Cima, an uninhabited Portuguese island off Cape Verde; Neide José Paixão*
WINTER
The pungent smells of a California winter,
Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.
I add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.
“In Ilawa,” the news item said, “at age 70
Died Aleksander Rymkiewicz, poet.”
He was the youngest in our group. I patronized him slightly,
Just as I patronized others for their inferior minds
Though they had many virtues I couldn’t touch.
And so I am here, approaching the end
Of the century and of my life. Proud of my strength
Yet embarrassed by the clearness of the view.
Avant-gardes mixed with blood.
The ashes of inconceivable arts.
An omnium-gatherum of chaos.
I passed judgment on that. Though marked myself.
This hasn’t been the age for the righteous and the decent.
I know what it means to beget monsters
And to recognize in them myself.
You, moon, You, Aleksander, fire of cedar logs.
Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.
Not important whether the generations hold us in memory.
Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of
the world.
And now I am ready to keep running
When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death.
I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest
Where, beyond every essence, a new essence waits.
You, music of my late years, I am called
By a sound and a color which are more and more perfect.
Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love.
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
~ Czeslaw Milosz
ILYA KAMINSKY ON UKRAINIAN, RUSSIAN, AND THE LANGUAGE OF WAR
My family huddled by the doorframe at 4 am, debating whether or not to open the door to the stranger wearing only his pajama pants, who’d been pounding on the door for at least five minutes, waking the whole apartment complex. Seeing the light come on, he began shouting through the door.
“Remember me? I helped you haul your refrigerator from Pridnestrovie. Remember? We talked about Pasternak on the drive. Two hours! Tonight they bombed the hospital. My sister is a nurse there. I stole someone’s truck and drove across the border. I don’t know anyone else. Can I make a phone call?”
So the war stepped its shoeless foot into my childhood two decades ago, under the guise of a half-naked man gulping on the phone, victim of an early post-Soviet “humanitarian aid” campaign.
2.
During a recent visit to Ukraine, my friend the poet Boris Khersonsky and I agreed to meet at a neighborhood café in the morning to talk about Pasternak (as if he is all anyone talks about, in our part of the world). But when I walked up the sidewalk at 9 am, the sidewalk tables were overturned and rubble was strewn into the street from where the building had been bombed.
A crowd, including local media, was gathered around Boris as he spoke out against the bombings, against yet another fake humanitarian aid campaign of Putin’s. Some clapped; others shook their heads in disapproval. A few months later, the doors, floors, and windows of Boris’s apartment were blown up.
There are many stories like this. They’re often shared in short, hurried sentences, and then the subject is changed abruptly.
“Truthful war books,” Orwell wrote, “are never acceptable to non-combatants.”
When Americans ask about recent events in Ukraine, I think of these lines from Boris’s poem:
3.
Over the last twenty years, Ukraine has been governed by both the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West. The government periodically uses “the language issue” to incite conflict and violence, an effective distraction from the real problems at hand. The most recent conflict arose in response to the inadequate policies of President Yanukovych, who has since escaped to Russia. Yanukovych was universally acknowledged as the most corrupt president the country has ever known (he’d been charged with rape and assault, among other things, all the way back to Soviet times). However, these days, Ukraine’s new government continues to include oligarchs and professional politicians with shrewd pedigrees and questionable motivations.
When the standoff between the Yanukovych government and crowds of protesters first began in 2013, and the embattled President left the country shortly thereafter, Putin sent his troops into Crimea, a Ukrainian territory, under the pretext of passionately protecting the Russian-speaking population. Soon, the territory was annexed. In a few months, under the pretext of humanitarian aid, more Russian military forces were sent into another Ukrainian territory, Donbas, where a proxy war has began.
All along the protection of Russian language was continually cited as the sole reason for the annexation and hostilities.
Does the Russian language in Ukraine need this protection? In response to Putin’s occupation, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians chose to stand with their Ukrainian- speaking neighbors, rather than against them. When the conflict began to ramp up, I received this e-mail:
I, Boris Khersonsky, work at Odessa National University where I have directed the department of clinical psychology since 1996. All that time I have been teaching in Russian, and no one has ever reprimanded me for “ignoring” the official Ukrainian language of the state. I am more or less proficient in the Ukrainian language, but most of my students prefer lectures in Russian, and so I lecture in that language.
I am a Russian language poet; my books have been published mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. My scholarly work has been published there as well.
Never (do you hear me—NEVER!) did anyone go after me for being a Russian poet and for teaching in Russian language in Ukraine. Everywhere I read my poems in RUSSIAN and never did I encounter any complications.
However, tomorrow I will read my lectures in the state language—Ukrainian. This won’t be merely a lecture —it will be a protest action in solidarity with the Ukrainian state. I call for my colleagues to join me in this action.
A Russian-language poet refuses to lecture in Russian as an act of solidarity with occupied Ukraine. As time passed, other such emails began to arrive from poets and friends. My cousin Peter wrote from Odessa:
Our souls are worried, and we are frightened, but the city is safe. Once in a while some idiots rise up and announce that they are for Russia. But we in Odessa never told anyone that we are against Russia. Let Russians do whatever they want in their Moscow and let them love our Odessa as much as they want—but not with this circus of soldiers and tanks!
Another friend, the Russian-speaking poet Anastasia Afanasieva, wrote from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv about Putin’s “humanitarian aid” campaign to protect her language:
~ In the past five years, I visited the Ukrainian-speaking Western Ukraine six times. I have never felt discriminated against because I spoke the Russian language. Those are myths. In all the cities of Western Ukraine I have visited, I spoke with everyone in Russian—in stores, in trains, in cafes. I have found new friends. Far from feeling aggression, everyone instead treated me with respect.
I beg you, do not listen to the propaganda. Its purpose is to separate us. We are already very different, let’s not become opposite, let’s not create a war on the territory where we all live together. The military invasion which is taking place right now is the catastrophe for us all. Let’s not lose our minds, let’s not be afraid f non-existent threats, when there is a real threat: the Russian army’s invasion. ~
As I read the letter after letter I couldn’t stop thinking about Boris’s refusal to speak his own language as an act of protest against the military invasion. What does it mean for a poet to refuse to speak his own language?
Is language a place you can leave? Is language a wall you can cross? What is on the other side of that wall?
4.
Every poet refuses the onslaught of language. This refusal manifests itself in silence illuminated by the meanings of poetic lexis—the meanings not of what the word says, but of what it withholds. As Maurice Blanchot wrote, “To write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely.”
Ukraine today is a place where statements like this one are put to the test. Another writer, John Berger, says this about the relationship of a person to one’s language: “One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home.” He insisted that it was “the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man . . . One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god.” But what happens when a poet refuses his language as a form of protest?
Or, to put this question in broader terms: what happens to language in wartime? Abstractions very quickly attain physical attributes. This is how the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska sees her own body watching the war around her: Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in. The poet Kateryna Kalytko’s war is also a physical body: War often comes along and lies down between you like a child / afraid to be left alone.
The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us: the poet Anastasia Afanasieva writes using the first-person plural “we,” showing us how the occupation of a country affects all its citizens, no matter which language they speak:
5.
On another visit to Ukraine, I saw a former neighbor of mine, now crippled by war, holding his hand out on the street. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. As I hurried by, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me, I was suddenly brought up short by his empty hand. As if he were handing me his war.
As I walked away from him, I had an eerie feeling of recognition. How similar his voice, the voices of the Ukrainian poets I’ve been speaking with, to the voices of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose houses my own tax money has destroyed.
6.
In the late 20th century, the Jewish poet Paul Celan became a patron saint of writing in the midst of crisis. Composing in the German language, he has broken speech to reflect the experience of a new, violated world. This effect is happening again—this time in Ukraine—before our very eyes.
Here is the case of poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, whose family are refugees from Pervomaisk, the city which is one of the main targets of Putin’s most recent “humanitarian aid” effort. Answering my questions about her background, Lyuba responded:
I was born and raised in the war-torn Luhansk region and my hometown of Pervomaisk is now occupied. In May 2014 I witnessed the beginning of the war . . . In February 2015 my parents and grandmother, having survived dreadful warfare, set out to leave the occupied territory. They left under shelling fire, with a few bags of clothes. A friend of mine, a [Ukrainian] soldier, almost shot my grandma as they fled.
Discussing literature in wartime, Yakimchuk writes: “Literature rivals with the war, perhaps even loses to war in creativity, hence literature is changed by war.” In her poems, one sees how warfare cleaves her words: “don’t talk to me about Luhansk,” she writes, “it’s long since turned into hansk / Lu had been razed to the ground / to the crimson pavement.” The bombed-out city of Pervomaisk “has been split into pervo and maisk” and the shell of Debaltsevo is now her “deb, alts, evo.” Through the prism of this fragmented language, the poet sees herself:
Just as Russian-language poet Khersonsky refuses to speak his language when Russia occupies Ukraine, Yakimchuk, a Ukrainian-language poet, refuses to speak an unfragmented language as the country is fragmented in front of her eyes. As she changes the words, breaking them down and counterpointing the sounds from within the words, the sounds testify to a knowledge they do not possess. No longer lexical yet still legible to us, the wrecked word confronts the reader mutely, both within and beyond language.
Reading this poem of witness, one is reminded that poetry is not merely a description of an event; it is an event.
7.
What exactly is the poetry’s witness? The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us. Like a seismograph, it registers violent occurrences. Miłosz titled his seminal text The Witness of Poetry “not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.” Living on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Zbigniew Herbert told us something similar: a poet is like a barometer for the psyche of a nation. It cannot change the weather. But it shows us what the weather is like.
8.
Can examining the case of a lyric poet really show us something that is shared by many—the psyche of a nation? the music of a time?
How is it that a lyric poet’s spine trembles like a barometer’s needle? Perhaps this is because lyric poet is a very private person: in her or his privacy this individual creates a language—evocative enough, strange enough—that enables her or him to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.
9.
Living many hundreds of miles from Ukraine, away from this war, in my comfortable American backyard, what right do I have to write about this war?—and yet I cannot stop writing about it: cannot stop mulling over the words by poets of my country in English, this language they do not speak. Why this obsession? Between sentences is the silence I do not control. Even though it is a different language, the silence between sentences is still the same: it is the space in which I see a family still huddled by the doorframe at 4 am, debating whether or not to open the door to the stranger, wearing only his pajama pants, who is shouting through the doorframe. ~ Ilya Kaminsky
https://lithub.com/ilya-kaminsky-on-ukrainian-russian-and-the-language-of-war/?fbclid=IwAR1oqrQ1WwhNcoKxJ9cI3OO4U5fn6RpsT43YyTXjV9vI6L1Gbo_BFf1lU-g
Mary:
*
SOARING RUSSIAN DEATH TOLL IN UKRAINE
~ The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials.
While the officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, they say the slaughter from fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and the town of Soledar has ballooned what was already a heavy toll.
With Moscow desperate for a major battlefield victory and viewing Bakhmut as the key to seizing the entire eastern Donbas area, the Russian military has sent poorly trained recruits and former convicts to the front lines, straight into the path of Ukrainian shelling and machine guns. The result, American officials say, has been hundreds of troops killed or injured a day.
Russia analysts say that the loss of life is unlikely to be a deterrent to Mr. Putin’s war aims. He has no political opposition at home and has framed the war as the kind of struggle the country faced in World War II, when more than 8 million Soviet troops died. U.S. officials have said that they believe that Mr. Putin can sustain hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine, although higher numbers could cut into his political support.
Ukraine’s casualty figures are also difficult to ascertain, given Kyiv’s reluctance to disclose its own wartime losses. But in Bakhmut, hundreds of Ukrainian troops have been wounded and killed daily at times as well, officials said. Better trained infantry formations are kept in reserve to safeguard them, while lesser prepared troops, such as those in the territorial defense units, are kept on the front line and bear the brunt of shelling.
The last public Biden administration estimate of casualties came last November, when Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed and wounded since the war began. At the time, officials said privately that the numbers were closer to 120,000.
“I would say it’s significantly well over 100,000 now,” General Milley said at a news conference last month in Germany, adding that the Russian toll included “regular military, and also their mercenaries in the Wagner Group.”
On Norwegian TV on Jan. 22, Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s defense chief, said estimates were that Russia had suffered 180,000 dead and wounded, while Ukraine had 100,000 killed or wounded in action along with 30,000 civilian deaths. General Kristoffersen, in an email to The New York Times through his spokesman, said that there is “much uncertainty regarding these numbers, as no one at the moment are able to give a good overview. They could be both lower or even higher.”
Senior U.S. officials said this week that they believe the number for Russia is closer to 200,000. That toll, in just 11 months, is eight times higher than American casualties in two decades of war in Afghanistan.
A senior U.S. military official last month described the combat around Bakhmut as savage. The two sides exchanged several thousand rounds of artillery fire each day, while the Wagner private military company, which has been central to Russia’s efforts there, had essentially begun using recruited convicts as cannon fodder, the official told reporters.
The convicts took the brunt of the Ukrainian response while the group’s more seasoned fighters moved in behind them to claim ground, the official said. Wagner has recruited some 50,000 troops to fight in Ukraine, according to senior American military and defense officials.
Thousands of the convicts have been killed, a loss of life that has shocked American officials, who say the strategic value of Bakhmut simply is not in line with the price Russia has paid.
The Russian military is running low on critical supplies and replenishment, said Colin H. Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy. “They’re running low on artillery. They’re running low on standoff munitions, and they are substituting by sending convicts in human waves into places like Bakhmut and Soledar.”
The Russian military has been following the Wagner playbook and deliberately using the poorly trained troops to draw, and deplete, Ukrainian fire, senior American military and defense officials said.
Kusti Salm, Estonia’s deputy defense minister, in a briefing with reporters in Washington last week, said that Russia was better able to stand its losses than Ukraine.
“In this particular area, the Russians have employed around 40,000 to 50,000 inmates or prisoners,” Mr. Salm said. “They are going up against regular soldiers, people with families, people with regular training, valuable people for the Ukrainian military.”
“So the exchange rate is unfair,” he added. “It’s not one to one because for Russia, inmates are expendable. From an operational perspective, this is a very unfair deal for the Ukrainians and a clever tactical move from the Russian side.”
Moscow has thrown people it sees as expendable into battles for decades, if not centuries. During World War II, Joseph Stalin sent close to one million prisoners to the front. Boris Sokolov, a Russia historian, describes in a piece called “Gulag Reserves” in the Russian opposition magazine Grani.ru that an additional one million “special settlers”— deportees and others viewed by the Soviet government as second-class citizens — were also forced to fight during World War II.
“In essence, it does not matter how big the Russian losses are, since their overall human resource is much greater than Ukraine’s,” Mr. Salm, the Estonian official, said in a follow-up email. “In Russia the life of a soldier is worth nothing. A dead soldier, on the other hand, is a hero, regardless of how he died. All lost soldiers can be replaced, and the number of losses will not shift the public opinion against the war.” ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ukraine-russia-casualties.html?fbclid=IwAR1nxmpxFlpfHeeA3-NqMwqRq7-nDCF_QnbhTrzCpuXkc6JYfZLZssBW7E8
*
THE SOVIET 1939 WAR WITH FINLAND AND THE CURRENT WAR WITH UKRAINE
~ Putin is not exactly losing, but struggling to make progress.
There is actually a very good historical parallel: Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939. The Russian's struggled to make headway against a smaller plucky nation, but they kept throwing men at it, and eventually their superior size prevailed. Finland eventually had to sue for peace, and give away chunks of its territory to the invaders.
I'd be moderately surprised if Russia's invasion of Ukraine doesn't follow a similar pattern. ~
Colin Riegels, Quora
Eric Anson:
Ukraine is far less outnumbered, and is getting far more aid from third parties, than Finland. I agree that there are many parallels, and maybe Ukraine will acknowledge Russia’s claim on Crimea or something like that (basically a fait accompli with popular support in Crimea), but I would actually be surprised if Ukraine lost Donbas. I can easily see Donbas being a sticking point in the negotiations that draws out the war.
Abrams tank
Neal Sollan:
It is worth noting that the Winter War played out in essentially 2 phases. The forces in the first “lightning strike” were completely defeated over roughly (as I remember) about 2 months. The second strike won the war for Russia.
At this point it is not clear at all that Russia could mount a similar second strike.
Some military analysts noted that the earlier invasions of Georgia and Moldova plus Invasion I in Ukraine were conducted using small elite units (aka special forces). They also noted that the Russian military had not spent a lot of time and effort in recent years training for large multiple unit operations with ground support from the air. Their conclusion was along the lines that “this might be a problem.” It clearly is that.
It appears that 120K (or so) “lightning force” in action now is the cream of Russian force structure but seems to have a lot of conscripts. At last count I’ve seen along that with a lot of expected casualties they have lost 16 senior commanders. I am guessing in the Winter War losses were replaced with soldiers with more or less equal skills as those in Strike One equipped with the lessons learned from their predecessors. Not clear that Russia could muster a similar force in what to planners is a very short period of time.
They sorta-kinda “won”. It’s generally considered a “white peace”, but they got to keep the 2nd largest city in Finland (along with other border lands), so I’d say the peace treaty was quite clearly in their favor. They didn’t get to annex Finland, though, which was a major achievement for the Finnish defenders.
Longer-term, though, the black eye given them by the Finns may well have saved the Soviet Union. It was a major wake-up call, on a number of levels. The necessary reforms weren’t complete by the time of the German attack, but they had a much earlier start than they might otherwise have done. It also cleaned out a lot of dead wood in the officer corps, and gave the military leadership time to think, plan, and adjust without having the distraction of an active war going on.
I don’t think the situation in Ukraine will have as “happy” an ending for Russia.
Andrew Dunbar:
Ironically the Finns conceded considerably more territory that the Soviets had originally demanded. So it was a double defeat.
*
RUSSIAN SOLDIERS’ WIVES COMPLAIN ABOUT LICE (Misha Firer)
This is a screenshot from a video that was recorded by the wives of partially mobilized soldiers (‘chmobiks’) from Ussuriysk, in which they tell Putin that husbands have caught lice in the barracks — their heads and pubic hair are very itchy. Wives had complained earlier to the mayor on Telegram, but he blocked them.
A woman wearing glasses (Russian people believe that smart people have myopia from reading too many books in small print under bad lightning; I, for one thing, am constantly asked for directions on the streets, because as a coder — if a man wears glasses he’s 100% a coder — I know how to use Yandex Map) reads out the text she’d scribbled on paper.
Smart people are articulate like Vladimir Soloviev and the guests on his TV show. Not only they read a lot but also can write well.
Observe that the women’s hands in the front row are interlocked: they are intertwined in the common grief: lice on husbands’ heads. Some don’t look at the camera — ashamed to bother Mr. Putin with such trifles.
There are hundreds of videos featuring relatives — mostly women, because a real man would never show weakness — of the mobilized soldiers ventilating their grievances about faulty military equipment, unpaid wages, theft, bedbugs, Chechens sodomizing young Russian soldiers (Chechnya has strict anti-gay laws), barrier troops, suicidal missions behind the enemy lines, beatings.
My friend who relates to the videotaped women's strife (her own adult male family members have relocated abroad to avoid mobilization) believes — and I know it’s gonna sound counter-intuitive — that this is a form of anti-war protest.
Women know that “war” is a taboo topic. They can’t openly rebel against it. Husbands, brothers and sons would never admit that going to war in Ukraine is criminal and wrong.
And women found a loophole — complaining about poor conditions at the barracks and war front in hopes that if the benevolent tsar sees the state of disarray he will stop the war and call out troops home.
"Russian people love to rebel! They kneel in front of the manor's house and stand, scoundrels! And they know that they are rebelling, and they stand anyway!” ~ M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin “The Town of Fools”
Michael Horrocks:
What an excellent post, I’m sure you’re right in your conclusion that this is a subtle anti war protest but I’m gonna guess that it won’t really work as the Tsar hasn’t had his victory yet.
You’re right about the glasses. It’s a world-wide belief I think.
Elena Gold:
In some of these videos people literally drop on their knees, recording pleas to Putin.
Oriana:
OMG, imagine protesting on your knees, on hard pavement . . . a plea taped across your chest . . . and of course they could get arrested.
Joey the Ice Pick
“The Czar is good. It is the Boyars who are wicked.”
Russia never changes.
Otto Warsteiner:
Russia is a textbook fascism—same as USSR, Nazi Germany, Italy, North Korea — in different forms like a cancer but the whole concept is the same. Communism is utopia never existed in real life only in the heads of those thinkers like Engels, Marx, and Lenin.
New soldiers' graves
*
A NORWEGIAN GENERAL THINKS NATO SHOULD ACT NOW TO PREVENT WW3
~ “If
things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” NATO Secretary-General
Jens Stoltenberg said in remarks to Norwegian broadcaster NRK. So what is his solution to stop World War 3?
NATO must intervene in Ukraine now and let Putin know this his game of thrones and imperialism is over.
First NATO must implement a no-fly zone and give Putin a short timetable to withdraw his forces or NATO will destroy the Russian forces.
If Putin does not comply, NATO must mobilize and enter Ukraine with boots on the ground and kick Russia out.
His reasoning behind this is that Russia now is severely weakened and will have no option but to comply or be destroyed, but if NATO does not intervene the war will carry on whilst Russia mobilizes upwards of 700 000 troops, this will not only prolong the war but also escalate it.
It’s better that NATO intervenes instead of allowing Russia to build up forces and crank out military hardware.
Retired Lieutenant General Robert Mood advocates presenting Putin with a concrete ultimatum: Withdraw the forces from Ukraine, or we will take control of the airspace, move in and kick his forces out.”
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/nato-chief-fears-ukraine-war-widen-wider-conflict-94860216
Oriana:
Of course not acting is always easier than acting, so I wonder if anything will be done. 
*
A SURVIVOR’S MEMORIES OF JOSEF MENGELE
~ Although I survived his experiments, I never had any in-depth discussions with him. The relationship between Mengele and us, the twins, was a unique and unusual relationship. We knew that we were alive because he used us as guinea pigs. I couldn't be grateful to him that I was his little puppet and he could do whatever he wanted to me -- I did not like that position. Yet I knew I was alive because he wanted to use me as a guinea pig.
Second, we knew within a very short time in Auschwitz that he was probably responsible for selecting most of our family members for death and sending them to the gas chambers. But that was not something that I was able to deal with in Auschwitz. The issues at hand were very pressing -- getting more food, not getting sick, and staying alive. I understood that I was only alive as long as Josef Mengele wanted me alive.
Ultimately, most of us would be murdered. Twins started disappearing from our barrack. First one twin, who was kind of sick, then the other would disappear. That was the way the rumor got started that if a twin got sick, they never survived. That was the pattern. There was no clear information from anybody except what we observed and heard from rumors.
I can say that Mengele did bring in cookies and chocolate to some of the younger children. I never received any, and it's my understanding that he did not like me and I definitely did not like him. I was very defiant and angry. My close interaction with him was after I was injected with a deadly germ. Mengele did not do the injection. However, he was standing by as one of the nurses injected me with all kinds of things in my right arm. That night I became very ill. I explained this part of my experience in more detail here: What gives you hope during tough times?
Mengele was always dressed immaculately. He was very proper. I never personally witnessed him kill another person, but that does not mean that he didn't. What I have also learned about him from other people is that he would give chocolate, candy, and goodies to the little gypsy twins (I heard this in a testimony in Jerusalem from one of the nurses who took care of the gypsy twins). He was so fanatic about the little girls being dressed perfectly. He would give them stocking-type leggings with a seam in the back. If the seam wasn't perfectly lined up, he would yell at the nurses. They had to be picture perfect. He would bring silk pantaloons for the little boys, and he liked to play word games with them, observe them, and ask them questions. By October 1944, all the gypsies in the camp were murdered and all the gypsy twins were gassed to death with their parents. I never saw the gypsy twins because they were in a different barrack -- we were not intermingled.
Some other thoughts about Mengele: Realizing that this guy had the power of our life and death in his hands, I couldn't possibly admire him. I didn't like what he was doing to me, yet I was at his mercy. I don't think I have ever had such a complicated relationship with anybody. In a strange way he was our protector and our tormenter, because as long as he wanted us alive, we stayed alive. Every single one of us knew that within a few weeks of being in Auschwitz.
I talked to another former Nazi doctor, Hans Munch, who knew Mengele in Auschwitz. I asked him how he became friends with Mengele. He said, "Eva, it was the only way to stay alive. He was the only other Nazi in Auschwitz who didn't get drunk. After coming back at night from the miseries of the camp, at least I could have a conversation with someone." During those conversations, Mengele would justify it to him by saying, "I am saving those twins. If it weren't for my experiments, they would all be dead." So he was rationalizing the fact that he was using us as guinea pigs.
I saw Mengele probably for the last time at the end of November, 1944. He seemed very preoccupied and nervous. When he got nervous, he would yell an awful yell. There were a couple of twins who died in the barrack, and he screamed about that. Sometime after November, the experiments stopped. There was so much bombing and artillery around, and we could sense this war was coming to an end. According to Munch, Mengele took all his files on January 18 and loaded them in his car as he escaped Auschwitz. The only things that have been found at the Auschwitz Museum are isolated pages. I have copies of three that fell out of the file as he was in a hurry, grabbing his files and taking them with him.
If I saw Mengele today, I would go up to him, look him straight in the eyes, and number one ask him, "What did you inject into us?" Number two, I would say, "I forgive you — not because you deserve it, but because I and every human being who has ever been victimized deserves to be free. And I deserve to be free from what you imposed upon me in 1944.” ~ Eva Kor, Quora (eight years ago)
Jet Foncannon:
Tacitus (Annalen) made the insightful comment: “It is only human to hate those we have abused.” I was reminded of this comment when I heard that Mengele, in his flight from justice, would often rail against the Jews who were hunting him.
The forgiveness exercised by the poster is commendable and extraordinary. Forgiveness is the most underutilized of the human virtues. But it is the only action that allows us freedom from hate.
Morty Goldmacher:
Mengele sorted the new arrivals into those who would be immediately killed and those who would be slaves. Most victims had at least a brief glimpse of him. My mom recalled every detail of his appearance.
*
EVA KOR ON HER SURVIVAL
When I was 10 years old, my twin sister and I were used in medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. He injected me with a deadly germ and a few days later he came to the sick barrack where I was sent. He never even examined me. He looked at my fever chart and declared, laughing sarcastically, "Too bad, she's so young — she has only two weeks to live." At that time I knew he was right — I was very ill. But I refused to die. I made a silent pledge: That I will prove Mengele wrong, that I will survive, and I will be reunited with Miriam.
For the next two weeks I was between life and death. I have only one memory — crawling on the barrack floor, because I no longer could walk. There was a faucet on the other end of the barrack. As I was crawling, I would fade in and out of consciousness. I just kept thinking, I must survive, I must survive. After two weeks, my fever broke and I immediately felt a lot stronger. It took me another 3 weeks before my fever chart showed normal and I was released from the barrack of the living dead and reunited with my twin sister Miriam. That event — surviving whatever I was injected with — serves to me as a very big source of strength.
When my son had cancer, I couldn't get him to accept the fact that he had to fight for his life, that he had to make the choice to fight for his life. No one else could do it for him. I repeated to him the story of my survival in Auschwitz. He got mad at me and I just said, "Alex, when I was in Auschwitz, the doctors who were around me wanted me dead. I made the decision that I would live. Can you make that decision?" He got mad at me and hung up the phone — he wasn't ready to deal with it. But he called me back two days later. Alex said, "Mom, I think I understand it. This is my Auschwitz. This is my struggle that I need to survive." If the person who is suffering from cancer doesn't even want to make the decision to live, no one can help them. My son is alive today.
The fact that I have overcome so much adversity in my life helps me to have hope during tough times. I believe if I could survive Auschwitz, if I could survive crawling on the barrack floor between life and death, I could probably survive anything. Basically that is the way we gain confidence in our ability. When we overcome one difficulty and one hardship, we can build on that when any other hardship comes along in life. I also like the fact that people who hear me speak can tune in and feel inspired. They see that I could do it, and they realize they can overcome whatever they are trying to overcome too. That is helpful to realize, that maybe each of us can help others overcome by sharing our stories.
You can also look for ideas on YouTube and the Internet for people who have overcome tough times. You will find a story that fits your situation. Then when you are inspired, DO something. Make a commitment to yourself. Make a promise and keep it close by. If you get off track, don’t feel guilty — we all do it. Just get right back on it.
Eva Kor, pointing to the photo of herself and her sister on the book cover
Oriana:
This is an inspiring stories, the kind of story we want to hear. We don’t wish to hear of those whose will to live was as ardent, but the cancer ultimately prevailed. Eva, and later her son, had the physiological energy of youth. While the will to live is an important factor in survival, especially if there is something important to live for, there are other variables as well, such as needing to answer the nasty question: how aggressive is the cancer? Is the person still in the early seventies, or already in his/her late eighties?
The problem with inspiring stories is (or at least can be) is that these we may think of those who lost the battle as “losers.” And it may be sheer luck — a less aggressive cancer, a piece of vital health information reaching the patient at just the right time, a brilliant physician by sheer lucky chance replacing the mediocre one.
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SOME THOUGHTS ON THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD
~ Don’t mistake Russian World War II nostalgia for what it really is: the celebration of the survival of the regime. Since Soviet communism was, at best, no better than German Nazism, there was not much to celebrate about victory in World War II for the Soviet people or their captive countries.
The Soviet Union lost more people — soldiers and civilians — in winning that war, than either Germany or Japan did in losing it. Bear in mind that Germany and Japan were fighting the largest geopolitical entities on Earth, mostly without assistance (the British Commonwealth, the United States, and the Soviet Union, in the case of Germany, and the British Commonwealth, the United States, and China, in the case of Japan), and that the Soviet Union was fighting only Germany, essentially.
Equally, bear in mind that both Axis countries were heavily bombed during the course of the war. The reasons for such a tremendous loss of Soviet life were because 1) Soviet military tactics, and equipment, were largely inferior to its enemy’s 2) communism was a terrible way to organize society and distribute vital material for the best use of the people and, most crucially, 3) the Soviet leaders didn’t care how many people had to die in order to win the conflict.
The same regime that won World War II didn’t go away. The last (as well as first) President of the Soviet Union was a lifelong Communist Party apparatchik, born in 1931, who was a regional party leader (Stavropol Krai), and given charge of a Politburo ministry portfolio (agriculture). And he, Gorbachev, gave way to the first President of the Russian Federation, who was a lifelong Communist Party apparatchik, born in 1931, who was a regional party leader (Sverdlovsk Oblast), and given charge of a Politburo ministry portfolio (construction). Yeltsin tapped Putin, who was a KGB colonel during the Soviet days, and remained in the service, as secret police tend to do. Dmitri Medvedev was only an understudy stand-in for Putin.
Thirty years the Soviet Union has been gone, and there hasn’t been one leader of Russia unconnected to the Soviet regime. This is why the Russian state holds a candle for May Day and Stalingrad. The only positive legacy of 100 years’ worth of communist and post-communist rule that the regime might point to are World War II victory (which involved a lot of foreign aid and a lot of human sacrifice) and Olympic glory. Not even the Space Race has much cachet, these days, given the pathetic state of Roscosmos and the USA reaching the moon first (and solely). ~
Matt Wilson, Quora
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DEFECTORS FROM RUSSIA REVEAL CRIMES
~ As an influential human rights activist and journalist, Vladimir Osechkin has long been a thorn in the side of many powerful Russians. After founding Gulagu.net in 2011 – a collaborative human rights organization targeting corruption and torture in Russia – he has overseen a string of high-profile investigations accusing Russian institutions and ministries of crimes. One alleged the systematic rape of male prisoners in Russian prisons.
But it was Gulagu.net’s work since Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border in February that gave the organization newfound international relevance.
The prison investigation inspired one group of officers from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) – the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB – to turn whistleblower, driven by what the officers said was their “disgusted surprise” at Gulagu.net’s findings, Osechkin said. This led to #windofchange, a series of letters purportedly from FSB personnel shared with Osechkin’s organization. Published online by Osechkin’s team, they detailed their dissent with Russia’s direction and war in Ukraine.
Putin’s so-called “special military operation” wasn’t the only movement of Russians after February 24. It also sparked “a big wave” of Russian officials leaving their homeland, Osechkin said, dwarfed only by the flood of men fleeing the Kremlin’s “partial mobilization” order in September. Now, he told CNN, “It’s every day some people … ask [for] our help.”
Many are low-level soldiers, but among them are far bigger prizes: Osechkin says their number include an ex-government minister and a former three-star Russian general – CNN has confirmed the identities of an ex-FSB officer and Wagner mercenaries.
In January, Osechkin helped a former Wagner commander who fled Russia on foot into neighboring Norway to claim asylum. The ex-soldier was in fear for his life after refusing to renew his contract with the mercenary group.
“When the person is in the very high level, they understand very well how the machine of Putin’s regime worked and they have a very good understanding that if they open [up about it], it’s very high risk of the act of terrorism with Novichok or killers,” Osechkin told CNN. Novichok was the nerve agent used in a 2018 attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. The UK government assessed that the Russian government “almost certainly” approved the poisoning; Moscow denied involvement.
Implicit in such officials’ escape from Russia through Osechkin’s network is an agreement to provide him with information about Moscow’s inner workings. Some of that ends up in the hands of European intelligence agencies, with whom Osechkin has regular contact, he said.
One former senior FSB lieutenant who Osechkin is helping in Europe, Emran Navruzbekov, said he prepared FSB directives on Russia’s espionage operations in Europe to offer Western intelligence agencies.
“Our FSB bosses asked their agents in Europe to find out about the ‘mercenaries’ who would go to Ukraine. Volunteers who go to fight for Ukraine they call terrorists. I kept such correspondence,” he told CNN.
Some of those that Osechkin helps carry information – even military secrets – that he admits is of limited interest to his human rights organization. But Western intelligence agencies have very different priorities.
Michel Yakovleff, an ex-French army general and former deputy commander of NATO operations, who at CNN’s request reviewed several military files obtained by Osechkin, said that while they may not hold much importance for a military commander, “these are bits of intelligence. Even if they are individually moderately interesting, they build up a picture. And that is the interest of intelligence gathering.”
One ex-Russian general brought with him military documents including an architectural plan of a building, according to Osechkin, with a legend detailing the meaning of the symbols, listing utilities and construction dates.
The general, seeking to win European favor, hoped Western authorities would see their value, Osechkin said. Intelligence sources have confirmed the likely authenticity of the documents to CNN but raised questions over their utility and exclusivity.
For Yakovleff, documents aren’t the only currency defectors hold.
Alongside the military documents, the ex-Russian general ferried information on corruption within the military and secret recordings showing how the FSB pulls the strings even within military units, Osechkin said.
Another defector, 32-year-old Maria Dmitrieva, escaped with purported secrets from within the FSB’s ranks. She told CNN that she had worked for a month as a doctor for the FSB. In preparation for her defection, she says she secretly recorded conversations with patients, whose symptoms sometimes hid state secrets.
One operative with the infamous GRU – or Russian military intelligence – was suffering from malaria after an unpublicized mission in Africa, she said. Other conversations revealed Chechen officials being given judicial impunity, she alleged, or officials discussing the collapse in the Russian army.
CNN has been unable to verify this independently.
Dmitrieva, who is seeking asylum in the south of France, leaving behind her family and her boyfriend who she says works for Russian intelligence, is unsure whether the information she provided to authorities will be enough to guarantee her permanent asylum.
“You need good reasons to defect,” Yakovleff said. “It’s not all of a sudden, [that] ‘it dawned upon me that democracy is better than tyranny, and therefore here I am.’”
“That’s one of the first questions [intelligence agencies] are going to have. ‘Why is this person defecting now?’” he added.
Ex-FAB officer Navruzbekov claimed that desperation over Russia’s chances in Ukraine was driving many of his colleagues to look for an escape.
“Now in the FSB it’s every man for himself, everyone wants to escape from Russia. Every second FSB officer wants to run away,” he told CNN.
“They already understand that Russia will never win this war, they will just go out of their way to find some solution,” he said.
For Dmitrieva too, the war in Ukraine was the trigger. She said that she hopes to inspire others inside the system to undermine Putin’s regime.
“I am not afraid of anyone except the Almighty. Because it is important for me that by my action I can set an example for my compatriots, fellow security officials, enforcers,” she said.
She left behind more than her family in Moscow. Dmitrieva says her position afforded her unique privileges, including a luxury car with state number plates and an office with views of the defense ministry. She says she has no regrets about leaving.
“What inspires me the most is that I am sure that I am taking the correct actions to stop what’s happening so that less people will die,” Dmitrieva said.
“Putin and his retinue and everyone who approves of this war – these people are murderers. Why are [you] bothering this country that has been fine for 30 years?”
Osechkin said that the Ukrainian heritage and family ties of many Russian officials played a key role in their defection, prompting them to join a years-long exodus of journalists and human rights defenders from Russia.
“There is no truth in this war,” he said. “It’s the war of the one man who wants to save his power, his control over Russia and who wants to enter it in the international history and books in schools.”
As a result of his work aiding in the escape of whistleblowers from Russia, Osechkin has become something of a beacon for defectors, who know that he has the contacts with Western authorities and public profile to ensure the most effective treatment of the secrets they smuggle out.
Wary of attempts by Moscow to infiltrate his organization and discredit his work, his colleagues verify the identity of all those that they help, Osechkin said.
Even so, one man posing as a defector embarrassed Gulagu.net, his apparent motives – not to actually defect – only revealed after Osechkin had streamed four interviews with him on the organization’s YouTube channel. In a video interview with another blogger, the imposter criticized Osechkin’s level of care toward him once he was in Europe. Osechkin admits this can make it harder for real whistleblowers to trust him.
Osechkin argues that the “real secret agents of the Russian Federation” don’t need his help to enter Europe.
European allies have taken an increasingly aggressive stance against Russian spying after a string of Russian attacks, including the 2014 occupation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, the Skripal poisoning in the UK and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.
Last year, 600 Russians were expelled from European countries, 400 of whom were spies, according to the British intelligence services. Many were working as diplomats.
Osechkin also feels that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a turning point for the Russian leader, undoing decades of Russian stability under his power.
“He has a lot of enemies in his system because they worked with him [for] more than 20 years for the stability and for the money and for a beautiful life for the next generations. And now, in this year, Putin annulled this perspective of their life,” he said. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/25/europe/russia-fsb-defectors-osechkin-intl-cmd/index.html
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RUSSIA’S ALLEGED “GAY LOBBY”
This may or may not be true — Mossad would likely know, along with the CIA.
~ from 30% to 50% of highest ranking officials in the government are homosexual men, and “gay lobby” is believed to be the most powerful in Russia. In some state corporations, the percentage of gays among top management is similar.
In 2008, two candidates vying for the president’s chair were not some random picks: both Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov were gay making it safe to assume that they would not overstay their welcome after four years. In the end, Medvedev was chosen because he was shorter than Ivanov.
Yuri Kovalchuk, Putin’s confidante and billionaire, is gay. So are Sergey Kirienko, First Deputy Chief of Staff; Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of State Duma; Herman Gref, CEO and Chairman of Sberbank; Vladislav Surkov, main ideologist of Kremlin; Vladimir Medinsky, former minister of culture and chairman of the General Council; TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselev who vouched to destroy the UK with nukes; Sergey Axenov, Crimea Governor; Denis Pushilin, head of Donetsk People’s Republic, and many more. ~ (Quora)
Oriana:
Given that Russia is officially anti-gay, and Putin, himself gay, presents himself as a promoter of “traditional family values,” this is amazing. (See my past blog: https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2022/09/is-putin-gay-best-mental-health-advice.html )
Medvedev as painted by Konstantin Aldunin
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THE LONG AMERICAN COUNTER-REVOLUTION
~ U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and even the civil wars are above average.
In the orthodox telling, there was only one revolution that mattered, after all. The fact that American revolutionaries won their independence in part because the French intervened in their British civil war has often been narrated as at most a useful irony. Certainly Africans or Natives had nothing to do with it, except as desperate fighters for their own marginal purposes: defined out of the story partly because they lost but mostly because, well, they were defined out of the story. Yet the century-long debate between “Progressive” (read: radical) versus “Whig” (liberal and conservative) historians about whether ordinary white people benefited or whether elites did has begun to seem almost beside the point: there was more at stake for others than republicanism or nationhood.
The certainty that “the people” and their liberties triumphed and set the stage for future progress doesn’t seem sufficient as history anymore. Casting the U.S. Civil War as a second good revolution—a resolution of unfinished business that finally ended slavery (how stubborn it proved!) and created a real nation-state—leaves many questions unanswered.
If Revolutionary-era ideas and Civil War identities are so powerful and bend so decisively toward justice, why are the wrong ones winning? No wonder the settler revolutionaries of 1776 realized that the first priority was spin—or as Thomas Jefferson put it so delicately in the Declaration of Independence, “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”
The United States claimed to be the first self-determined nation, a model for anti-monarchy and anti-colonialism. In a nationalist, liberal world, this was everything, and in particular a beacon against reaction. For socialists it was primitive, if not worse than nothing: a bourgeois mirage, or just an exception (the too-often unappreciated subtext of the famous question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”). Marxists have long kept a cordon sanitaire around the American Revolution, focusing instead on the resulting nation’s imperialism; their inquiries were dominated by the French, Russian, and decolonizing revolutions. The real problem may have been the inability to see counter-revolution as something that could happen here.
That tide has slowly been turning. For two decades Gerald Horne, the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, has been building a well-documented argument for rethinking the entirety of U.S. history in terms of empires and insurrections and counter-revolutions. With his latest book, The Counter-Revolution of 1836, he has given us a distinctive magnum opus: the longest and perhaps most challenging of his many books.
Horne places Texas and its revolution at the center of the national story that now stretches, in his series of studies, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, with occasional instructive asides about how unsurprising the right-wing resurgence of our era ought to be to anyone with an unblinkered knowledge of history. Instead of a sanguine trajectory from Jamestown or Plymouth to Obama, it’s the story of Christopher Columbus to Trump, with the loss of redemption that this should imply and then some.
A lawyer and an activist before he became a professor of history, Horne files his detailed briefs with an urgency that match his commitment to a Black anti-capitalist internationalism. He’s made many contributions, especially to the history of the left in the twentieth century, but lately his broad and ambitious accounts of an earlier United States in a hemisphere of empires and enslaved people have scaled up, giving readers a more synoptic and honest account than we have been getting from the doyens and the textbooks.
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A major theme in Horne’s work has been the importance of Black political engagement, from the left, with other nations. As he put it in 2011, “the fate of those now known as African Americans has been shaped indelibly by the global correlation of forces, or what older scholars once termed the ‘motion of history,’ and we ignore this reality at our peril.”
A lot of historians today talk about transnational history: Horne simply does it, taking for granted how much is at stake for ordinary Black people in war, imperial conquests, liberation movements abroad, travel, and both official and unofficial diplomatic ventures. In some ways he’s an old-fashioned imperial historian, with a sense that clashes of empires affect everyone. Where he differs is in his focus on what Black Americans, indigenous peoples, and their allies abroad have made of those imperial clashes, and what that history has made of those potentially and sometimes actually revolutionary meetings.
Horne’s 1688 is not mainly the “Glorious” Revolution triumph of England’s Parliament over absolute monarchy: it’s when the merchants triumphed over the Royal African Company to deregulate the African slave trade. In The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014), after summarizing the expansion of slavery and of enslaved restiveness in the Caribbean and southern mainland, Horne pivoted to argue that rising British antislavery, in response to slave rebellions and disgust with North American and West Indian greed, motivated planter-rebels and their merchant allies to mount the ensuing civil war in the British empire. The real revolutionaries, in other words, were the enslaved; the vaunted American Revolution was nothing less—or, nothing more—than a counter-revolution against the strivings of the truly oppressed of America and their budding alliance with the metropole. We don’t have to wait for C. L. R. James’s “Black Jacobins”—the focus of his 1938 study of the Haitian revolution—to find enslaved rebels rocking the new world.
At the time the book was published, only specialists and aficionados remarked on how uncompromisingly Horne pressed his view of the American Revolution as a British civil war that functioned to shut down rather than inspire Black liberation. This changed in late 2019, after Nikole Hannah-Jones relied on Horne’s strongly worded argument, though without at first mentioning him, in the lead essay for the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Her assertion that a desire to hang onto their slaves was “one of the primary reasons” colonists “decided to declare their independence” provoked a firestorm, with major, celebrated historians like Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz joining with right-wing outlets and Trotskyists alike to denounce Hannah-Jones as falsifying history.
Eventually, a particularly genocidal and capitalist Anglo version evolved based on cynical uses of race. Indigenes and Africans resisted violently, and sometimes succeeded in the short term, especially when they could join together or find allies among competing empires at the borders of one colony or another. Meanwhile, successive English revolutions and civil wars, of the 1640s–50s and of 1688, led to expansions of the British slave trade. Finally, in the British colonies, settlers realized that their imperial overlords were not always their friends over against other subjects. The “revolting spawn” of Britain, not just planters but also merchants, committed counter-revolution—revolting against crown and against the threat from below—to increase their control over land and people. (Horne’s use of “spawn” throughout his books rebukes the happy “birth” and organic “growth” of the republic in conventional histories.)
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For Horne, 1836 is as much a linchpin of this history as 1776 because it turns the original Caribbean and coastal dynamics of settler colonialism into a continental force that has endured up to our own age of rising neo-fascism. Here the counter-revolution is against Mexico, which had infuriated the Anglo settlers it had warily welcomed by intermittently abolishing slavery by law as well as by failing to protect its northern provinces against the Comanche and other native nations.
The revolutionary republic of Texas (1836–45), in this sense, anticipated the dilemma of the southern states after gradual emancipation in the northern United States: they had abolitionists at their door, not to mention the threat—or opportunity—of scheming British and French empires looking to limit the growing United States, whether that meant safeguarding slavery or liberating slaves. The very fluid borders that enabled slave drivers to move to Texas continued to beckon fugitives and raiders of cattle and persons.
Texas was born in border crisis and civil war that repeatedly slid into race war in the name of nation-making. Gary Clayton Anderson called it a fifty-year war that amounted, as he put it in the title of his 2005 book, to The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land. The dynamic of border, or really regional, violence has also been captured more recently by Brian DeLay and Pekka Hämäläinen with emphasis on the role of the Comanche. Andrew Torget’s Seeds of Empire (2015) portrayed the contest for Texas in light of the rise of cotton, and in South to Freedom (2020), Alice Baumgartner has analyzed the role of fugitive slaves in shaping southern border politics all the way to the Civil War. Horne brings these insights together at great length, tracing how Texas followed upon Indian removal in Georgia in combining corrupt theft of land with the rapid expansion of slavery.
In Texas and bordering Indian Territory as well as New Mexico, Native refugees suffered and sometimes exacerbated the pattern of civil wars and enslaving ventures. This counter-revolution by slavers might as easily be called a Mexican civil war over slavery, since Mexico’s insistence on abolition only stiffened in the ensuing years. Northward, the sheer disorder, and the distinct possibility of international intervention (British, but also French) became an excuse to argue, anew, for annexation to the United States. White Texans displayed only a very conditional loyalty to the United States, though: pushing for security for their property, they bought off and slaughtered Natives on their own terms regardless of federal policy. Like the Virginians and Carolinians of 1776, they dominated a slavocracy that, Horne implies, provided just enough incentives, or American dreams, for poorer whites who stuck around.
Much of this long book is a retelling of the sheer violence and brutality of early Texas, “bent” as it was “on dismembering Mexico” and exterminating Natives in order to sustain an economy built on land speculation and slave labor. The period of Texas independence was characterized by “incessant warfare,” “an overall culture of rampant violence that has yet to dissipate.”
Never satisfied with enough fertile land or slaves, ever nervous about its borders, Texas ultimately set the stage for the next counter-revolution by enslavers in 1861. In the standard history, the Civil War represents the most fundamental break with the American past; for Horne, Texas is the Civil War exception that proves the rule. Planters flocked to Texas with their slaves from the threat and reality of Union occupation; after the war, Confederates made it their base, along with French-occupied Mexico. The “real and imagined indignities” of having their property expropriated by government-sponsored emancipation (if not for the refugees among them) “fed a terrorist insurgency” and white Texans’ enduring hatred of the federal government “that propels politics even today.” That government also armed Black people, though the protections offered to Black Texans by the Union Army suffered from deployments west to put down Natives.
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The basic pieces of this story are not new, Horne acknowledges. Like most historians writing from below, Horne hangs the oppressors with their own web of words. (It’s easier to do for Texans in the 1800s, who seem to have written each other constantly about their fears, than for Northerners in 1776; the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin actually had liberal ideals and had to worry what the British and the French would say, given that the entire justification of colonial protests and eventually rebellion rested not just on traditional English liberties but on “natural rights.”) What’s new and worthy of careful consideration is the framing. Horne is not interested in explicit theorizing: when he sees a concept that’s useful, like settler colonialism, he adopts rather than refining it. He avoids talk of “racial capitalism,” but he gives it empirical grounding. Texas renewed and turbo-charged the relationship between settler colonialism, enslavement, capitalism, and racism.
Most of all, Horne is breaking out of a certain hardline Marxist reluctance to view the United States as anything but capitalism liberated from feudal restraints. That rigid attitude isn’t exactly popular among U.S. socialists today—it hasn’t been since at least the 1960s, and especially since Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) gained a wide audience—but it still exerts a historiographic pressure and rears its head in perennial debates over the relation between race and class. Horne’s strategy isn’t to repudiate Marxism but to evoke (though not explicitly) Marx’s theory of political reaction—the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), where history returns as tragedy and then as regime-changing farce, but with no less suffering for the absurdity.
If revolution is defined as not-necessarily-successful liberation struggles from below aided by outside forces in a world of competing empires, and counter-revolution is what shuts it down, then fascism is the politics that sacrifices everything to the unity and rule of the blood-defined class: racial capitalism with few restraints. It is always complaining about borders even as it occupies others’ lands, and it is ever identifying enemies, foreign and domestic. It tends toward extreme corruption as the economy is not recognized to have any independent existence beyond the political rule that sustains it and its small ruling class. Violence is continually justified and celebrated. It’s not inherently European: maybe Germany and Italy were the exceptions, the late wannabe empires. It’s a politics of nouveau-riche property owners and slavers: settlers let loose and threatened from all sides. It is home grown.
For his part, Horne is at his most persuasive in stressing the long origins and long effects of what happened in 1836, and he is very clear that the implications for our times are disturbing. The United States is “fundamentally right-wing” because of this legacy, he concludes, so much so that “traditional political labels tend to lose meaning.” We couldn’t be much further from hoary invocations of American liberalism—but that’s what’s so valuable here, as that venerable tradition seems unable to grapple with racial domination as anything other than irony, contradiction, or paradox.
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Thanks in part to the influence of a slew of antiracist histories that inform Horne’s synthesis, American educators are at an impasse: Does the Revolution (or the Civil War for that matter) still represent a usable past? Can it explain anything about where we are, except as an example of failed revolutionary change? The 1619 Project exposed this impasse yet largely ignored early America, vast or English, outside of its invocation of early-bred anti-Blackness. But however constrained, and despite the limitations of its desire to replace one founding year with another, it showed which way the wind is blowing.
It’s easier to understand these people in a tradition of counter-revolution than of liberal-republican consensus based in enlightened reason and equality for all. Horne doesn’t deny the Revolution and the Civil War mattered. He rather brings out their counter-revolutionary dimensions and remembers neglected episodes that may have been just as or more important in, for example, Texas. Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, his Gulf South–oriented U.S. history is a rejoinder to several varieties of north-south or east-west ways of looking at our past. Instead of Texas exceptionalism, it’s America as Texas.
What a stirring if depressing counterpoint this is to the lyrical, similarly bracing, yet in the end optimistic brief version of Texas-as-American-history offered by Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth (2021). It isn’t an accident that Horne is inclined to mock the pretensions of Juneteenth as a national holiday if it reduces emancipation to a day that a Union General rode into Galveston. His Texas is more like Walter Johnson’s St. Louis in The Broken Heart of America (2020), where “much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness” and the changes reveal essential continuities. The point isn’t to be fatally pessimistic—to view the future as foregone conclusion—but to see the challenge clearly. Horne’s broader framework and oeuvre demand our attention as the most far-reaching such exercise on offer today. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-long-american-counter-revolution/
Mary:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ~ Henry Ford
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WHEN PARENTS ARE DYING, TRY TO BE WITH THEM
~ “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poignant verse on parenting. And yet we are, each of us, someone’s child — physiologically or psychologically or both — and they sing themselves through us as we sing ourselves into our longing for life, whether we like the melody or not.
Like a Zen koan, this fact becomes utterly discomposing when you begin thinking deeply about the fundamental, layered realities beneath the mundane, even banal factuality of the fact. Parents — the very notion of them. The notion that you — this immensely complex totality of sinew and selfhood, this portable universe shimmering with a million ideas and passions and little ways of being-in-the-world that make you you — began as a glimmer in someone else’s eye, a set of chemical reactions that became molecules that became cells in someone else’s body before they constellated into you.
The notion that so many dimensions of your personhood, so many of the givens you take for granted in making sense of the world, were forged by someone other than yourself (and possibly other than the body that begot the cells that became you) — someone who occupies, in the cosmogony of you, this strange and staggering position of arbiter between the existence and nonexistence of the particular you that you are.
The doubly discomposing experience of what happens when that arbiter crosses the threshold of their own nonexistence is what Mary Gaitskill addresses in her thoughtful, tender contribution to Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two) — the wondrous 2002 anthology by artist and writer James L. Harmon, inspired by one of his own spiritual parents: Rilke and his timeless Letters to a Young Poet.
Gaitskill writes:
“My advice here is very specific and practicable. It is advice I wish someone had given me as forcefully as I’m about to give it now: When your parents are dying, you should go be with them. You should spend as much time as you can. This may seem obvious; you would be surprised how difficult it can be. It is less difficult if you have a good relationship with the parent or, even if you don’t, if you’re old enough to have lost friends and to have seriously considered your own death. Even so, it may be more difficult than you think.”
With the sensitive caveat that there exist people “to whom this general directive does not apply” and her advice is not meant as a rebuke to those people, Gaitskill addresses those of us raised by fallible parents who, in one way or another, failed dreadfully at the deepest task of parenting — unconditional love:
If you’re a young person who has had a bad relationship with your parent, it’s a nightmare of anger, confusion, and guilt. Even if you hate them, you may still not want to believe it’s happening… Even if your parents have been abusive, physically or emotionally, they are part of you in a way that goes beyond personality or even character. Maybe “beyond” isn’t the right word. They are part of you in a way that runs beneath the daily self. They have passed an essence to you. This essence may not be recognizable; your parents may have made its raw matter into something so different than what you have made of it that it seems you are nothing alike. That they have given you this essence may be no virtue of theirs — they may not even have chosen to do so. (It may not be biological either; all I say here I would say about adoptive as well as birth parents.)
Being with a dying parent, Gaitskill notes, is a way of honoring the fact — so basic yet so incomprehensible a fact — that they will soon be gone, and with them will go your experience of being their child in the way you have known, a fundamental way in which you have known yourself. At the heart of this dual recognition is “the hard truth that we know nothing about who we are or what our lives mean.” She writes:
Nothing makes this plainer than being in the presence of a dying person for any length of time. Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what’s inside us from moment to moment. Being in the presence of death can break you open, disgorging feelings that are deeper and more powerful than anything you thought you knew. If you have had a loving, clear relationship with your parent, this experience probably won’t be quite as wrenching. There may in fact be moments of pure tenderness, even exaltation.
But you might still have to watch your parent appear to break, mentally and physically, disintegrating into something you can no longer recognize. In some ways this is terrible — many people find it absolutely so. There is another side to it, though: In witnessing this seeming breakage, we are glimpsing the part of our parents that doesn’t translate in human terms, that which we know nothing about, and which the human container is too small to give shape to.
Because any emotional experience we have when facing another is always an emotional experience we have within, and about, ourselves — especially if that other gave rise to this self — facing this supraknowable quality is facing the limits of our own self-knowledge. Gaitskill writes:
~ Knowing your feelings is hard too because there’s so much emotion, it’s hard to tell which is truest. Part of you might want to leave right away; part of you might want to stay forever. That’s why I advised that you stay “for as long as you can.” What that means will vary with each person, with the needs of the parent and the other relations. A day might be enough, or it might take a whole month. If it’s a prolonged situation, it might be good to leave for a few days and come back. Those decisions are so personal they are beyond the scope of my advice — except my advice to pay close attention to yourself. If you feel, To hell with this, I’m getting out, don’t worry — there’s room for that. Maybe in fact you should leave. But before you do, be sure that voice is not shouting down a truer one. When your parents die, you will never see them again. You might think you understand that, but until it happens, you don’t. ~
In a sentiment on the surface contradictory but in fact consonant with the deeper meaning of what artist Louise Bourgeois inscribed into her lifelong diary in her old age — “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.” — Gaitskill concludes:
They say that you come into the world alone and that you leave alone too. But you aren’t born alone; your mother is with you, maybe your father too. Their presence may have been loving, it may have been demented, it may have been both. But they were with you. When they are dying, remember that. And go be with them.
Complement this fragment of Take My Advice — which also includes novelist Richard Powers on the most important attitude you can take toward your life and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to honor your inner world — with Richard Dawkins on the luckiness of death, Marcus Aurelius on embracing mortality as the key to living fully, and Zen Hospice Project founder Frank Ostaseski on the five life-redeeming invitation to extend in facing death, then revisit this tender illustrated meditation on the cycle of life.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-your-parents-are-dying-some-of-the-simplest-most-difficult-and-redemptive-life-advice-you-ll?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR
~ Lincoln’s position wasn't popular in the North
The story of the Civil War is all about division within one’s own country. But the schisms ran deeper than just North against South—there were also cracks within the Union itself, even after the Southern states seceded.
Up North, a group called the “Peace Democrats” opposed everything about Lincoln’s leadership and his war. In time, these dissidents would be nicknamed “ Copperheads,” after the venomous snake. Some of them were Southern loyalists; others were Democrats who strictly adhered to a reading of the Constitution that privileged states’ rights above federal powers.
One of Lincoln’s most notable critics was Horatio Seymour, the governor of New York. Tensions between the two leaders came to an ugly head during the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863.
Many of New York’s working-class citizens were incensed over the Enrollment Act of 1863, which established a draft lottery and provided a means for wealthy draft-eligible men to avoid conscription by paying a hefty fee instead. What might have begun with principled indignation towards the legislation soon devolved into terroristic violence and destruction. The rioters targeted African Americans and the businesses that catered to them, killing many and even setting fire to an orphanage.
Governor Seymour, for his part, was not only seen by the public to be potentially siding with the rioters, he even referred to them as “my friends” in a speech shortly afterward.
Elsewhere in the country, when former Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham made an anti-war speech, he was seized by Union troops and tried by a military court. Vallandigham was all set to go to prison until Lincoln decided to commute his sentence and banish him to the Confederacy.
2. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davies were not staunch secessionists
Jefferson Davis, the man who would eventually become the Confederacy’s first and only president, was originally a senator from Mississippi who opposed early calls for secession. But when Davis learned that his home state officially voted to leave the union in January 1861, he decided to stick by his state, rather than his country. He did so with a heavy heart, saying it was “the saddest day of my life.”
This was a time when many politicians and citizens thought of themselves in terms of state first, country second. In Davis’s eyes, there was no other choice, and he eventually headed to Montgomery, Alabama, where the heads of the recently seceded Southern states were planning to meet and form the Confederate States of America.
Even when Davis had his doubts about secession, his mind was entirely made up about the war’s defining ideological difference: In 1857, a newspaper reports him proclaiming that “African slavery, as it exists in the United States, was a moral, a social, and a political blessing.” Even if there were plenty of racists in the North and unionists in the South, the question of slavery largely defined the outlines of the war.
Robert E. Lee followed a similar ideological trajectory on the issue of secession. Though he was initially against it, his real loyalties were with his home state of Virginia. After Virginia’s state convention voted to secede by a count of 88 to 55 on April 17th, 1861, Lee resigned from the United States military, where he was a colonel, and went to work for the Confederate army.
While in command, Lee served under Davis, who apparently got over his whole secession-phobia in a big way. In a late 1862 speech to the legislature of Mississippi, he declared, “After what has happened during the last two years, my only wonder is, that we consented to live for so long a time in association with such miscreants …”
3. The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery
When President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it declared: “[All] persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Old-timey jargon aside, Lincoln was basically saying “Slaves in the rebelling states are free ... if we win.” It was what many people wanted to hear, but it still had some important limitations.
First, it left out border states like Kentucky and Delaware. And none of it would really matter if the Union didn’t prevail.
Despite that, it was also a huge win for abolitionists. This was really an announcement that the Civil War was no longer a war just to preserve the Union; freeing the enslaved population was now an official objective for Lincoln and his army. It emboldened the abolitionists in the North and made opposing countries like France and the UK bristle at the thought of supporting the pro-slavery forces of the Confederacy.
Still, it would be another two years before slavery would actually come to an end in the United States. In June 1865, Union troops led by General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that all 250,000 enslaved people in the state were officially free. Today,
Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19 to honor this occasion, though it’s worth noting that even after that date, slavery continued in some places within the United States. Neither Delaware nor Kentucky ended slavery during the Civil War, so some historians estimate there were still around 65,000 enslaved people in 1865.
In December 1865, the end of slavery was finally put into law when Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which stated “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
4. Lincoln wasn’t the keynote speaker on the day of the Gettysburg Address
On November 19, 1863, a crowd of 15,000 gathered to witness the dedication of a military cemetery on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers had died over a three-day span in July.
Coming in at around 270 words, President Lincoln powered through the Gettysburg Address in less than three minutes. And contrary to what you might have heard, no, Lincoln didn’t scribble the speech onto an envelope on the way to the battlefield. Lincoln’s secretary later commented that with all the noise, distractions, and rockings and joltings, it would have been impossible to write anything on the moving train, and the surviving drafts of the speech are written in Lincoln’s normal, steady handwriting. She did note that Lincoln finished up the speech that morning, but romanticizing it as history’s greatest rush job is definitely overstating it.
One thing that you might not know about the address is that Lincoln wasn’t pegged to be the main speaker on that day. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, a distinguished scholar and orator who took the stage before the president.
Everett’s speech would go on for around two hours, totaling upwards of 13,000 words. It was a speech he poured his heart and soul into, along with months of research. He obsessed over every account of the battle, from both the Northern and Southern perspectives, in order to get the words just right. Throughout the speech, he retold the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, interspersed with flowery ruminations on the idea of liberty and a plea for unity, saying, “these bonds of union are of perennial force and energy, while the causes of alienation are imaginary, factitious, and transient. The heart of the People, North and South, is for the Union.”
After Everett finished his speech, the president shook his hand and told him, “I am more than gratified, I am grateful to you.” Then the Thunder-Stealer-in-Chief rang out with “Four score and seven years ago ...” and made Everett’s magnum opus a historical footnote in under 180 seconds.
Even Everett himself knew he was one-upped by Lincoln, writing soon after that, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/7-misconceptions-about-the-civil-war?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Obviously, I quoted from the article only selectively.
I’m still stunned when I ponder the statement that the American Civil War was the bloodiest civil war in human history.
And it’s disquieting to think of the denial one can encounter in accounts by historians — some claim the war wasn’t about the right to own slaves, but about state rights, slavery being only a side issue.
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CHILDREN’S FINGER LENGTH POINTS TO MOTHER’S INCOME
~ Low-income mothers feminize their children in the womb by adjusting their hormones, whereas high-income mothers masculinize their children, a major study based on finger length, led by a Swansea University expert, has found.
The phenomenon is an unconscious evolutionary response aimed at boosting their offspring's chances of successful reproduction.
It helps, in part, explain associations between low income, low levels of testosterone before birth, and major causes of mortality such as cardiovascular disease.
The study was based on the relationship between the length of a person's index and ring fingers, known as the 2D:4D ratio. A longer ring finger is a marker of higher levels of testosterone, whereas a longer index finger is a marker of higher levels of estrogen. Generally, men have longer ring fingers, whereas women have longer index fingers.
The 2D:4D ratio is a widely-debated measure that has been the subject of over 1000 studies, but what is significant about the new report is that the team examined the ratio in relation to parental income.
Led by Professor John Manning of Swansea University, with colleagues in Austria and Jamaica, the team tested a hypothesis about evolutionary influences on the mother and her children. This suggests that for higher-income mothers, sons have higher reproductive success compared to daughters. For lower-income mothers, in contrast, daughters will be more reproductively successful. Known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, its senior author, Professor Robert Trivers, was also involved in this new study.
The team used data from over 250,000 people from around 200 countries, who were taking part in an online BBC survey. Participants were asked to measure their index and ring fingers and given instructions on how to do this accurately. They were also asked to indicate their parents' income level.
The results showed:
Children of parents of above-average income had a low 2D:4D ratio, with longer ring fingers, which indicates high testosterone and low estrogen before birth, hallmarks of a more masculinized fetus.
Conversely, the children of parents of below-average income had a high 2D:4D ratio with longer index fingers, which indicates lower testosterone and higher estrogen before birth, markers of a more feminized fetus.
These effects were present for both men and women.
Professor John Manning of Swansea University's A-STEM research team in sport science, lead researcher on the study, said:
"Our results show that mothers with high income may secrete high levels of testosterone relative to estrogen early in pregnancy, thereby masculinizing their male and female children. In contrast, women with low income may secrete low levels of testosterone, which will feminize their male and female children.
This is an evolutionary response, which mothers will not be aware of, let alone able to control. It is geared towards giving their offspring the best chance of reproductive success.
For high-income mothers, the advantages of high testosterone for their sons are likely to outweigh its disadvantages for their daughters. For low-income mothers, the fitness gain from feminized daughters is likely to outweigh the fitness loss for feminized sons.
This pattern is consistent with the Trivers-Willard hypothesis.”
Professor Manning explained how the findings could shed light on susceptibility to disease:
"These patterns suggest important effects on public health which are linked to poverty.
Low testosterone and high estrogen in male fetuses may predispose those men, as adults, to diseases linked to poverty such as heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure.
It is well known that poverty is closely associated with poorer health. What our research indicates is that this link can be replicated across generations”.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/647071
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WHAT KIND OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY ENHANCES BRAIN FUNCTION?
~ What if you could look at all the things you do daily — walking from room to room, preparing a presentation at your desk, running up and down stairs to deliver folded laundry or taking a jog around the block — and know which ones will best help or hurt your brain?
A new study attempted to answer that question by strapping activity monitors to the thighs of nearly 4,500 people in the United Kingdom and tracking their 24-hour movements for seven days. Researchers then examined how participants’ behavior affected their short-term memory, problem-solving and processing skills.
Here’s the good news: People who spent “even small amounts of time in more vigorous activities — as little as 6 to 9 minutes — compared to sitting, sleeping or gentle activities had higher cognition scores,” said study author John Mitchell, a Medical Research Council doctoral training student at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health at University College London, in an email.
Moderate physical activity is typically defined as brisk walking or bicycling or running up and down stairs. Vigorous movement, such as aerobic dancing, jogging, running, swimming and biking up a hill, will boost your heart rate and breathing.
The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, found doing just under 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous exertion each day improved study participants’ working memory but had its biggest impact on executive processes such as planning and organization.
The cognitive improvement was modest, but as additional time was spent doing the more energetic workout the benefits grew, Mitchell said.
“Given we don’t monitor participants’ cognition over many years, this may be simply that those individuals who move more tend to have higher cognition on average,” he said. “However, yes, it could also imply that even minimal changes to our daily lives can have downstream consequences for our cognition.”
Steven Malin, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology and health at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told CNN the study provides new insight in how activity interacts with sedentary behavior as well as sleep.
“Understanding the interaction of sleep and various physical activities is often not examined,” said Malin, who was not involved in the new study.
While the study had some limitations, including a lack of knowledge about the health of the participants, the findings illustrate how “the accumulation of movement patterns in a day to a week to a month is just as, if not more important, than just getting outside for a single session of exercise,” he said.
There was bad news as well: Spending more time sleeping, sitting or engaged only in mild movement was linked to a negative impact on the brain. The study found cognition declined 1% to 2% after replacing an equivalent portion of moderate to vigorous physical activity with eight minutes of sedentary behavior, six minutes of light intensity or seven minutes of sleep.
“In most cases we showed that as little as 7 to 10 minutes less MVPA (moderate to vigorous physical activity) was detrimental,” Mitchell said.
That change is only an association, not a cause and effect, due to the observational methods of the study, Mitchell stressed.
In addition, the study’s findings on sleep can’t be taken at face value, he said. Good quality sleep is critical for the brain to operate at peak performance.
“The evidence on the importance of sleep for cognitive performance is strong,” Mitchell said, “yet there are two major caveats. First, over-sleeping can be linked to poorer cognitive performance.
“Secondly, sleep quality may be even more important than duration. Our accelerometer devices can estimate how long people slept for, but cannot tell us how well they slept.”
Additional studies need to be done to verify these findings and understand the role of each type of activity. However, Mitchell said, the study “highlights how even very modest differences in people’s daily movement — less than 10 minutes — is linked to quite real changes in our cognitive health.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/health/physical-activity-type-cognition-wellness/index.html
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A MILLIONAIRE’S PROTOCOL TO REVERSE AGING
~ Novak Djokovic, age 35, sometimes hangs out in a pressurized egg to enrich his blood with oxygen and gives pep talks to glasses of water, hoping to purify them with positive thinking before he drinks them. Tom Brady, 45, evangelizes supposedly age-defying supplements, hydration powders and pliability spheres. LeBron James, 38, is said to spend $1.5 million a year on his body to keep Father Time at bay. While most of their contemporaries have retired, all three of these elite athletes remain marvels of fitness. But in the field of modern health science, they’re amateurs compared to Bryan Johnson.
Johnson, 45, is an ultrawealthy software entrepreneur who has more than 30 doctors and health experts monitoring his every bodily function. The team, led by 29-year-old regenerative medicine physician Oliver Zolman, has committed to help reverse the aging process in every one of Johnson’s organs. Zolman and Johnson obsessively read the scientific literature on aging and longevity and use Johnson as a guinea pig for the most promising treatments, tracking the results every way they know how. Getting the program up and running required an investment of several million dollars, including the costs of a medical suite at Johnson’s home in Venice, California. This year, he’s on track to spend at least $2 million on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.
“The body delivers a certain configuration at age 18,” he says. “This really is an impassioned approach to achieve age 18 everywhere.” Johnson is well aware that this can sound like derangement and that his methods might strike some as biotech-infused snake oil, but he doesn’t much care. “This is expected and fine,” he says of the criticism he’s received.
Johnson, Zolman and the team are more than a year into their experiments, which they collectively call Project Blueprint. This includes strict guidelines for Johnson’s diet (1,977 vegan calories a day), exercise (an hour a day, high-intensity three times a week) and sleep (at the same time every night, after two hours wearing glasses that block blue light). In the interest of fine-tuning this program, Johnson constantly monitors his vital signs. Each month, he also endures dozens of medical procedures, some quite extreme and painful, then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies. “I treat athletes and Hollywood celebrities, and no one is pushing the envelope as much as Bryan,” says Jeff Toll, an internist on the team. All the work, the doctors say, has started to pay off: Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger.
There are some obvious signs that Johnson is at least healthier than most 45-year-olds. The dude is way beyond ripped. His body fat hovers between 5% and 6%, which leaves his muscles and veins on full display. But it’s what has happened inside his body that most excites his doctors. They say his tests show that he’s reduced his overall biological age by at least five years. Their results suggest he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity and fitness of an 18-year-old. “All of the markers we are tracking have been improving remarkably,” says Toll.
Zolman, who got his medical degree from King’s College London, is more measured. He stresses that his work with Johnson is just beginning and that they have hundreds of procedures left to explore, including a range of experimental gene therapies. “We have not achieved any remarkable results,” he says. “In Bryan, we have achieved small, reasonable results, and it’s to be expected.”
In Johnson’s mind, however, success is already at hand. While he isn’t the first software developer to grow fixated on living a healthier life, he’s chasing something close to the ne plus ultra version of what tech-industry types call the quantified-self movement. Over the past decade or so, Silicon Valley’s idea of optimizing your innards has mostly taken the form of the occasional exercise or diet fad, from intermittent fasting to Soylent. Johnson’s pitch is that you have to count a lot more than your steps to get a clear picture of what’s best for your body. “What I do may sound extreme, but I’m trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable,” he says. In conveying the lessons of his unorthodox lifestyle to the rest of us, he’s also counting on a strategy that’s well known in the software business: making it feel, as much as it can, like a game.
In his 30s, Johnson created a payment processing company called Braintree Payment Solutions LLC. It was a massive success, but the long hours and stress left him overweight and deeply depressed, bordering on suicidal. He sold the business to EBay Inc. in 2013 for $800 million in cash, then began a long journey to sort himself out. This included learning more about his biology, an obsession that made its way into his work. He founded a biotech-focused venture firm called OS Fund and then, in 2016, a company called Kernel, which makes helmets that analyze brain activity to learn more about the mind’s inner workings. Researchers are currently using the helmets to try to quantify the impacts of meditation and hallucinogens and find ways to lessen chronic pain. By this time, Johnson had begun tinkering with his body: altering his diet, taking loads of supplements, snorting the occasional vial of stem cells.
I wrote about Kernel (and these early health experiments) for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2021, and I’ve followed Johnson’s physical and mental transformations for a few years now. Throughout, he’s insisted that people don’t have the most important information they need to live healthy lives—that seeing the data in black and white can help people break destructive habits. “You can look at your body and your situation and turn it over to willpower,” he says. “And, like, good luck.” Forcing himself to abide by Blueprint has taken late-night binges (of pizza, booze, whatever) off the table, and all the testing and tweaking has given him confidence that he’s doing as right by his body as he can.
Zolman, a generation younger than Johnson, has experienced his own kind of medical wakeup call. In 2012, his first year of med school in London, Zolman hurt his back playing basketball. The injury proved bad enough that for about a year he struggled to walk properly and sometimes had to use a wheelchair after visits to the hospital. The doctors he met with couldn’t seem to fix things, so he started doing his own research and developing his own physical therapy program, including deep-tissue massages across his legs, glutes, lower back, abs and pelvis. “As soon as I did that,” he says, “boom, I could walk.”
This could sound like the start of any TikToking quack’s sales pitch for enlightenment juice or liver bedazzlers, but Zolman, who isn’t shy about listing his academic achievements, finished his medical degree with honors in 2019. Soon after, he began studying any and all clinical research he thought might help him live healthier for longer.
Zolman is convinced that progress in the field of longevity requires a more concerted pursuit of medicines and therapies that seem in any way promising. Out on the edges of medical science, he argues, there must be better outcomes than the ones we grudgingly accept. In 2021 he opened a firm, 20one Consulting Ltd., in Cambridge, England. “My goal is to prove through biostatistics a reduction of aging of 25% across all 78 organs by 2030,” he says. “It’s an extremely hard and crazy idea.” For beginners, his treatment, offered on a sliding scale, focuses on the basics of improving diet and exercise. More expensive programs, which top out at $1,000 an hour for people in Johnson’s bracket, include lots of testing, therapies and health-aid devices. (He doesn’t charge if the patient doesn’t see results.) Johnson, though, is the only client going this hard.
In Cambridge, Zolman spends much of his time reading research papers and synthesizing their findings into something Johnson can try. “There is no person in the world who is 45 chronologically but 35 in every organ,” Zolman says. “If we can eventually prove clinically and statistically that Bryan has made that change, then it will be such a large effect size that it will have to be causative of the intervention and beyond what’s genetically possible.”
To determine that kind of progress, Zolman says, he keeps track of 10 or more different measurements for each of a patient’s organs. With the brain, for example, he uses a range of MRIs and ultrasounds to track blood flow, tissue volume, scarring, swelling, and plaque growth in the cerebrum, ventricles, midbrain, cerebellum, pituitary and brainstem, and supplements those measurements with cognitive ability tests and blood draws. Configuring the tests, let alone performing them, can be an arduous exercise, because much of the required hardware is usually found only at research institutions.
While he’s effusive and optimistic about his program, Zolman also tries to strike the tone of a realist. He concedes that it will take years to know if he’s chasing the right things and just how well any of this works.
Each morning starting at 5 a.m., Johnson takes two dozen supplements and medicines. There’s lycopene for artery and skin health; metformin to prevent bowel polyps; turmeric, black pepper and ginger root for liver enzymes and to reduce inflammation; zinc to supplement his vegan diet; and a microdose of lithium for, he says, brain health. Then there’s an hourlong workout, consisting of 25 different exercises, and a green juice packed with creatine, cocoa flavanols, collagen peptides and other goodies. Throughout the day, he eats some solid-ish health food (we’ll get there), with the recipes tweaked based on the results of his latest tests. After eating, Johnson brushes, Waterpiks and flosses before rinsing with tea-tree oil and applying an antioxidant gel. His doctors say he has the gum inflammation of a 17-year-old.
There’s a regimen and series of measurements for every last part of Johnson’s body. He’s taken 33,537 images of his bowels, discovered that his eyelashes are shorter than average and probed the thickness of his carotid artery. He blasts his pelvic floor with electromagnetic pulses to improve muscle tone in hard-to-reach places and has a device that counts the number of his nighttime erections. Of late, he’s been presenting as a teenager in that regard, as well.
Daily, he measures his weight, body mass index and body fat, and he monitors his waking body temperature, blood glucose, heart-rate variations and oxygen levels while sleeping. He’s also undergoing a fairly constant stream of blood, stool and urine tests as well as whole-body MRIs and ultrasounds, plus regular tests aimed more specifically at his kidneys, prostate, thyroid and nervous system.
To repair sun damage to his skin, Johnson applies seven daily creams and gets weekly acid peels and laser therapy, and he’s begun staying out of the sun. To improve hearing in his left ear (which suffered from childhood hunting trips in Utah), he does sound therapy, which tests the limits of the frequencies he can hear and then produces inaudible sounds that stimulate the cells in his ear and brain. (Clinical studies performed at Stanford University and elsewhere have concluded that this can help the average person improve their hearing by at least 10 decibels, a significant margin.) He has, however, rejected many of the internet’s favorite health fads, including resveratrol, ice baths and high doses of testosterone.
Doctors on his team help with the scans and tests, read the results and offer advice on what’s safe and what might be dangerous. At one point, Johnson’s body fat had fallen to 3%, which threatened the healthy functioning of his heart. His team recommended tweaks to his diet, including eating more throughout the day instead of consuming all of his calories at breakfast.
Johnson’s lifestyle isn’t for me. In September, shortly before I walked up to his door in Venice for dinner, he texted to warn me that he’d just had some fat injected into his face and seemed to be suffering from an allergic reaction to the excruciating procedure. As a result, he said, he might look a little weird.
He was not wrong.
When he opened the door, I could barely recognize him. His face was so puffed up it looked like he’d spent the afternoon chugging bee venom. Stranger still, his pale skin was glowing, absent of most of the flaws that accompany middle age. He could have been mistaken for a big, swollen porcelain doll.
The procedure, he said, wasn’t the usual Hollywood look-younger filler. It was the first in a series of injections to build a “fat scaffolding” in his face that would produce genuine, young-person fat cells. “Filler is just patching over something,” Johnson said. “It will take a few months for the fat scaffold to build, but then, as I regenerate, it will actually create fat on its own. If I do an MRI or multispectral imaging, then hopefully it will show that I’m identical to an 18-year-old again.” Usually, the early adopters of this procedure harvest the fat from other parts of a patient’s body, but Johnson, who doesn’t have the fat to spare, received his from an undisclosed donor.
This treatment struck me as largely cosmetic. (Johnson also dyes his hair.) And, Zolman notes, there’s little to no evidence that having a fatter, more youthful face or luscious red hair offer clinical benefits on their own. “But, if you do this at the whole-body level, it becomes clinically relevant,” Zolman says. “If you restore young fat-level distribution throughout the whole body, you’re going to have less toxic compounds being secreted and affecting the rest of the body and you’re going to have things like better heat control. If you had no fat, you’d be f---ing dead. If you had no skin, you’d be f---ing dead. These are not aesthetic organs.”
As we talked about Blueprint, Johnson prepared dinner for me, a sample of his typical fare. On the yum side, I was given something called nutty pudding, which consisted of almond milk, macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, half a Brazil nut, sunflower lecithin, cinnamon, cherries, blueberries, raspberries and pomegranate juice. Delicious. On the yuck side, I also had to eat a mound of vegetables that had been pureed into a gray-brown goop. Once upon a time, it consisted of black lentils, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, garlic, ginger root, lime, cumin, apple cider vinegar, hemp seeds and olive oil, all of which sound fine on their own. But when put together and blended, it felt and tasted like dirt paste.
For dessert, we had chocolate, but not just any chocolate. “With Blueprint, there are layers,” Johnson said. “You can say, ‘Chocolate is good for you.’ Then the next layer is ‘Dark chocolate is better for you.’ And then there is this Dutching process that people sometimes do to chocolate where they alkalize it to take away the bitterness, but it ruins much of the value. So, you want non-Dutched dark chocolate, and you want some that has been tested for heavy metals. And then you want chocolate from the regions of the world that have the highest concentration of polyphenols, which is what you’re trying to get. Unless you’re looking at that fifth layer of polyphenol concentration, you’re really getting very little benefit.”
The lifestyle seems exhausting, but Johnson revels in it, as does his 17-year-old son, Talmage. As our dinner kicked off, Talmage came into the house after a workout. For a moment, he was taken aback at his dad’s swollen face. Then he let out a chuckle, as if he’d seen this type of thing before. Talmage prepared his own specialized dinner alongside us and said he’s adopted some, but not all, of his dad’s practices. For one, he doesn’t do the vegetable sludge, preferring his veggies raw or sautéed.
After dinner, father and son watched as I inserted my arm into a cardiac health monitor on Johnson’s kitchen island. The machine buzzed and whirred for a few seconds, then reported back that my ticker—at least by one measure—wasn’t that far off Johnson’s. It felt like a small victory for paunchy 45-year-old Scotch lovers everywhere.
Johnson has heard his share of criticism from people who’ve accused him of having an eating or psychological disorder or of being a delusional health zealot going about life in the most boring, restrictive way possible. The handful of doctors I’ve interviewed on Johnson’s team all say he’s breaking ground in the field of longevity and probably extending his life, but even they have questions about whether their conclusions will apply to the rest of us. “I think what he’s doing is impressive, and he has personally challenged me to be better,” says Kristin Dittmar, an interventional oncologist. “What he does is also essentially a full-time job.” She also stresses that cancer, her specialty, has genetic components that no cutting-edge science, let alone juices or creams, can yet beat.
One way to pass his gains along to others, Johnson says, might be radical transparency. He has a website where he posts his entire course of treatment and all his test results. And, now, he’s launching another site, Rejuvenation Olympics, that encourages fellow travelers to do the same. The idea is to move away from the latest fads in favor of more rigorous medical science and a dash of competition. The more popular this type of lifestyle becomes, the cheaper and more readily available some of the procedures Johnson tries might be. “If you say that you want to live forever or defeat aging, that’s bad—it’s a rich person thing,” Johnson says. “If it’s more akin to a professional sport, it’s entertainment. It has the virtues of establishing standards and protocols. It benefits everyone in a systemic way.”
For a hint at the size of the early adopter demographic, there’s the blood test offered by a company called TruDiagnostic LLC, which tries to assess a person’s rate of aging by looking at whether various genes are functioning at hundreds of thousands of points across their genetic code. Of the roughly 20,000 people who’ve taken the test in the three years it’s been on the market, about 1,750 have repeated it over years to track their battles against aging. The company says that within that group, Johnson has reduced his biological age the most.
It’s easy to imagine how a coterie of Johnson wannabes experimenting with ever-riskier procedures could go horribly wrong. More likely, most people will find Johnson’s lifestyle impossible or absurd. Some researchers and health aficionados who have run across Johnson’s program take particular exception to his promotion of supplements and vitamins that they view as largely useless.
Still, some of the most respected experts who study longevity and aging say the underlying idea of an open forum for the science of life extension is inevitable. “The whole longevity field is transitioning into a much more rigorous, clinical place,” says George Church, the famed Harvard University geneticist, who has stakes in a number of biotech companies. “I think what Bryan is doing is very well-intentioned and probably very important.” He adds: “I also don’t think a lot of this stuff will be all that expensive when the dust settles.”
While Johnson won’t discuss it yet, he’s about to undergo some far more experimental procedures, including gene therapies, according to several of his doctors and advisers. For better or worse, he’s very much dedicating his body to science in the hopes of proving what’s possible for the rest of us. “That’s the beauty of this,” he says. “It’s a new frontier.” ~
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-25/anti-aging-techniques-taken-to-extreme-by-bryan-johnson?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Nevertheless, it seems that the best predictor of longevity is coming from a family in which people typically live into their nineties and beyond.
At the level of biomarkers, low insulin and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IG-1) and low fasting blood sugar (94 or lower) were the best predictors of long life.
It's true that a vegetarian community in Loma Linda, California, is one of the Blue Zones -- places with an unusually high number of centenarians. They happen to be Seventh Day Adventists. The women in particular are strict vegetarians (or vegans), while the men tend to cheat and sneak out for an occasional hamburger, according to Dr. Steven Gundry. But Gundry also found that the long-lived Adventist women "were quite sick." They suffered from auto-immune diseases. Gundry attributes it to the abundance of lectins in a typical vegetarian diet. As for the strict vegan diet, it may interfere with wound healing. Dr. Amy Myers created an auto-immune disease reversing diet that includes grass-fed lamb and wild-caught fish.
*
ending on insight:
A small gray person cancels
this twenty-first century,
adjusts his country’s clocks
for the winter war.
~ Lydia Khersonsky
(image: Carpathian village, Ukraine)
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