Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on ‘The Situation of Our Time’)

“The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime.
There lies the body half-undressed,
We all had reason to detest,
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved
And under lock and key the cause
That makes a nonsense of our laws.”— British-American poet, playwright, and essayist W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940),” from Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (1976)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on ‘Abuse of Greatness’)

Brutus: “Th' abuse of greatness is when it disjoins/Remorse from power.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar (1599)

The image accompanying this post shows James Mason as Brutus in the 1953 film adaptation of Julius Caesar.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Hamilton, on a Leader ‘Despotic in His Ordinary Demeanour’)

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”—Founding Father Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), “Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration of the Government,” Aug. 18, 1792

This week 231 years ago, Alexander Hamilton pondered seriously what it would take to introduce a monarchy or aristocracy into the nation he had joined with others, at grave risk to themselves, to bring into being.

For the most part, he dismissed the notion of a threat to liberty coming from a government that continually changed hands in the normal process of a transfer of power. “A people so enlightened and so diversified as the people of this Country” could never allow it, he believed—unless after a “long series of time,” and brought about by “convulsions and disorders, in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.”

This week, in Fulton County, GA, conspirators who had acted at the behest of such a “popular demagogue,” will begin the slow process of being held to account for what Hamilton called “flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”

For the past seven years, many politicians felt that this “popular demagogue” would inevitably wear out his welcome with voters. That has proven to be wishful thinking. It is now up to ordinary jurors, working within the criminal justice system, to hasten the departure from the public scene of the man I called six years ago “a petulant libertine terrifyingly possessed of unmatched economic, political and military power.”

Quote of the Day (Hannah Arendt, on How ‘Anything Can Happen’ Without a Free Press)

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.

“And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”— German-born political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), to French writer Roger Errera in 1974, in “Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 26, 1978

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Million Dollar Legs,’ As W.C. Fields Reveals the Fate of His Daughter’s Beau)

[The security personnel of the nation of Klopstokia have taken away an American brush salesman for some rough treatment, dismaying the woman who’s fallen in love with him, daughter of the tiny country’s president.]
 
Angela [played by Susan Fleming] [tearfully]: “Father, they won't hurt him, will they?”
 
The President played by W.C. Fields]: “Only for about two hours—then they'll shoot him.”—Million Dollar Legs (1932), screenplay by Henry Myers, Nicholas T. Barrows, and an uncredited Ben Hecht, based on a story by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, directed by Edward F. Cline

Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on a Candidate ‘Actor of Genius’)

“He [populist Presidential candidate—and eventual winner—Buzz Windrip] was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”—Pulitzer- and Nobel Literature Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Quote of the Day (Michael Idov, on Cynicism and Dictatorships)

“One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it.”— Michael Idov, “Russia: Life After Trust,” New York Magazine, Jan. 23, 2017

The image accompanying this post shows Russia’s Vladimir Putin—not only the dictator of his country’s own autocracy, but also a model for would-be strongmen elsewhere. This article was published three years ago, but it is no less relevant now--and probably more so.

Quote of the Day (Vasily Grossman, on Power, Evil, and Withered Souls)

“There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil—anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.”—Russian novelist-journalist Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), Life and Fate (1960)

Quote of the Day (Bruce McCall, Imagining Kim Jong-un’s ‘Smiling-Charm Offensive’)

“State Secret, do not read

“Instructions for smiling-charm offensive: E-mail to supreme hair fan D. Trump JPEGS of enlarged black-and-white photos of the head of V. Putin, revealing advanced male-pattern baldness, and color glossies of Kim’s luxuriant pompadour. Follow this by delivering to the main White House gate, under cover of night, a live baby seal, club included, in a basket. Immediately commence five-for-the-price-of-one blowout sale of Ivanka Trump handbags, shoes, and fashion jewelry at every D.P.R.K. government outlet mart.”— Bruce McCall, “Shouts and Murmurs: Kim Jong-un No Patsy,” The New Yorker, March 27, 2017

The photo accompanying this post, showing North Korea’s Kim Jong-un meeting with South Korean envoys at the Workers' Party of Korea main building, was taken March 6, 2018, by Blue House (Republic of Korea).

Quote of the Day (Alexis de Tocqueville, on How Despotism Might Come to a Democracy)

“I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.”—French diplomat, political scientist, and historian  Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” Democracy in America, original publication 1835-40, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (2012)

This Day in Chinese History (Death of Chairman Mao, Propagandist-Tyrant)

Sept. 9, 1976—Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, who cultivated a cult of personality that led many to overlook the dismal economic record and millions of deaths under his leadership, died at 82.

The physical decline of Chairman Mao was, in its way, of a piece with his crimes: the evidence scattered, but lying about in such profusion that an unbiased, reasonably attentive person could have surmised that something was amiss. He had not been seen in public since 1971, and the consensus of China watchers was that he had suffered from a neuromuscular disease, probably Parkinson’s.

In fact, his deterioration had been even more rapid than supposed. China’s leader had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease in 1974. His condition, dire enough with that diagnosis alone, was even worse because of a longtime addiction to cigarettes that left him vulnerable to bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema and congestive heart failure, his personal physician Li Zhi-Sui finally revealed in The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994).

Similarly, the strong-arm tactics of the Chinese leader were not impossible to divine, as in one of the principal maxims in Quotations from Chairman Mao (aka The Little Red Book): “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But many in the West were so excited at the wholesale transformation of the world’s most populous country after the 1949 revolution that they paid little attention to the strong signals of human-rights abuses.

In 1955, to quell any notion of revolt against a regime still only in existence a half-dozen years, Communist China formed what were known euphemistically as “re-education through labor” camps meant to house “counter-revolutionaries.” In time, they would house not only dissidents but also petty criminals, drug addicts and prostitutes—about 400,000 people in more than 300 facilities by 2007, according to an NPR report. Only two years ago did the current post-Mao overlords close what had become symbols of detention without trial and other legal abuses.

Even that did not begin to describe the extent of human-rights violations under the Maoist regime. Before he even seized power from Chiang Kai-shek, Mao had indicated his general indifference to human life on his so-called “Long March,” the 368-day, 7,000-mile retreat of Chinese Communist forces away from Chiang in 1935. As I mentioned in a prior post, less than 5% of his original 86,000 men survived the trip. If he remained unmoved at the thought of losing so many supporters, is it any wonder that he would be less so by opponents?

The estimates may vary concerning those who lost their lives because of Mao’s rule, but the arithmetic is unswervingly grim. Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikotter, when allowed access to government archives, estimated that at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in the laughably named “Great Leap Forward,” the nation’s attempt to catch up with Western economies from 1958 to 1962 through collectivization. In the “Cultural Revolution” of 1966, another two million may have lost their lives at the hands of students mobilized into Red Guard units who attempted to purge China of institutions and individuals regarded as insufficiently revolutionary.

The new understanding about Mao may have been best expressed by Australian man of letters Clive James, who has written:

“In China Mao Zedong went to war against the evil landlords and the imperialist spies. Neither group actually existed. The death toll of his countrymen exceeded the totals achieved by Hitler and Stalin combined. They all died for nothing. Dying innocent, they have their eternal dignity, but there are no profundities to be plumbed in their collective extinction except the adamantine fact of human evil.”