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Reframing America's Role in the World: The Specter of Isolation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54251"><span class="small">Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 19 October 2020 12:41 |
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Bacevich writes: "Only by genuinely democratizing the formulation of foreign policy will real change become possible."
A car with US President Trump in it drives past supporters outside Walter Reed Medical Center on Oct. 4. (photo: Alex Edelman/Getty)
Reframing America's Role in the World: The Specter of Isolation
By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch
19 October 20
I was never in the military myself, but I did spend time at a U.S. military base and I have to admit that it remains a treasured experience among my memories. Sometime in the 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Now largely a public park, it was then an Army base with two forts on it, both built by the early nineteenth century. To tell you the truth, though, what I remember was a really large swimming pool and a movie theater where, for maybe a dime, I could see Buck Rogers serials and cowboy or war films to my heart’s content. Troops drilled on the island. Jeeps drove by. There was even a golf course (known as the “world’s crookedest”). Growing up on Manhattan Island, my Saturday ferry trips there with my dad were my thrilling introduction to the suburbs, military-style.
Here’s the thing, though. I never could have imagined then that such American bases -- approximately 800 significant ones (and many smaller outposts of various sorts) -- would by the twenty-first century be scattered in at least 80 countries and on every continent but Antarctica. As scholar Chalmers Johnson dubbed it back in 2004, this is America’s “empire of bases,” its “Baseworld.” Though not all of those bases have the amenities of Governors Island in the early 1950s and some, from Afghanistan to Kenya, are now embattled parts of America’s forever wars, here’s the strange thing: except at places like TomDispatch, they are normally neither acknowledged nor discussed here in any significant way. Over the years, millions of American troops and contractors have passed through them. Wars have been launched from them. And yet they are not debated in Congress or investigated by the media. They are simply a given, the no-need-to-notice bedrock of a highly militarized imperial power now visibly in trouble in a pandemicized world that, in my childhood, no one could have imagined.
TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich is one of the rare and memorable figures who, in his military life, spent time on embattled versions of just such bases in American war zones and came home to tell the tale. In his books, from The New American Militarism to The Age of Illusions, How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, he has repeatedly focused on the curious militarization of this country and its global policies and what that meant. Today, in the midst of an America that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s, while recommending a new book by a colleague, he wonders again why not just those bases but so many aspects of American policy abroad remain ill-considered and undiscussed even in the midst of the most embattled presidential campaign of our lifetimes.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 he so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.
Remember when Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was all the rage? It’s now available in hardcover for $0.99 from online used booksellers. James Comey’s Higher Loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck.
An additional forty-six cents will get you Omarosa Manigault Newman’s “insider’s account” of her short-lived tenure in that very White House. For the same price, you can acquire Sean Spicer’s memoir as Trump’s press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci’s rendering of his tumultuous 11-day stint as White House communications director, and Corey Lewandowski’s “inside story” of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Bibliophiles intent on assembling a complete library of Trumpiana will not have long to wait before the tell-all accounts of John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Mary Trump, and that journalistic amaneusis Bob Woodward will surely be available at similar bargain basement prices.
All that said, even in these dismal times genuinely important books do occasionally make their appearance. My friend and colleague Stephen Wertheim is about to publish one. It’s called Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy and if you’ll forgive me for being direct, you really ought to read it. Let me explain why.
The “Turn”
Wertheim and I are co-founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a small Washington, D.C.-based think tank. That Quincy refers to John Quincy Adams who, as secretary of state nearly two centuries ago, warned his fellow citizens against venturing abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Were the United States to do so, Adams predicted, its defining trait -- its very essence -- “would insensibly change from liberty to force.” By resorting to force, America “might become the dictatress of the world,” he wrote, but “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” While his gendered punchline might rankle contemporary sensibilities, it remains apt.
A privileged man of his times, Adams took it for granted that a WASP male elite was meant to run the country. Women were to occupy their own separate sphere. And while he would eventually become an ardent opponent of slavery, in 1821 race did not rank high on his agenda either. His immediate priority as secretary of state was to situate the young republic globally so that Americans might enjoy both safety and prosperity. That meant avoiding unnecessary trouble. We had already had our revolution. In his view, it wasn’t this country’s purpose to promote revolution elsewhere or to dictate history’s future course.
Adams was to secretaries of state what Tom Brady is to NFL quarterbacks: the Greatest Of All Time. As the consensus GOAT in the estimation of diplomatic historians, he brought to maturity a pragmatic tradition of statecraft originated by a prior generation of New Englanders and various slaveholding Virginians with names like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. That tradition emphasized opportunistically ruthless expansionism on this continent, avid commercial engagement, and the avoidance of great power rivalries abroad. Adhering to such a template, the United States had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, become the wealthiest, most secure nation on the planet -- at which point Europeans spoiled the party.
The disastrous consequences of one European world war fought between 1914 and 1918 and the onset of a second in 1939 rendered that pragmatic tradition untenable -- so at least a subsequent generation of WASPs concluded. This is where Wertheim takes up the story. Prompted by the German army’s lightning victory in the battle of France in May and June 1940, members of that WASP elite set about creating -- and promoting -- an alternative policy paradigm, one he describes as pursuing “dominance in the name of internationalism,” with U.S. military supremacy deemed “the prerequisite of a decent world.”
The new elite that devised this paradigm did not consist of lawyers from Massachusetts or planters from Virginia. Its key members held tenured positions at Yale and Princeton, wrote columns for leading New York newspapers, staffed Henry Luce’s Time-Life press empire, and distributed philanthropic largesse to fund worthy causes (grasping the baton of global primacy being anything but least among them). Most importantly, just about every member of this Eastern establishment cadre was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As such, they had a direct line to the State Department, which in those days actually played a large role in formulating basic foreign policy.
While Tomorrow, The World is not a long book -- fewer than 200 pages of text -- it is a tour de force. In it, Wertheim describes the new narrative framework that the foreign-policy elite formulated in the months following the fall of France. He shows how Americans with an antipathy for war now found themselves castigated as “isolationists,” a derogatory term created to suggest provincialism or selfishness. Those favoring armed intervention, meanwhile, became “internationalists,” a term connoting enlightenment and generosity. Even today, members of the foreign-policy establishment pledge undying fealty to the same narrative framework, which still warns against the bugaboo of “isolationism” that threatens to prevent high-minded policymakers from exercising “global leadership.”
Wertheim persuasively describes the “turn” toward militarized globalism engineered from above by that self-selected, unelected crew. Crucially, their efforts achieved success prior to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, may have thrust the United States into the ongoing world war, but the essential transformation of policy had already occurred, even if ordinary Americans had yet to be notified as to what it meant. Its future implications -- permanently high levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases stretching across the globe, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry -- would only become apparent in the years ahead.
While Wertheim is not the first to expose isolationism as a carefully constructed myth, he does so with devastating effect. Most of all, he helps his readers understand that “so long as the phantom of isolationism is held to be the most grievous sin, all is permitted.”
Contained within that all is a cavalcade of forceful actions and grotesque miscalculations, successes and failures, notable achievements and immense tragedies both during World War II and in the decades that followed. While beyond the scope of Wertheim’s book, casting the Cold War as a de facto extension of the war against Nazi Germany, with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a stand-in for Adolf Hitler, represented an equally significant triumph for the foreign policy establishment.
At the outset of World War II, ominous changes in the global distribution of power prompted a basic reorientation of U.S. policy. Today, fundamental alterations in the global distribution of power -- did someone say “the rise of China”? -- are once again occurring right before our eyes. Yet the foreign-policy establishment’s response is simply to double down.
So, even now, staggering levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry remain the taken-for-granted signatures of U.S. policy. And even now, the establishment employs the specter of isolationism as a convenient mechanism for self-forgiveness and expedient amnesia, as well as a means to enforce discipline.
Frozen Compass
The fall of France was indeed an epic disaster. Yet implicit in Tomorrow, The World is this question: If the disaster that befell Europe in 1940 could prompt the United States to abandon a hitherto successful policy paradigm, then why have the serial disasters befalling the nation in the present century not produced a comparable willingness to reexamine an approach to policy that is obviously failing today?
To pose that question is to posit an equivalence between the French army’s sudden collapse in the face of the Wehrmacht’s assault and the accumulation of U.S. military disappointments dating from 9/11. From a tactical or operational perspective, many will find such a comparison unpersuasive. After all, the present-day armed forces of the United States have not succumbed to outright defeat, nor is the government of the United States petitioning for a cessation of hostilities as the French authorities did in 1940.
Yet what matters in war are political outcomes. Time and again since 9/11, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or lesser theaters of conflict, the United States has failed to achieve the political purposes for which it went to war. From a strategic and political perspective, therefore, the comparison with France is instructive, even if failure need not entail abject surrender.
The French people and other supporters of the 1930s European status quo (including Americans who bothered to pay attention) were counting on that country’s soldiers to thwart further Nazi aggression once and for all. Defeat came as a profound shock. Similarly, after the Cold War, most Americans (and various beneficiaries of a supposed Pax Americana) counted on U.S. troops to maintain an agreeable and orderly global status quo. Instead, the profound shock of 9/11 induced Washington to embark upon what became a series of “endless wars” that U.S. forces proved incapable of bringing to a successful conclusion.
Crucially, however, no reevaluation of U.S. policy comparable to the “turn” that Wertheim describes has occurred. An exceedingly generous reading of President Trump’s promise to put “America First” might credit him with attempting such a turn. In practice, however, his incompetence and inconsistency, not to mention his naked dishonesty, produced a series of bizarre and random zigzags. Threats of “fire and fury” alternated with expressions of high regard for dictators (“we fell in love”). Troop withdrawals were announced and then modified or forgotten. Trump abandoned a global environmental agreement, massively rolled back environmental regulations domestically, and then took credit for providing Americans with “the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.” Little of this was to be taken seriously.
Trump’s legacy as a statesman will undoubtedly amount to the diplomatic equivalent of Mulligan stew. Examine the contents closely enough and you’ll be able to find just about anything. Yet taken as a whole, the concoction falls well short of being nutritious, much less appetizing.
On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, the entire national security apparatus and its supporters assume that Trump’s departure from office will restore some version of normalcy. Every component of that apparatus from the Pentagon and the State Department to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations to the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post yearns for that moment.
To a very considerable degree, a Biden presidency will satisfy that yearning. Nothing if not a creature of the establishment, Biden himself will conform to its requirements. For proof, look no further than his vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2003. (No isolationist he.) Count on a Biden administration, therefore, to perpetuate the entire obsolete retinue of standard practices.
As Peter Beinart puts it, “When it comes to defense, a Biden presidency is likely to look very much like an Obama presidency, and that’s going to look not so different from a Trump presidency when you really look at the numbers.” Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and get tough with China. The United States will remain the world’s number-one arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”
Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership. “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Those uplifting sentiments are, of course, his from a recent Foreign Affairs essay.
So if you liked U.S. national security policy before Trump mucked things up, then Biden is probably your kind of guy. Install him in the Oval Office and the mindless pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” will resume. And the United States will revert to the policies that prevailed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama -- policies, we should note, that paved the way for Donald Trump to win the White House.
The Voices That Count
What explains the persistence of this pattern despite an abundance of evidence showing that it’s not working to the benefit of the American people? Why is it so difficult to shed a policy paradigm that dates from Hitler’s assault on France, now a full 80 years in the past?
I hope that in a subsequent book Stephen Wertheim will address that essential question. In the meantime, however, allow me to make a stab at offering the most preliminary of answers.
Setting aside factors like bureaucratic inertia and the machinations of the military-industrial complex -- the Pentagon, arms manufacturers, and their advocates in Congress share an obvious interest in discovering new “threats” -- one likely explanation relates to a policy elite increasingly unable to distinguish between self-interest and the national interest. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams never confused the two. His latter-day successors have done far less well.
As an actual basis for policy, the turn that Stephen Wertheim describes in Tomorrow, The World has proven to be nowhere near as enlightened or farseeing as its architects imagined or its latter day proponents still purport to believe it to be. The paradigm produced in 1940-1941 was, at best, merely serviceable. It responded to the nightmarish needs of that moment. It justified U.S. participation in efforts to defeat Nazi Germany, a necessary undertaking.
After 1945, except as a device for affirming the authority of foreign-policy elites, the pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” proved to be problematic. Yet even as conditions changed, basic U.S. policy stayed the same: high levels of military spending, a network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry. Even after the Cold War and 9/11, these remain remarkably sacrosanct.
My own retrospective judgment of the Cold War tends toward an attitude of: well, I guess it could have been worse. When it comes to the U.S. response to 9/11, however, it’s difficult to imagine what worse could have been.
Within the present-day foreign-policy establishment, however, a different interpretation prevails: the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War ended in a world historic victory, unsullied by any unfortunate post-9/11 missteps. The effect of this perspective is to affirm the wisdom of American statecraft now eight decades old and therefore justify its perpetuation long after both Hitler and Stalin, not to mention Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, are dead and gone.
This paradigm persists for one reason only: it ensures that statecraft will remain a realm that resolutely excludes the popular will. Elites decide, while the job of ordinary Americans is to foot the bill. In that regard, the allocation of privileges and obligations now 80 years old still prevails today.
Only by genuinely democratizing the formulation of foreign policy will real change become possible. The turn in U.S. policy described in Tomorrow, The World came from the top. The turn needed today will have to come from below and will require Americans to rid themselves of their habit of deference when it comes to determining what this nation’s role in the world will be. Those on top will do all in their power to avert any such loss of status.
The United States today suffers from illnesses both literal and metaphorical. Restoring the nation to good health and repairing our democracy must necessarily rate as paramount concerns. While Americans cannot ignore the world beyond their borders, the last thing they need is to embark upon a fresh round of searching for distant monsters to destroy. Heeding the counsel of John Quincy Adams might just offer an essential first step toward recovery.
Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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RSN: Trump's Road to Tyranny Runs Through the Supreme Court |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36753"><span class="small">Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 19 October 2020 10:41 |
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Excerpt: "Trump's road to Tyranny runs through the Supreme Court. He plans to win there 6-3 or 5-4. He could lose nationwide by millions of votes. He doesn't care."
In this photo taken April 21, 2017, President Donald Trump looks out an Oval Office window at the White House. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Trump's Road to Tyranny Runs Through the Supreme Court
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
19 October 20
rump’s road to Tyranny runs through the Supreme Court.
He plans to win there 6-3 or 5-4.
He could lose nationwide by millions of votes.
He doesn’t care.
The plan is clear:
Spend four years screaming Big Lies about a “fake” election.
Pack the Court with flunkies, culminating with Amy Barrett.
Create chaos in the swing states.
Use gerrymandered TrumpCult state legislatures to override the popular vote (see below for the 1887 Electoral Count Act).
Sabotage the Electoral College past its “Safe Harbor” date.
Get the whole mess in front of the Trump-owned Supreme Court. Win either 6-3 or 5-4, depending on a wavering John Roberts.
The stage was set in 2010, when the Koch Brothers gerrymandered fascist legislatures into 29 states, including Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and other Electoral College pivots.
In a well-funded covert operation known as the Redmap Coup, GOP agents took state power throughout the US. The Obama Democrats said and did nothing (see David Daley’s Ratf**ked).
Since 2016, Trump has screeched that millions of Mexicans swam the Rio Grande to vote for Hillary Clinton. Defeated by obvious election thefts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Clinton said and did nothing.
From 2010 to now, GOP Dirty Tricksters have filched a thousand elected offices, including at least six US Senate seats and those three on the Supreme Court. The Democrats have said and done nothing.
A Florida referendum decisively re-enfranchised more than a million ex-felons, only to be trashed by a governor and legislature empowered in a stolen 2018 election.
Nationwide, the TrumpCult has stripped some 17 million citizens from the voter rolls.
It has budgeted $20 million for 50,000 armed White Supremacist militias to intimidate voters.
It has assaulted vote-by-mail, gutted the US Postal Service, obliterated drop boxes, misdirected voters, subverted ballots, intimidated citizens, trashed precincts, sabotaged reception and recount deadlines, and done all else possible to sabotage this year’s vote count.
Inside the voting centers, they’re disqualifying countless ballots without significant opposition from the supine Democrats.
And they’re sabotaging digital scanners set to count virtually all of 2020’s ballots, illegally destroying electronic ballot images, which can supply an accurate vote count quickly and easily.
Instead, in virtually any state, those machines (many linked to the internet) could be hacked to produce any tally the TrumpCult might want.
Trump does face significant opposition.
Polls showing a massive public rejection may understate the power of 86 million millennials who generally despise Trump, but have been slow to vote. Their younger Gen Z siblings also hate him, but are just starting to come to the polls.
Overall, Trump’s imperial white misogynist hate-base is on a demographic death march. Whites will soon be a minority in this country. A strong woman of color like Kamela Harris – a “monster” in Trump’s eyes – embodies their worst nightmare … and the tangible future they will fight to resist.
So the Millennial/Z’s diverse, tolerant, Solartopian mega-generation must flood the polls to overcome Trump’s election theft breakwater.
To start, as elders shun infectious voting centers, Millennial/Zs may transform the ranks of poll workers.
The epic shift to vote-by-mail and early voting is at last moving our elections away from hackable electronic touchscreens and onto hand-marked paper ballots.
With protected chains of custody and preserved digital images, we could get quick, accurate, reliable vote counts.
But tens of millions of youthful voters must arise, especially in the gerrymandered swing states.
Only overwhelming margins like those run up by Obama in 2008 and 2012 – at least 5%, probably more – can prevent these fascist legislatures from voiding the popular vote and sticking Trump delegations into the Electoral College.
That means winning the 2020 Trifecta by restocking the registration rolls, protecting early voting and vote-by-mail, and preserving the digital vote count.
Otherwise, amidst the choreographed chaos, by a count of 6-3 or 5-4, Donald Trump will become President for Life.
Postscript: The Electoral Count Act of 1887
The US Constitution gives legislatures the power to choose their state’s Electoral College delegations, no matter what the public wants.
This became an issue when the 1876-1877 election devolved into the kind of chaos Trump aims to create this year.
Democrat Samuel Tilden got 250,000 more votes than Rutherford B. Hayes, whose Republicans stole enough Electoral College votes to force a five-month stalemate. Hayes finally cut a deal to end southern Reconstruction, disenfranchising the African-American population.
Ten years later, the Electoral Count Act set a “safe harbor” date – this year an entirely unworkable December 8 – by which legislatures must certify their state’s Electoral College delegation. The role of the state governors is murky and untested.
An obvious Trump strategy would be to sabotage state vote counts and delay definitive tallies beyond the legal deadline. The Roberts-Kavanaugh-Barrett “Brooks Brothers Mob” did that in 2000 by physically assaulting Florida’s recount, allowing the Supreme Court to throw the election to George W. Bush.
This year, Trump could repeat history in Florida (not to mention Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and/or Arizona) delaying the certification of enough Electoral votes to deny Biden the presidency, even if he wins the popular vote by many millions.
Electoral votes must be delivered to the Vice President by December 23. On January 6, a joint session of the newly-elected Congress counts them, with a dizzying array of variables in between.
Any Senator can join with a Representative to force a closed two-hour joint session evaluating any state’s Electoral College delegation.
In 2001, then-VP Al Gore prevented the Congressional Black Caucus from challenging the Florida delegation that had been seated by armed thugs who got the Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount. Gore also stopped Rev. Jesse Jackson from staging a national demonstration demanding the popular vote be honored.
In 2005, with then-VP Dick Cheney presiding, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) joined Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland) to challenge Ohio’s fraudulent delegation. Congress didn’t care. Bush got a second term.
This year, Trump has his armed White Supremacists on “standby.” Chaos at the polls and in the vote count is certain. The laws are contradictory, often incomprehensible.
But Trump’s “November Surprise” bottom line is obvious: delay the vote counts, hijack the state legislatures, steal the Electoral College delegations, get it all to his “safe harbor” Supremes, who will crown him 6-3 or 5-4.
The question then becomes: What (if anything) will the Democrats do about all this? Or, more importantly, what will YOU do about it?
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-wrote The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, which resides at www.freepress.org along with Bob’s Fitrakis Files. Harvey’s People’s Spiral of US History awaits Trump’s departure at www.solartopia.org
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Alexey Navalny Has the Proof of His Poisoning |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46742"><span class="small">Masha Gessen, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 19 October 2020 08:32 |
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Gessen writes: "The Russian anti-corruption activist, who nearly died in August, talks about his recovery and his future."
Alexei Navalny. (photo: EPA)
Alexey Navalny Has the Proof of His Poisoning
By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
19 October 20
The Russian anti-corruption activist, who nearly died in August, talks about his recovery and his future.
 lexey Navalny is the biggest thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side. A decade ago, Navalny, as a young lawyer in Moscow, started piecing together publicly available information to document corruption and abuse of power in the Russian government. At first, he used his blog to document inflated prices in government contracts, suggesting kickbacks; he moved on to documenting real-estate holdings, luxury cars, and cash reserves that government officials had registered in the names of relatives. Navalny’s one-man project grew into the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a multimedia production company with dozens of investigators whose tools have ranged from data mining to sending drones to film the estates of highly placed bureaucrats. One of Navalny’s biggest hits is a series of films about the then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s sneaker-collecting habits and estate, which included three helopads, a ski slope, cascading swimming pools, a hotel-style dormitory for staff, and a little lake house for ducks, which became an Internet meme. Russian authorities have been fighting to have the films removed from YouTube, where one of them has been viewed more than thirty-six million times.
Navalny was one of the leaders of the mass protests against rigged elections that erupted in Russia in 2011 and 2012. Many of his fellow-members of the protest coördinating council are either living in exile, like the chess champion Garry Kasparov or the prisoners’-rights activist Olga Romanova, or dead, like the politician Boris Nemtsov. The Kremlin has tried to shut down Navalny and his organization through a series of court cases and arrests. But when Navalny was jailed in 2013, sentenced to five years on flagrantly trumped-up embezzlement charges, thousands of Muscovites protested and secured his release. When he was sentenced to house arrest, Navalny refused to comply, because the Russian penal code does not allow for such a punishment; after a few months, the authorities gave up, although his brother, Oleg, remained behind bars for years on spurious charges.
Navalny’s activism and reach kept expanding—he even attempted to run for President—and for a few years he seemed invincible. (In a piece for this magazine in 2016, I wrote, “The strangest thing about Alexey Navalny is that he is walking around Moscow, still.”) But, on August 20th, Navalny fell ill when returning to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. He was in a coma for twenty-six days, most of them in a hospital in Berlin. Analysis performed by multiple European labs shows that he was poisoned with a previously unknown version of Novichok, a deadly Russian-developed chemical agent. Navalny regained his ability to speak, write, and make jokes within ten days of coming out of the coma, but he has continued to experience significant physical effects owing to the poisoning. He spoke with me, over Zoom, from an apartment in Berlin, on October 8th; through the screen, it was obvious that Navalny had lost a great deal of weight, but otherwise he looked and sounded as I’d always remembered him. Our conversation has been translated from Russian and condensed.
How did you know what had happened to you?
This is the hardest part. The moment I knew that I’d been poisoned was the moment I realized my life was ending. What I was experiencing up until then was a kind of incomprehension. We can understand a heart attack or a stroke, but we cannot understand the effects of cholinesterase inhibitors—evolution does not prepare us for this. You are in this strange state of losing focus, and the strangeness keeps growing. I’ve compared it to being touched by a Dementor in a Harry Potter novel—you feel that life is leaving you. Let’s say I touch my own hand with my finger. My brain can perceive that signal and then cancel it out. But Novichok makes it not get cancelled out, so it feels like I’m touching my own hand a million times a second, and every cell in my body goes berserk, and the brain understands that this is the end.
Let’s go back a second. You have boarded a plane from Tomsk to Moscow. You’ve opened up your laptop and started watching “Rick and Morty,” as is your habit. And then—
I started losing focus. Say, right now, I see you on the screen. I understand that Kira is here in the room. [Kira Yarmysh, who is Navalny’s spokeswoman, was present during our interview; she was also seated next to him on the Tomsk-Moscow flight.] I understand this, but I cannot see it and focus on it. I have the strength to point at the screen. I see the cat who has entered the frame. But I can’t grasp the concept of “cat,” and if someone asked me to point at the cat on screen, I’d have a very hard time. On the airplane, I went to the bathroom and I realized that I would not be able to leave the bathroom on my own, and this was when I knew I’d been poisoned. It was so difficult to open the door. I could see the door, I could understand everything, and I was plenty physically strong enough—I would have been able to do pushups, if only, at that moment, I had been able to grasp the concept of pushups. I guess if I’d had sudden heart pain or abdominal pain, I would have realized even faster that I was dying, because this physical experience would have been familiar to me. But this was worse than pain.
I’m trying to understand what you are describing, using my own experience. Have you ever been sedated with opiates?
Sure, I had my appendix removed. And last month, too, I had the experience of coming out of sedation. This was nothing like it. Some people have compared it to a panic attack. But I think I understand what a panic attack feels like: a sense of growing anxiety. Anxiety is a feeling you can ultimately comprehend.
I came out of the bathroom. I could still stand upright. I saw my seat and realized I would probably never make it that far. I thought I should probably ask for help, but I also thought that, by this point, it would be useless. So I informed the flight attendant that I was about to die, right there on their plane, and I lay down.
On the floor. And then they tried to keep you awake, right?
They were saying, “Sir, stay with us, please don’t lose consciousness. . . .” But I did.
Did you have a sense of the passage of time?
I just felt indifference. It was clear that this was the end. I imagine that a person, when they are dying, thinks about important things, like, This is what I haven’t completed, or, What will happen to my children, or, What will my wife say? But I was finding it so difficult to think at all.
So those awful screams that someone recorded—
I don’t remember those. I might have been hallucinating.
And the next thing you remember was nearly a month later?
For a while, I was convinced that I was in the hospital and I’d lost my legs and was waiting for new legs to be made for me. And my wife, Yulia, and Leonid Volkov [Navalny’s closest associate in his political work] and the doctors kept telling me that I’d been in an accident and they’d make me new legs, and I shouldn’t worry. Obviously, there were no such conversations. Gradually, I started making contact with reality, in which there was Yulia and I waited for her to come every day and adjust my pillow. But I was still missing legs. And I had these awful hallucinations that really got to me, like I’m in a jail cell and the cops won’t let me sleep, and they keep asking me to recite the rules for being in jail, interspersed with lyrics by the [Russian rap group] Krovostok.
Yulia and Volkov told me that there was a prolonged period when they would sit me up, and I would just stare, and they couldn’t tell whether I recognized them. As I recall, I was having mind-blowing conversations with them in my imagination. Yulia hung up a small flip chart and marked every day I spent in the hospital with a heart in magic marker. I reacted to that flip chart and looked at it, but I don’t remember any of that. I do remember the horrible feeling when you can’t speak or write.
What do you mean?
The doctor says, “Do you understand that you are Alexey Navalny?” I do. “Do you remember your age?” I do. “Do you understand that you are currently in Berlin?” I knew this, though I wasn’t particularly interested in why I was here. “Can you say a word?” I know I have a tongue, and I have lots of words floating around in my head. But that part of the brain where a word takes shape and you pronounce it—that wasn’t processing. I couldn’t say a word. This was torture. I probably looked like the cat in that scene in “Shrek,” with intelligent eyes but speechless. I can’t say anything and I can’t even get angry, because I can’t remember how emotions work, either. But this didn’t last long—about a week. I don’t remember this, either, but Yulia and Volkov have told me that when I did start talking, I addressed everyone in English.
Then I discovered that I couldn’t write. They’d give me a piece of paper, and I realized that I couldn’t place letters in a line in the correct order. Say, “Masha.” I remember what the word looks like. I know that the first letter is “M,” followed by an “A.” I start writing—the first letter that comes out is “S.” Then I place the second letter below it—I’m writing in a column. I can see that this is totally wrong. I cross it out. I start over, and the same thing happens. This scared me, so I kept practicing, and I didn’t calm down until I was sure that I could put letters in a line and that I could write out the word I’m asked to write. I don’t remember being unable to read—they would sometimes turn on the TV to keep me entertained, and I understood the subtitles.
What was the first word you tried to write?
I wanted to ask for water, but I couldn’t come up with the word. I asked my doctor later—after all, many people have been in a coma—did they have the same experiences? He said that, first of all, my coma was unusually long. Also, it was overlaid with the poisoning by Novichok, and there is nothing to compare that to. They say the same thing about my rehabilitation: they can’t tell me anything, because, as far as we know, there are barely any known cases of people who survived Novichok. [They include the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were poisoned in England two years ago.] Plus, I was poisoned with a different kind of Novichok.
Even the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons classifies its reports, because no one wants to publish the formula. This is a thing from hell. Chemical weapons are rightly banned. Conventional weapons can be used to kill people, but also to protect them; these substances are intended solely for making people die a painful death.
How would you describe your condition now?
I’m like a little old man. I was in the I.C.U. for twenty-six days, so I figured I’d be back to normal after twenty-six more. It hasn’t been that long yet, but I notice strange things. For example, I’ve lost all flexibility. I’m like the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz.” I’m doing a lot of physical therapy. My first physical-therapy sessions involved two glasses of water. I had to use a tablespoon to scoop up water from one glass and pour it into the other. It was so fucking difficult. It was unbearable torment. The first time they threw a ball at me, there was no way I could have caught it. I couldn’t walk across a room. My hands were shaking. In my mind, I felt like I did before, but then I’d try to get into a car with my hands and feet shaking.
I can take long walks, up to three hours. I’m sitting as I talk to you, and it’s all right. It’s hard to concentrate for a long time, and it can get tiring to keep track of the questions and think about my answers. But that’s all right. Now, pulling a T-shirt off—that’s truly difficult. Strength is coming back faster than coördination and balance. I can now use the phone again, despite shaky hands.
By the time you came to, all the information was there, right?
The labs—one in Sweden and one in France—had already determined that it was Novichok. They’d done the testing while I was still in a coma, with Yulia’s permission. The only thing that’s happened since is the Russian authorities making crazy claims about me being a C.I.A. agent and all that.
Who was the person who gave you the information that you had been poisoned with Novichok?
Yulia. I had to be told multiple times; it took me a while to grasp. It still sounds bizarre. But the lab results—you can’t argue with those. Of course, this completely changes our understanding of how the Russian authorities work. We used to think we knew that Putin divides people up into different categories. There are the secret agents and former secret agents, and they can kill one another, poison one another, spray one another with polonium or Novichok, because they have their own rules. Then there are the politicians and other civilians. The instruments they use against politicians are arrests, fabricated criminal charges, defamation campaigns.
But to kill so blatantly, using Novichok—that sends a very strong message. A mysterious death, especially of a relatively young person, scares people. Their plan was that no medical examiner, not even the most conscientious one, would be able to find traces of Novichok. There are, maybe, only seventeen laboratories in the world that can find it. You need a super-powerful mass spectrometer. They made sure to wait forty-eight hours [before Navalny was allowed to be evacuated to Germany], and after that, they were convinced that no one would be able to find anything on me. It would have been recorded as a suspicious death. That is a stunningly effective intimidation method: “He didn’t know his place, he exposed corrupt officials, he called Putin a thief—and what do you know, he is dead at forty-four. Could be his heart gave out. Could be something else.”
You say that you thought they reserved poison for secret agents, but we know that Pyotr Verzilov, a Pussy Riot activist, was poisoned, and so was the journalist and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was poisoned twice—
That’s true. It was obvious to me that they were both poisoned. They were both very healthy, and Kara-Murza, like me, turned into an old man who had to use a cane. But still—and this is the tricky thing—even though I knew both of them, and I had no doubt that they were poisoned, there is always this little voice, this bit of doubt. Like, really, did they poison them? But why didn’t they die? Maybe they really did take too much medicine? My wife went through the same thing. On the one hand, it was obvious that I’d been poisoned. On the other hand, there were all these doctors, at the hospital in Omsk, wearing their white coats, saying, “Of course, he wasn’t poisoned, of course, it’s a case of pancreatitis.” It’s hard to argue with that. They are doctors! And we are not. And Yulia and Volkov both told me that even as they were making arrangements to have me airlifted to Germany, they were thinking, What if it is pancreatitis and tomorrow he comes to in Germany, furious? When Kira was with me in the ambulance, the medics told her I had clearly O.D.’d. “Tomorrow he’ll be walking around and talking,” they said.
Novichok was apparently on something I touched. They say that if you inhale it, you die very quickly. If you ingest it with food, you are dead within an hour. If you touch it, it takes about three hours. But no one knows where it was. No one knows how this new version of Novichok acts. This scares people very effectively. You can decide not to fear being arrested or being shot. But when you are just walking around, and the next thing you know, your lifeless body is lying in the street, and a normal pathologist will never find anything?
My case is unusual because, thanks to a series of happy accidents—the pilot who decided to make an emergency landing, the ambulance staff who acted on the assumption I’d overdosed and tried to revive me, and the fact that some traces of Novichok remained even after forty-eight hours—they actually found Novichok. We got evidence. And the thing about Novichok is you can’t just go and use it. If I give you some Novichok and tell you to go kill someone with it, you are going to kill yourself and the people around you and probably not the person you are targeting. You have to be trained to use it. This definitively changes our picture of what happens inside the Kremlin, and now we have proof.
Every interviewer used to ask you, “Why haven’t you been killed yet?” So you have this understanding that you should have been killed by now, and you have people you know who nearly died from being poisoned, and yet somehow your mind tells you, This won’t happen to me, because—why?
Because you think rationally. There are a million ways to isolate someone or kill them, but this is like some trashy thriller. I find myself living inside of a James Bond movie. If you told me that they planned to kill me using Novichok and administer it in such a way that I would die on an airplane, I would say that’s a crazy plan, because there are so many ways for it to fail. It’s like if someone asked me if I believe that I’m at risk for being beheaded with a lightsabre. I’d say no, even if I saw that someone I know is missing an arm and it looks to have been lasered off.
Did you have any personal safety protocols? I know that when Garry Kasparov was still living in Russia, he never drank water except from his own supply, he didn’t eat in restaurants—
I remember the first time he was in jail [sentenced to five days in 2007 for an unsanctioned protest] he didn’t eat a thing because he was afraid that they’d poison him. And we all laughed at him! We thought he was paranoid. He is the only person I know who took any security measures. But what can you do? The poison wasn’t in my food. A person can leave their apartment, open the car door, and be a goner—the door handle can serve as the contact surface. You can eat only the food you cooked yourself and drink only water you poured yourself, and still there is nothing that can keep you safe from surface contact.
Let’s summarize what preceded this poisoning, just to make sure the reader understands how you were being silenced by a thousand cuts. Give me the highlights, perhaps starting with the first case against you and ending with all your bank accounts being frozen.
Back in 2009 and 2010, my anti-corruption activities started getting people’s attention. I was filing court claims against giants like [the state-backed gas monopoly] Gazprom, and I even won a couple of times—the courts ordered them to release certain reports. In 2010, I was a World Fellow at Yale, and just when I was supposed to come back, there was a news item that I could be facing criminal charges. This was meant to keep me from coming back to Russia. I returned anyway, and they just started escalating, first by planting news stories about me, then there was the first trumped-up case against me [in 2011]. They made a mistake that I think they regret, when they let me run for mayor of Moscow. I would have won in the runoff if they hadn’t rigged the vote. So this was when they got scared enough to conjure another criminal prosecution against me, and that’s when they arrested my brother, taking him hostage.
In the last two years, the pressure has really ramped up. Our offices have been raided by law enforcement repeatedly. There have been a number of criminal prosecutions. They tried to crush our nationwide structure, which they perceive as the biggest threat to their power. We are the victims of our own success. They saw that the organization can’t be beaten down, so they decided to seek a final solution. They imagined that if they removed me from the organization, the organization would break. They were wrong.
The last two years is when you’ve promoted a strategy you call “intelligent voting.” Can you explain it?
It’s tactical voting. It’s when we convince voters to back the No. 2 candidate—we may not like him, but he has a chance to knock out the representative of the ruling party. Usually all the candidates outside of United Russia get more than fifty per cent of the vote taken together, but it’s dispersed, so United Russia always wins. We used to think we’d never convince liberal voters to back a Communist, often even a Stalinist, or vice versa—convince Communists to back a liberal candidate—but we’ve succeeded in doing that to various extents in different places. Of course, Putin and the rest of them see this as a major threat. For Putin, United Russia is a foundational political structure. Yes, he controls the courts and dominates all the other parties, but in any autocratic regime, the ruling party is the key structure. This was true in the U.S.S.R. and East Germany, and is now true in Belarus, in Russia, and in Syria. There is always a ruling political party, and its ability to reliably take elections is what gives the regime its stability.
Where has your approach worked?
In Tomsk, United Russia no longer has a majority in the city legislature, for the first time in twenty years. In Moscow, we didn’t manage to do that, but we got a bunch of very active people into the city legislature. Same in Novosibirsk.
All these years you’ve been fighting corruption. Do you think this is Putin’s most important quality—that he is corrupt?
He is obsessed with power as a way of amassing wealth. He is obsessed with money. He is personally involved in apportioning money—he decides how much he gets, how much each of his people get. Gradually, of course, power became more important. Now he is, without a doubt, the most powerful man on the planet, because nothing keeps him in check. Sure, the U.S. President leads a stronger country, but he is constrained by the courts, by Congress, by the media, by the opposing party. Putin leads a country that’s not particularly strong, but there are no constraints on him at all. He could be using this power in different ways, but to him it’s just a giant money pump. He wants more: more palaces, more money, more billions. So I have been fighting corruption, because corruption is the political foundation of this regime.
So you think that “Putin is corrupt” is a more important or precise statement than “Putin is a murderer”?
Yes. Because he murders in order to be able to perpetuate the corruption. He is different from someone like Lukashenka, for example—Lukashenka is very corrupt as well, but he doesn’t have this bottomless thirst for goatskin sofas, gold handguns, and giant palaces.
What are the palaces for? Putin can’t live in them while he is President, and he won’t be able to live with them if he ever stops being President, because if he ever loses power, he’ll end up in prison or in exile.
Why do people collect stamps or baseball cards? They die, and their descendants sell them off. Why do you accumulate as much gold as you can in a computer game? That’s how people work—they always want more. And he wants to take all the money in part so that other people don’t have it and can’t influence him.
I understand you are going back to Russia after you recover?
Of course I’m going back. If I don’t, that will be the ideal outcome for them. They’d love to have me as just another political émigré.
You have given one interview so far to a Russian journalist, the very popular YouTube talk show host Yury Dud. I found it hard to watch, because he says you are wrong to think that you were poisoned and accuses you of having delusions of grandeur. And this is a journalist who supports you politically! Yet he refuses to believe that it’s all so simple, so crude, and so cruel. What was that like for you?
I don’t mind. The news sounds so crazy that it’s hard to believe. I can afford to be O.K. with it, because the facts speak for themselves. It’s not me people are arguing with but chemistry and independent labs. Anyway, my entire political life consists of having arguments with people who believe in nothing or believe in conspiracies, or who are just dumb. So having to argue my case is nothing new. I like doing it. I’m not going to be able to persuade everyone, but I will persuade some people, simply because I stand on the facts and the truth.
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Nuclear Meltdown in Fukushima, Political Meltdown in US, No End in Sight for Either |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 18 October 2020 13:09 |
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Boardman writes: "Once again the people in charge of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant are talking about flushing 1.2 million tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean."
IAEA fact-finding team examines devastation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in May 2011. (photo: IAEA/Greg Webb)
Nuclear Meltdown in Fukushima, Political Meltdown in US, No End in Sight for Either
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
18 October 20
 nce again the people in charge of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant are talking about flushing 1.2 million tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. That’s more than 265 million gallons of water so toxic that it currently has to be stored on-site to keep it safe. This is not a new problem. Radioactively toxic water has accumulated constantly since three of Fukushima Daiichi’s four nuclear reactors melted down in the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The present situation, as reported by Reuters on October 16, suggests some uncertainty about the actual release of radioactive wastewater:
Nearly a decade after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan’s government has decided to release over one million tonnes of contaminated water into the sea, media reports said on Friday, with a formal announcement expected to be made later this month.
This is a “decision” that authorities at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the plant, and the Japanese government, which is responsible for it, have wanted to make for a long time as a safety shortcut and money-saving stopgap solution to a problem that’s not going away for decades to come. TEPCO and the government have been floating the Pacific dump for more than a year without ever carrying it out. No one knows what impact such a massive amount of radiation will have on the Pacific Ocean. Neighboring countries object to being guinea pigs in an experiment that has no fail-safe. The Japanese fishing industry in the Fukushima region, already battered by the after-effects of the meltdowns, adamantly opposes further release of radioactive water into the ocean.
TEPCO and the government have been trying to shed responsibility for the Fukushima disaster for years. A report in 2002 predicted the possibility of an earthquake and tsunami. The power company took no precautions. Government regulators failed to compel the company to take precautions. On September 30, ruling in a suit filed seven years earlier, the Sendai High Court found that TEPCO and the government are responsible for the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This is the first time a High Court has ruled on a Fukushima case, and the first time a High Court has sought to hold TEPCO and the government accountable for their actions and inactions. TEPCO and the government have appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
As matters now stand, radioactive water seeps continuously into the Pacific at a presumably low but unmeasured rate. This is uncontrolled groundwater that enters the melted cores clean but becomes irradiated by the cores that remain highly radioactive and all but unapproachable even by robots. The cores, inherently more dangerous than the original accident, are kept in check by cooling water pumped into the containment vessels. This water also becomes highly irradiated and is stored in huge tanks on site, which is running out of storage space.
Dumping radioactive water into the ocean won’t solve the problem. It will only free up storage space that will slowly fill until it needs to be dumped again – depending on whether the presently proposed dumping results in a new disaster. TEPCO has promised to treat the wastewater, removing all radioactive elements except Tritium. Nuclear wastewater with low levels of Tritium is routinely dumped by nuclear operations around the world. This dumpage is from normal nuclear operations, not plants in meltdown crisis. TEPCO’s treatment of Fukushima wastewater is expected to take another two years. Whether the treatment is effective remains uncertain.
Uncertainty is the key word when it comes to Fukushima. Reuters, having reported the dumping decision had been made (above), later in the same story quotes the Japanese industry minister as saying that no decision had been made, but that a decision needed to be made quickly to “prevent any delays in the decommissioning process.” That is nonsense, if not sheer dishonesty. The “decommissioning process” has no effective timetable, the melted cores are years if not decades from being brought under control, and the buildup of radioactive wastewater is only a visible sideshow to the largely invisible ongoing nuclear calamity at the bottom of the destroyed reactors.
By way of analogy, imperfect as all analogies are, the current state of American politics is all too much like Fukushima: a long-term crisis for which no foreseeable solution is available. And the American crisis seems, if anything, of longer standing and much greater intractability. Fukushima is at least subject to the laws of physics. American politics are increasingly unsusceptible to any laws at all.
The analogy goes something like this:
- In 2000, an electoral earthquake struck the United States. The election failed to produce a clear winner.
- This was followed by a tsunami of litigators and Republican intimidators swamping Florida and drowning the vote count under a flood of litigation.
- The partisan tide overwhelmed the Supreme Court, and American democracy melted down, votes went uncounted, and the people were denied their choice, whatever it might have been.
- The initial burst of deadly fallout was an illegitimate president and thuggish administration that soon lied us into war, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and escaped impeachment and prosecution by virtue of the broken system they had created.
- For years, the two parties responsible for the multi-meltdown of American institutions worked hard at denying the core crisis while blaming the other party for its effects. No one was called to account. Republicans went on behaving as if the melted-down one-party state was not only natural but preferable to any system centered on the common good.
- The continuing fallout crippled the next President, already weakened by his exposure to the withered state. Minor treatments of some of the symptoms failed to slow the national exposure to ever higher levels of vitriol, greed and criminality, until many Americans came to see those as the problem, not the rot of the melted core institutions that went untended and unrepaired.
- So here we are in 2020, our politically radioactive wastewater storage near capacity. Dumping vast amounts of Trump-waste into the ocean, as it were, is no solution, although it might buy time for the beginning of a solution to emerge.
Electing Joe Biden might improve the situation, but the underlying reality would remain the same on January 20, 2021: the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency have all melted down. They won’t be fixed by a mere change of leadership, least of all by leadership that emerged from one of the guilty parties. Although America’s political meltdown was led by Republicans, the crisis of a democratic state is a bipartisan achievement of profound dimensions.
Neither Fukushima nuclear power plants nor American government institutions have any easy fix. Both require, first and foremost, honest and clear assessment. That won’t be easy for those most responsible, and there’s little sign that it’s about to happen on either front. And once reality is clearly illuminated in either case, it gets harder, because someone has to figure out how to fix it. With Fukushima, at least, the framework is clear, applying nuclear physics to make a dangerous situation safe. At its cores, it’s not all that subjective. And it will still take decades.
Fixing or reinventing America’s system of self-government is much trickier, with no applicable laws. It took us decades to get here. We need to be prepared to invest decades to achieve a desirable future.
William Boardman has been writing for Reader Supported News since 2012. A collection of his essays, EXCEPTIONAL: American Exceptionalism Takes Its Toll, was published in September 2019 and is available from Yorkland Publishing of Toronto or Amazon. He is a former Vermont assistant judge.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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