is also a political one.

Elements of these scenarios can be mixed together. Some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet. And so one should be (preemptively, now) skeptical of Trump’s account of any future terrorist attack; we can be sure that, whatever its true origins and character, Trump will provide a self-serving account meant to serve a coup and a dictatorship. It is utterly predictable that he will attempt to pass responsibility for any act of terror to his domestic political opponents and discredit or undo elections. We have to think through this chain of events now to make sure that we are ready to block it -- and to turn any such attempt against him.

The terrorism scenario should not work. We should consider it in advance, and hold Trump responsible for any horror inside the United States brought about by his mad war. None of the other scenarios should work either, in any combination. Indeed, all of them should only hurt him, if we are attentive and active. But there is no neutral position. We cannot do nothing and expect the republic to make it through. Indeed, Trump’s one chance to succeed, in any of these scenarios, is our own silent collaboration. He can only carry out a coup if we decide to obey in advance: to pretend that wartime pretexts for coups are never used, although history instructs us that they are; and then to offer our surprise to Trump as the unique political resource that can transform his weak position into a strong one.

Trump is weak, but weakness only matters if it is treated as vulnerability and pushed towards defeat. He will try to make his weak position strong, which will expose further vulnerabilities that have to be seen and exploited. All of his policies make him vulnerable; the war in particular makes him vulnerable; and any gambit to exploit that war should make him and his party easy to defeat and discredit his authoritarian movement forever.

A coup attempt is not at all unthinkable; Trump has done it before, and he makes it very clear that he is thinking about it now. When we think about it now, about how it might take shape, we make it less likely; indeed, we deter it. Knowledge of history can change the future. If we remember what history shows us is possible, we can prevent a coup from succeeding -- and turn any such attempt against its instigator.

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On Putin and Trump, Road to Unfreedom

War planning follows a logic. Different traditions of strategists use different terms, but this flow is representative:

1 National interest, 2 policy, 3 strategy, 4 tactics, 5 operations, 6 capabilities.

A national interest would be the preservation or the security of a people or a state. A policy would be a general notion of how that is to be achieved in a particular part of the world. War, as Clausewitz says, is policy by other means. So sometimes policy leads to strategy, an overall plan for victory in war. A tactic is an element of a strategy, for example where and how and for what purposes forces are disposed. An operation is a specific action, for example on the battlefield. A capability is the combinations of humans, technique, and weapons necessary to achieve a specific desired effect in a specific setting.

The logic flow works two ways, as a design and a verification.

In design, each item determines the next. So, interest determines policy, policy determines strategy, strategy determines tactics, tactics determine operations, and operations determine capabilities.

In verification, we check backwards. Do I have the capabilities to carry out that operation? Does the operation serve the tactic? Does the tactic fit the strategy? Does the strategy implement the policy? Does the policy correspond to the national interest?

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Of course, war is a bloody, unpredictable mess. It is hard to tell what is actually happening, even for the participants. The enemy reacts in ways that are hard to foresee. Consequences spiral out quickly into the world and then back onto the battlefield. Leaders fail to understand what is going on. In the case of Donald Trump, they are shown two-minute sizzle reels of “stuff blowing up“ rather than being briefed.

These six terms are abstractions, as is in some sense all military planning. These are not sufficient to win a war. But they, or something like them, are necessary. If there is no logic beginning with a national interest, a war cannot be won, because victory demands some an objective. We have none.

In the war on Iran, the United States is demonstrating certain capabilities (in a highly unfortunate way, but that is another subject). But there is nothing else on any of the higher levels of the logic chain. At best we can identify some operations.

Because there is no national interest, capabilities determined everything. It was possible to kill Iranian leaders, and so we did. It was possible to launch missile strikes, and so we did.

In an excellent article, far more sophisticated that this one, B.A. Friedman argues that the logic chain was essentially reversed: that the notion was that capabilities create successful operations, and enough operations would make a tactic, enough tactics a strategy, enough strategy a policy. And his analysis is spot on. You can’t celebrate blowing things up and imagine that this is itself a national interest. Just because you can do things does not mean that you can explain to the nation why you are doing things. And Trump certainly has not.

Trump’s one consistent explanation is enjoyment. Trump felt good after kidnapping Maduro in Venezuela. He called into Fox and Friends to talk about how nice it would be to repeat the experience. He now says that the war in Iran is “fun.” Hegseth uses similar terms.

This is the pleasure principle. If war feels good, do it. Trump and Hegseth take satisfaction in killing or dominating other people.

That, however, has nothing to do with a national interest.

There is no evidence of anything beyond the pleasure principle. With good intentions and bad, commentators seek to force some policy around the whimsy. But it is whimsy all the way down. And a war for fun cannot be won.

And now that we have started with the pleasure principle, Trump is trapped, at least for a while, like an amateur gambler, in the behaviorist logic of intermittent pleasure and pain. It felt good at first. But then it didn’t feel good when Iran didn’t surrender, when Iran destroyed US systems, when Iran blocked the Straits of Hormuz. So now we must “double down” (consider how often that gambling jargon appears!) so that Trump can get another hit of pleasure. Each one will be more elusive than the last.

And he who follows the pleasure principle into war cannot understand the other side He cannot understand any action that is based upon other grounds than his own. If the other side is not having “fun” (again, Trump’s own term) it should surrender. If it does not, this is, according to Trump, “unfair.”

At this point, law, morality, and democratic politics are looking pretty good. War does not get us beyond them. Indeed, the successful prosecution of an American war demands them. Legal limits, ethical principles, and democratic principles can all be defended (and celebrated!) on their own terms. But even if we are simply talking about successful war planning, they have their place. To be sure, “national interest” can be defined as anything. But if we generate discussions based in law, ethics, or democratic politics, it will not be confused with the pleasure of a single man.

Law asks whether what we are doing is legal. In this case, it clearly is not: we are fighting an illegal war of aggression. Knowing that, we might pause a bit and ask whether what we are doing is worth undermining international order. Morality asks whether what we are doing is right. Considering that, we might take a moment to consider whether we want to commit ourselves to killing people when no real reason has been given. Politics reminds us that we are the citizens, that Congress represents us, and that according to the Constitution war is in its realm. Recalling that, we might conclude that a review by others beyond the White House might have spared us this bloody farrago.

The point is not that Iran has won. No doubt the regime will emerge weakened, at least internationally. The point is that the United States cannot win, because it is not fighting for anything. Its capabilities become a trap, suggesting further actions that might indeed hurt Iran in some sense, but which cannot lead to US victory, because there is no objective. And Trump’s pleasure principle elicits the pleasure of others. Now people around him are making money. And his patron Vladimir Putin is doing very well indeed.

For me, the moral, legal, and democratic political arguments are decisive in themselves. I have considered them elsewhere. In particular, I worry that Trump will use this war (or the next one) an related terrorist attack to try (this should not work) to rig elections.

But even if we think only of military planning, moral, legal, and democratic reasoning all hinder a natural moment in tyranny, one in which an unchecked leader uses the power of the state to make war in order to please himself. For Americans, the only victory in this war would be to restore the principles that would have prevented it.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

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I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Prosperity. The wealth of workers is handed to oligarchs.

The Constitution. One person seeks unrestrained power.

Justice. The innocent are punished while the guilty believe in impunity.

Peace. Americans kill and die in a war whose purpose is to keep us down.

Democracy. Those in power seek to eliminate the right to vote. .

All of this can be seen. All of this can be stopped. A better America is around the corner.

And protest is the first step to that better future. We know that non-violent protest works. It helps to stop authoritarian takeovers. And it opens the way for a better politics to come. How?

Protest changes the atmosphere. For authoritarians to win, they need their supporters to be active, the majority to be silent, and their actions to seem normal. Protest shows that their supporters are in the minority, that the majority will not be silent, and that it is the people who set the standards.

Protest summons more protest. When some of us act, others will follow. When you attend a protest next Saturday, bring someone with you. And know that when you do so, you are setting an example. These No Kings protests are the largest such actions in US history, and each one is bigger than the last.

Protest keeps us organized. There will not only be more people protesting this time, there will be more protests. Thousands of them. And this is the work of organizers, of civil society. When you attend a protest, you have a chance to meet others, and see how they organize. When I am speaking next Saturday, I will pause as I did last time to ask people to introduce themselves to those around them.

Protest affirms freedom. We have the right to assemble freely. We have the right to speak freely. But these rights become real when we avail ourselves of them. When we do what we believe is right, in the knowledge that those in power would like it otherwise, we are acting as free people. This is practice that we all need. When we say “No Kings,” we mean freedom.

Protest wins elections. In the situation that we are in now, the opposition must win elections to halt the shift to a one-person, one-party authoritarian regime. And although these elections will be difficult, they can be won. But winning them means building a big, active coalition, of which the opposition party is just one part. Protestors are another part. The groups we build together are what make the difference.

Protest brings joy. It feels good to be active and to be with other people. It dispels the loneliness we might experience when we are alone or online. When we realize that we are with millions of others, we feel we can make a difference, because we are making a difference: in the world, and in ourselves.

Protest changes us. There isn’t any going back. There is only what we make next. When we get to the other side, what we will have to guide us as we make new things is the experience of resistance now. What we can make next depends on what we learn now, on who we become now, by acting, by taking part.

Please step up. And step out. Everything depends on this. On us.

Find a place to protest on March 28th.

No Kings protests

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His resignation reveals a fault line in the Trump elite, but not one that does credit to anyone. In basic political terms, it might be suggestive that fighting a doomed war will make it harder rather than easier for Trump to steal the coming election.

In the video I sketch this out. If you find it helpful, please share.

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He explained that prison had changed his thinking about violence. It was not, he decided, about making a person do this thing or that thing. It was about the abolition of the capacity for choice. Torture was about the undoing of personhood itself, about turning a person into an object. He was a realist about this, in a tradition of east European prison writers.

The Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński spent two years in the Soviet Gulag. in his memoir, A World Apart, wrote that “when the body has reached the limit of its endurance, one cannot, as was once believed, rely on strength of character and conscious recognition of spiritual values; that there is nothing, in fact, which man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain.”

This was the point Maksym made in terms of the loss of agency. Predictable suffering makes a predictable human. Herling-Grudziński defined the goal of interrogation as the thorough dismantling of a personality into its component parts. The prisoner becomes predictable, even to himself.

Listening to him, I was struck by the importance of books to Maksym while he was in captivity. He made appeals to prison authorities for access to certain books. In the Gulag, Herling-Grudziński was able to read a few novels, thanks to the kindness of a fellow prisoner. These novels enabled him to believe that he could understand the thoughts of others, that he was not entirely alone. The person who gave him books is one of the few who appears in his memoir by name. Is it by chance that I remember her name? Natalia.

Today Russian missiles target publishing houses, libraries, and archives. Today, in the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia, the Russians collect books that are in the Ukrainian language to be burned. This is work, and work can be done by prisoners. So Ukrainian prisoners-of-war, such as Maksym, found themselves forced to destroy the Ukrainian-language books that Russian occupiers had taken from libraries, schools, and universities.

The burnings of millions of Ukrainian books an action designed to destroy a culture, and could certainly be seen as evidence of a larger project of genocide. Maksym, however, defined the loss in terms of individual agency. People should be able to read the books that they want to read, in the language in which they want to read them. From a shelf of books in a library a human being does the choosing. In selecting a book with eye and hand, we make a choice for ourselves; but we also enter into the choices of the author.

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Listening to Maksym, I could remember books that I read, make connections, assemble thoughts.

We are not, most of us who will read this, ourselves in captivity. But we are, if we are Americans, citizens of a country in which librarians spend their time reviewing books and removing them from shelves. This is not so dramatic, of course, as Ukrainian prisoners being forced to burn Ukrainian books during a criminal war of aggression. But the difference is of degree and not of kind. Those librarians are not doing what they want to do. And books, once purged, cannot be seen, cannot be chosen.

Sometimes basic truths only come clear in extreme conditions. Maksym’s point that we choose books has relevance that goes beyond captivity, and even beyond the censorship of libraries. The internet is also a world apart in which things are chosen for us. That which is most predictable about is known, collected, magnified, exploited. We are set before options, but these are generated by algorithmic non-entities who must treat us objects because they are objects themselves.

This problem, in one way or another, was anticipated by writers of the twentieth century. Two years after Herling-Grudzinski’s memoir appeared in English, Ray Bradbury (to take one example among many) published Fahrenheit 451, in which firemen seek and burn books while the rest of society is expected to remain in front of screens. The free people in the novel are those who preserve books by memorizing them. Books figure here as “mediators of freedom,” to quote the French philosopher Simone Weil.

In Ukraine, a couple of mutual friends asked whether Maksym and I talked about my book On Freedom while I was writing it. We couldn’t have; he was at the front and in captivity. When Maksym volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian armed forces, I was beginning a class on freedom inside an American maximum security prison. When he was taken prisoner by the Russians, I was at the end of a semester in which I had learned from others who were reading in captivity. In one seminar, my student Dwayne quoted a wartime note from Simone Weil: freedom means substituting “devotion for obedience.” We might be devoted to a book, and author, a friend. But that is a choice.

Weil also called freedom “a loan that must be constantly renewed” -- a deep thought that turns my eyes to the overdue library books on my desk. A book whisks us into an unpredictable world, a world no longer apart, but renewed. We choose and then we find ourselves altered, expanded, capable of further choices. At some point, I chose to read Herling-Grudziński and Bradbury and Weil, and then they can return to me, thanks to others, in this case thank to Maksym. I find it extraordinary that he is able to speak about captivity, and appreciate the generosity that allows his own thinking about freedom to inform ours. I hope that he writes his own book.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

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