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Dana Milbank: The Revolt of the Gentry

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
14

Dana Milbank noticed a strange phenomenon: some prominent members of the GOP who graduated from Ivy League colleges are denouncing Democrats who graduated from the same colleges as elitists. He wrote this column during the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. How dare this Harvard/Harvard Law School elitist expect to win their votes!

Sen. Tom Cotton is what you might call a counterfeit commoner.
The dour Arkansas Republican announced with indignation at this week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he doesn’t want a justice who follows the “views of the legal elite.” He later complained that “a bunch of elite lawyers” such as nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson “think that sentences for child pornography are too harsh. I don’t and I bet a lot of normal Americans don’t, either.”

And who is this “normal American” decrying the “legal elite”? Why, he’s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, a former clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and a former associate at two Washington-insider law firms who now sits on the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate.

He’s part of a Republican Party of 2022 that has flipped the script on populism: The gentry are revolting.

At the same hearings this week, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) decried a “managerial elite” of media, academics, bureaucrats and corporations. “This cabal think they are smarter and more virtuous than the American people,” argued Kennedy, whose bio says he has a “degree with first class honors from Oxford University (Magdalen College).” This man of the people — Phi Beta Kappa at Vanderbilt, executive editor of the law review at the University of Virginia and a member of something called the Order of the Coif — has been heard denouncing the “goat’s-milk-latte-drinkin’, avocado-toast-eating insider’s elite.”

Also on the dais during the proceedings: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law who loves to inveigh against the “coastal elites,” and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a former Supreme Court clerk out of Stanford University and Yale Law School who fancies himself standing with the proletariat in “the great divide” between the “leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society.”

Three decades ago, Pat Buchanan, himself a Washington insider, ran for the Republican presidential nomination claiming a revolution of “peasants with pitchforks.” The latest Republican revolution seems to be of the trickle-down variety. Call it plutocrats with pitchforks.

Cruz, Hawley and Cotton are all contemplating presidential runs — where they might meet in the Republican primary another man of the people, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Don’t Trust the Elites,” and he rails routinely about “elites” trying to shove this or that “down the throats of the American people.”

These phonies must be onto something, because a new generation of pretend populists aims to join them in the Senate.

In Nevada, Republican candidate Adam Laxalt portrays himself as a modern-day Robespierre. He has repeatedly warned of the “rich elites … taking over America,” “elites in Washington,” the “coastal elites,” the “elites” who “do not believe in our nation” and the “elites” who are “all in one club” while “we’re all in another club.”

“We”? Laxalt is the grandson of a U.S. senator and governor of Nevada and the son of a Washington lobbyist. He is a graduate of prep school, Georgetown University and Georgetown Law School who recently hauled in $2.2 million as a partner at Cooper & Kirk, the same Washington firm that employed those plebeians Cotton and Cruz.

Milbank goes on in this vein, identifying other Republicans who rail against elites. Hypocrisy seems to be in vogue. Beware.

Categories Hypocrisy, Republicans

Chris Rufo Wants You to “Lay Siege to the Institutions”

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2022 //
36

Conservatives used to be known as people resistant to radical change. In decades past, conservatives sought to conserve traditional institutions and make them better. That stance appealed to many Americans who were unsettled by radical ideas, opposed to big-box stores that would wipe out small-town America’s Main Street. Conservatives were also known for opposing government intrusion into personal decisions; what you did in your bedroom was your business, not the state’s. What you and your doctor decided was best for you was your decision, not the state’s.

Chris Rufo is the face of the New Conservatism, who wants to frighten the parents of America into tearing down traditional institutions, especially the public school that they and their family attended.

Rufo became well-known for creating a national panic about “critical race theory,” which he can’t define and doesn’t understand. But he seems to think that schools are controlled by racist pedagogues and sexual perverts. In his facile presentation at Hillsdale College, one of the most conservative institutions of higher education in the nation, he makes clear that America has fallen from its position as a great and holy nation to a slimepit of moral corruption.

He has two great Satans in his story: public schools and the Disney Corporation. The Disney Corporation, in his simple mind, is a haven for perverts and pedophiles, bent on corrupting the youth of the nation.

Rufo asserts, based on no discernible evidence, that the decline and fall of America can be traced to the failed revolution of 1968. The radicals lost, as Nixon was elected that year, but burrowed into the pedagogical and cultural institutions, quietly insinuating their sinister ideas about race and sex into the mainstream, as the nation slept. Rufo’s writings about “critical race theory,” which he claims is embedded in schools, diversity training in corporations, and everywhere else he looked, made him a star on Tucker Carlson’s show, an advisor to the Trump White House, and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote a profile of Rufo in The New Yorker and identified him as the man who invented the conflict over critical race theory, which before Rufo was a topic for discussion in law schools.

Before Rufo’s demonization of CRT, it was known among legal scholars as a debate about whether racism was fading away or whether it was systemic because it was structured into law and public policy. I had the personal pleasure of discussing these ideas in the mid-1980s with Derrick Bell, who is generally recognized as the founder of CRT. Bell was then at the Harvard Law School, after working as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He reached the conclusion that the Brown Decision of 1954 was inadequate to root out systematic racism.

At the time, I was a centrist in my politics and believed that racism was on its way out. Derrick disagreed. We spoke for hours, he invited me to present a paper at a conference he was organizing, which I did. Contrary to Rufo, I can attest that Derrick Bell was not a Marxist. He was not a radical. He wanted an America where people of different races and backgrounds had decent lives, unmarred by racial barriers. He was thoughtful, gentle, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. He wanted America to be the land it professed to be. He was a great American.

Was 1968 the turning point, after which the radicals took over our culture and destroyed our founding ideals, as Rufo claims? No, it was not. I was there. He was born in 1984. He’s blowing smoke, making up a fairy-tale that he has spun into a narrative.

In 1968, I turned 30. I had very young children. I was not sympathetic to the hippies or the Weather Underground or the SDS. I hated the Vietnam War, but I was not part of any organized anti-war group. I believed in America and its institutions, and I was firmly opposed to those who wanted to tear them down, as the Left did then and as the Right does now. I worked in the Humphrey campaign in 1968 and organized an event in Manhattan—featuring John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and a long lineup of “liberals for Humphrey”— that was disrupted and ruined by pro-Vietnam Cong activists. That event, on the eve of the 1968 election, convinced me that Nixon would win. (While my event was disrupted, Nixon held a campaign rally a block away, at Madison Square Garden, that was not disrupted.)

1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. It was a horrible, depressing year. America seemed to be falling apart.

Did the Weathermen and other radicals begin a long march through the institutions and eventually capture them? That’s ridiculous. Some became professors, but none became college presidents, to my knowledge. Many were ostracized. Some went to prison for violent crimes. Those who played an active political role in 1968 are in their 80s now, if they are alive.

Rufo’s solution to what he sees as the capture of our institutions by racists and pedophiles is surpringly simple: school choice. He hopes everyone will get public money to send their children to private and religious schools, to charter schools, or to home school them. If only we can destroy public schools, he suggests, we can restore America to the values of 1776.

Good old 1776, when most black people were slaves, women had no rights, and the aristocracy made all the decisions. They even enjoyed conjugal rights to use their young female slaves. Those were the good old days, in the very simple mind of Christopher Rufo.

Turning the clock back almost 250 years! Now that’s a radical idea.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, History, Home Schooling, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Dana Milbank: If the Jackboot Fits, Wear It

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2022 //
12

Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post. He is one of my favorites. (I also adore Valerie Strauss and Jennifer Rubin, and of course, Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker). I’m sorry that his many links did not transfer when I copied and pasted. Subscribe to the Post.

He writes:

There were even more vermin than usual in Washington this week. A rabid fox at the Capitol bit at least nine people, including Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.). And Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with an insult most entomological.

After Cotton implied that Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson is a Nazi sympathizer, Harrison referred to Cotton as a “little maggot-infested man” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Fake news! Cotton may go low, but, at 6-foot-5, he is not little. Also, maggots typically feed on dead things, and Cotton, though stiff, is not currently deceased. The man likes to carry on, but he is not carrion.

Harrison went on to censure the Republican Party as a whole: “It is a party built on fraud, fear and fascism.” Interestingly, a statement from the Republican National Committee taking offense at the “maggot-infested” charge did not dispute the “fraud, fear and fascism” formulation. As your self-appointed fact-checker, I have therefore examined the merits of the accusation.

Fraud


Sixteen months after President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud failed in some 60 court cases, we have finally found evidence of potential voter fraud. Trump’s White House staff chief, Mark Meadows, reportedly registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he never lived in. And former Trump State Department official Matt Mowers, a current congressional candidate, voted twice during the 2016 primaries, in New Hampshire and New Jersey.

The “big lie” about a rigged election, accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters, has spawned new frauds about the dangers of coronavirus vaccines (leading to sharply higher death rates in heavily Republican counties) and the promise, touted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the deworming drug ivermectin to treat covid-19; an exhaustive new study finds the drug useless.

Then there are the little everyday frauds. Just days after Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told the world that his colleagues engage in coke-fueled orgies, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) declared at a Trump rally that it was Trump who “caught Osama bin Laden,” record-low unemployment is at a “40-year high” and there weren’t “any wars” during Trump’s presidency. Never mind Syria and Afghanistan.

Fear

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said people like Ketanji Brown Jackson become public defenders because “their heart is with the murderers.” Cotton said Justice Robert H. Jackson “left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.”

Republican senators used the Jackson confirmation to stir fear of minorities and vulnerable groups with manufactured crises about transgender athletes (of the 200,000 participants in women’s collegiate sports, perhaps 50 are transgender) and “critical race theory” (which isn’t taught in public schools).

Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance released an ad saying “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

The Florida legislature approved an “election crimes” police force for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), with the potential to intimidate voters, while various GOP-led states move forward with new provisions providing residents with incentives to inform on each other.

The newly-revealed text messages of Justice Clarence Thomas’s activist wife, Ginni, show her sharing with the Trump White House her “hope” that the “Biden crime family” as well as elected officials, bureaucrats and journalists would be taken to “barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
**
Is the GOP “a party built on fraud, fear and fascism”? Certainly, not all Republicans think this way. But too many others are subverting democracy, cavorting with white nationalists, spreading racist fears and fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment for political opponents and the media. For them, the jackboot fits

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Fascism, Hypocrisy, Republicans

Florida: Which Was the Only Publisher to Win the K-5 Math Textbook Market?

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2022 //
16

Only one publisher met all of Florida’s requirements for K-5 math textbooks.

The winner was Houston-based Accelerate Learning.

The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm, acquired Accelerate Learning on Dec. 20, 2018, according to the firm’s website.

During that time, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was the co-CEO of the firm. After 25 years with the company, Youngkin resigned in 2020 to run for office in Virginia.

The first thing Youngkin did as governor of Virginia was sign an executive order to “end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory, and restoring excellence in K-12 public education in the commonwealth,” a measure that’s comparable to DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act.”

The story reviewed Accelerate’s website and learned the following:

Accelerate Learning’s website includes an undated diversity statement which says the company commits to hold more diversity training, examine current business and recruitment practices and continue to be inclusive in all levels of the company.

“Our nation’s black communities have long faced the repeated, harmful effects of systemic racism within the justice and education systems,” the statement said.

The company also matched all employee donations to the NAACP, Black Lives Matter and Equal Justice organizations.

“Accelerate Learning, Inc. is committed to supporting diversity in all its manifestations, which requires a consequent commitment to equity and inclusivity,” the statement said.

Sounds like the winner of the math textbook competition is woke and espouses critical race theory.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Florida, Hypocrisy, Race

How Russia Defends the War That Is Not a War

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2022 //
36

A friend forwarded this message from her friend in St. Petersburg, Russia:

1. Russia did not attack Ukraine, but Ukraine must definitely stop defending itself.

2. A special operation is not a war, but economic sanctions are a war.

3. The war began so that the war would not start.

4. Conscripts were not sent to Ukraine, but some of them died there.

5. The maternity hospital was bombed because the Nazis were sitting there dressed as pregnant women, but it was still not bombed.

6. The special operation is proceeding according to plan, the troops do not meet resistance, but in 20 days they only managed to capture Kherson and surround Mariupol.

7. All Ukrainian planes were destroyed by missiles at airfields. But 2 weeks later, Ukraine vilely bombed Belarus.

8. You can wish death on Ukrainians on Russian TV, but wishing death on Russian invaders on Facebook is extremism. 9. Russian troops are fighting not with civilians, but with the Nazis. All 40 million Nazis. You will be surprised, but it easily fits and in all seriousness coexists in the minds of a significant part of Russians.

I added this one, since I recently read a statement from a spokesman for the Russian Defense Agency stating that Russia never targets civilians.

9. Russia never attacks civilians or civilian facilities, like hospitals, apartment buildings, homes, theaters, or civilian evacuees.

Categories Accountability, Hypocrisy, Lies

Steve Nelson: The Bizarre Ironies of “Parent Rights”

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2022 //
47

Steve Nelson, the retired headmaster of the Calhoun School in New York City, has spotted the ironies and hypocrisies in the GOP pandering to the “parent rights” movement.

Read the Bible and gasp at the references to incest and licentiousness.

Nelson writes:

There is a certain hypocritical Victorian flavor to the GOP these days, as they are turgid with moral rectitude when considering – gasp – transgender folks, same sex marriage or pre-marital sex, while embracing the multifaceted lecher who remains their president-in-exile. But back to children . . .

The GOP assault on CRT or any education related to race, gender or sex is partnered with the campaign for parental rights in education. Parental rights in education is further paired with the systematic and relentless attacks on public education. The logic is unassailable; if your schools insist on teaching CRT or mentioning sex despite your parental rights, then you should be empowered to send your child to a good Christian school, where they can learn about these things:

“If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity.” (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)

“When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts.” (Ezekiel 23:18-21)

Keep reading!

Categories Censorship, Hypocrisy, Religion

Please Confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2022 //
24

After four days of hostile grilling by Republicans, the nation had the chance to see a person who stood up to every insulting and demeaning question with a calm and collected demeanor. Judge KJB has a judicial temperament. She demonstrated grace under pressure.

She just received the highest rating from the American Bar Association, in recognition of her record, wisdom and intellect.

The senators running for the Republican nomination used the opportunity to appeal to their racist, Q Anon base, asserting that she was an advocate of critical race theory (false), soft on crime (false), and easy on child pornographers (false).

The judge has been endorsed by police organizations; several of her family members were law enforcement officers.

She opposes racism, but that does not make a CRT ideologue. The fact that her husband is white gives the lie to those like Senator Cruz who portray her as a racist who is hostile to white people.

The flap about child pornographers was an effort by GOP senators to placate the crazies in Q Anon who believe the government is filled with predators of children. Anyone who panders you them should be ashamed.

The judge was even questioned about whether she supports court-packing, a strange question coming from a party who refused to meet with President Obama’s choice “because it was an election year,” but rushed through Justice Barrett’s nomination on the eve of the 2020 election. The court now has 6 conservatives and only three liberals. Judge Brown would not change that uneven balance.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is well qualified to serve on the High Court. She should be promptly confirmed. Republicans should demonstrate that they are not knee-jerk partisans by voting for her.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Hypocrisy, Justice, Lies, Racism, Republicans

John Oliver on “Whataboutism”

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2022 //
118

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a lively debate among readers of the blog about whether Russia is to blame for its actions or whether it was provoked by NATO and the U.S., and whether anyone in the U.S. has the right to criticize Putin because the U.S. has dirty hands in many conflicts (e.g. Vietnam).

Those who say Putin is not to blame for launching a war have been accused of whataboutism. I understood what it means, because I remember long ago debates where any criticism of Stalin was met with “but what about the treatment of Blacks in the South?” The response was intended to defuse the criticism.

Wikipedia has a long entry about this kind of argument.

And John Oliver devoted a show to it in 2017, while Trump was in office. As he shows, Trump was a master of whataboutism. His show serves as a useful primer on whataboutism and trolling, which was another Trump speciality.

Whataboutism is a debating technique that changes the subject and stifles debate. (“Who are you to criticize because you are just as bad, so we can’t discuss your original criticism.”)

Categories Accountability, Hypocrisy, Trump

USA Today: Charter Schools Collected $1 Billion in COVID Funds They Did Not Need

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
9

Craig Harris of USA Today wrote a blistering expose of the money grab by charter schools for federal COVID funds. Harris was previously a reporter for the Arizona Republic who often covered charter school scandals in that state where deregulation has enabled grifters to get rich by opening charter schools. This story is a national scandal. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, so I urge you to run out and buy the Sunday March 20 USA Today.

The story begins:

America’s charter schools received at least a $1 billion windfall during the pandemic, an unneeded cash infusion for most from a federal program intended to bail out struggling small businesses, USA TODAY has found. 

More than 1,000 of the publicly funded but privately operated schools that educate a fraction of U.S. children jumped at the chance to collect forgivable loans up to $10 million after Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program in March 2020.

The hastily launched program was designed to save small businesses during the pandemic by helping them cover employee salaries and other costs.

While more than 90% of all eligible businesses across the country took the roughly $800 billion inloan allocations, charter schools were among the first to get the money — ahead of mom-and-pop shops and minority-owned companies — during the early days of the crisis when the economy was cratering and many business owners scrambled to get a financial lifeline.

And charter schools were uniquely positioned to get the loans — even though they continually received funding from taxes, just like traditional public schools. But unlike those schools, which educate the vast majority of American children, charters qualified for what would eventually become pots of free money because they are considered a business. 

A USA TODAY investigation, based on public records,found 93%of the charter schools may not have needed the money because they were in states that continued to fund them at the same level as before the pandemic, or at even higher levels in some cases. These schools also had access to federal COVID grants. 

Records show some of the private companies that operate the charter schools used the money to pad savings accounts or, in one case, hand millions of dollars to an investor.

USA TODAY’s investigation is based on publicly available documents from 1,139 charter schools, as well as federal and state agencies, including 37 departments of education that oversee local funding for charter schools.

“It makes me furious because there was absolutely no reason for those (charter) schools to get that money and take it from small businesses,” said Carol Corbett Burris, a critic of charter schools and executive director of the Network for Public Education Foundation, an advocacy group in New York City. “They successfully double-dipped….”

Charter school advocates said operators were entitled to the loans, which ranged from $150,746 to $9.8 million,because they are technically private businesses. 

“Funding is always difficult to secure but was even more challenging during the pandemic,”  said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Rees added that charter schools typically receive less public funding than traditional school districts and Congress intended for them to get the money because of “the special nature of these unique public schools.”

Critics have a different view. 

A congresswoman who has monitored the program said that while the schools may have done nothing legally wrong, their decisions to take the money were “terrible.” And one superintendent who leads an inner-city San Diego charter operation said that despite the legality, the behavior was unethical because financially strong charter businesses took money from those truly in need. 

“At the time PPP became available, we had not suffered financially,” said David Sciarretta, superintendent of the Albert Einstein Academies, which has 1,450 students from kindergarten to eighth grade at two San Diego campuses. “I saw PPP as a way to help small businesses, especially those in the service sector…There is a fiscal way to look at it, and there’s a moral and ethical way to look at it.”

While Sciarretta declined to call out specifics schools, USA TODAY found, for example, that at least 14 affiliates of the California-based charter chainKnowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) took a collective $28.4 million in loans and had them forgiven at locations around the U.S.

Its national headquarters in San Francisco, meanwhile, saw its bottom line swell 56% to $75 million during the first year of the pandemic….

The concerns about charter schools have spurred critics to pressure the federal Small Business Administration, which is in charge of forgiving the loans if companies used them to save jobs and cover COVID-related expenses, to claw back the money.

The SBA declined repeated requests for interviews in response to questions about financially solid charter schools having their loans forgiven. 

The agency in a late December email told USA TODAY it was committed to helping businesses reopen and that it had removed hindrances for small businesses to have their loans forgiven.

SBA two months later, following additional questions from USA TODAY, blamed the Trump administration for issues of “fraud, waste and abuse” in the program. Yet, nearly all of the loan forgiveness has happened at SBA during the Biden administration.

California Congresswoman Judy Chu is a member of the House Small Business Committee, and she has sought answers about where the money went and which businesses received loan forgiveness. Shamed by media attention in the early days of the pandemic, the Los Angeles Lakers and the national chain Shake Shack returned their multi-million dollar PPP loans.

Congresswoman Chu said:

It was never the intent of Congress to forgive loans to companies, such as charter schools, that experienced no economic loss.

“It’s terrible,” Chu said about the charter schools. “But nonetheless, it is in the realm of what is permissible.”

Permissible, but not ethical. Charter schools got their ”loans” early on because of their relationships with their banks, but minority-owned businesses waited for months.

The PPP program was a boon to the charter industry, which never lost its state funding, but it was ineffective. Harris quotes a study by the National Bureau of Educational Research which found that the program “the program kept up to three million workers employed an additional year at a cost of up to $258,000 per job retained.”

This is a very powerful, well researched article that raises important questions. if charter schools are “businesses,” how can they call themselves ”public schools?” Public schools were not eligible for PPP funds because they are not businesses. Charter schools qualified for public school funding and for PPP funding. They are both fish and fowl. They did not lose money, like the mom-and -pop stores that had to close their doors. But they eagerly took the money that was supposed to save the jobs of people who lost them and save the businesses on the edge of bankruptcy.

Permissible? Perhaps. Ethical? No.


Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Hypocrisy, Privatization

Vladimir Tismaneanu: Putin Is an Assassin of Memory

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2022 //
3

Vladimir Tismaneanu writes in American Purpose to denounce Putin’s claim that he is anti-Nazi. He is the author of “Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy.”

“Taming” Vladimir Putin is an impossible task, based on wishful thinking. Western democracies are procedural, contractual, constitutional arrangements. The FSB-controlled Russia is none of those things. Last month I watched the 2021 movie Munich: The Edge of War; Jeremy Irons plays Neville Chamberlain. I thought about the folly of putting trust in gangsters: A gentleman’s agreement with Putka the Bully is a stillborn project, a dead end.

Putka is a godfather, not a gentleman. To understand his “worldview” and modi operandi, read Mario Puzo and a history of the KGB, plus Karen Dawisha’s illuminating anatomy of Putin’s system as an authoritarian kleptocracy. For Putin, the legal person doesn’t exist. More, it should not exist.

In Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy (2020), which I wrote with Kate C. Langdon, we try to understand the origins and dynamics of Putinist political culture—its basic assumptions, conscious and subliminal goals, aspirations, apprehensions, affinities, and ambitions. Putin’s political hero is the late Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Budapest when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956. Later, in 1968, Andropov was KGB chairman when Warsaw Pact tanks smashed the Prague Spring.

Putin, when in his early twenties, identified himself with the fictional Soviet spy Max Otto von Stierlitz played by the charismatic Vyacheslav Tikhonov in the legendary 1973 TV series, Seventeen Moments of Spring. Stierlitz was a master of deceit, self-control, and logical deduction. This is most likely how Putin sees himself. But in what the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich aptly called the “anti-Soviet Soviet Union,” there are many Stierlitz jokes.

Another source of Putin’s worldview can be found in Nikolay Shpanov’s propaganda novels, published in the early 1950s. Shpanov, an immensely popular author of military thrillers, endorsed and enhanced the narrative of World War II’s being the result of a Western conspiracy to destroy the USSR. This political myth endured, espoused by successive generations of party, Komsomol, army, and KGB cadres. For the ultra-nationalists, whenever Russia or the USSR lost a war, it was the result of a “stab in the back.”

Putin claims that he is an anti-fascist. That is absolutely false. I come from an anti-fascist family. My parents fought in the International Brigades. We lost close family members in the Holocaust. To call Volodymyr Zelensky and his supporters “Nazis” is not just moronic but nauseating. We know who the real fascist is—the KGB thug in the Kremlin with his militaristic delirium, Slavophile delusions, and imperial obsessions.

Years ago, I wrote in the journal Orbis about the Pamyat’s “patriotic society.” Putinism is the updated version of the Pamyat’s phobias, neuroses, and hatreds.

My father was born in Soroca, which was then in the Russian Empire, on February 26, 1912. During the Spanish Civil War, he joined the International Brigades. He lost his right arm in a battle on the River Ebro in 1938. His older brother, Abram, his wife, and his two children died, burned alive, in the Odessa massacre, which was ordered, planned, and perpetrated by Nazi Germany’s ally, the Romanian government of dictator Ion Antonescu. When Putin maintains that the invasion of democratic Ukraine is meant to “de-Nazify” a country whose president is a Ukrainian Jew, he commits an obscene infamy. He offends the memory of the Holocaust victims, including members of Zelensky’s family. I take personal offense at this ignominy. The scoundrel Putin is an assassin of memory.

Please open the link to read the rest of this interesting article.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Fascism, History, Hypocrisy, International
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