Month: April 2019

An Ancient Lie

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Donald Trump again repeated a lie at his Wisconsin rally. It’s a lie that has been around a very, very long time, the form even longer. Paint your opposition as being capable of an atrocity that no decent person would tolerate. That makes it easier to ostracize them, jail them, go to war against them.

This particular lie was used to promote World War I, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and two wars against Saddam Hussein.

Babies and young children, as the most vulnerable of humans with lives ahead of them, are fodder for lies that play on deep emotions. To say someone kills babies is one of the most explosive accusations it is possible to make.

Trump takes his story from a mangling of a doctor’s statement about the heartbreak of delivering a baby that cannot live because it lacks major organs – lungs, parts of the brain or heart. That story has been told in major newspapers by mothers who have experienced a pregnancy with a severely deformed fetus. A nurse who has dealt with such tragedies describes them in this Twitter thread.

Yes, this lie has been around a very long time. It is related to the blood libel, the accusation that Jews drink the blood of children.

The New York Times says “President Trump revived an inaccurate refrain” in referring to Trump’s lie. But it’s worse than that. And it ties in with the antisemitism that Trump encourages, except this time it’s against every human who can imagine the feelings involved in a pregnancy that will result only in a dead baby, through natural causes.

 

Thanks to the commenters on an earlier Balloon Juice thread for pointing out how many times this attack has been used before.

 

Cross-posted to Balloon Juice.

We Must Turn The Country Around

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

I attended a symposium on authoritarianism a week or so ago. Two of the presentations implicitly compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and Hugo Chavez. The parallels are striking. Jay West, retired from teaching Russian history at Middlebury College, spoke about Nazi Germany and the temptations of fascism, something that naturally accompanies Russian history. Charles Shapiro, American ambassador to Venezuela during the Chavez years, spoke about his experience with Chavez.

Hitler, Chavez, and Donald Trump were all elected. Portions of the electorate disapproved of them for one reason or another, but they supported them because they thought they shared common goals and that those elected would be controllable. West and Shapiro gave much longer lists. Read More

Meanwhile, in Russia

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

I subscribe to Paul Goble’s blog, “Window on Eurasia – New Series.” Goble worked in the United States State Department while the Soviet Union was breaking up. He worked particularly with Estonia and the other Baltic States, which had been made Republics of the Soviet Union after World War II, although that status had never been recognized by the United States and most other countries.

After he retired from the State Department, he taught in Estonian universities and wrote a summary of media, translated from Russian and Estonian, for a mailing list. That summary became the blog. He watches a variety of publications for separatist leanings, of which there are many in Russia. Russia contains many nationalities and many languages, peoples not always happy to be part of that larger state, but not able to break away.

It’s a different view of Russia than we get from Big Media, which focuses mainly on Vladimir Putin, not even on the politics among his government and the oligarchs. The focus on Putin tends to make him look all-powerful, but he is subject to a great many political currents and challenges from rivals. For now, he is in a relatively stable position. Here are a couple of stories that Goble has been following. Read More