Charles Herbert Woodbury: The North Atlantic. 1902*
HALLOWEEN BIRCHES
Moonlight was silvering
the palm tree on my lawn.
It lit up the long arc of one frond.
After many years in California,
my first thought: A weeping birch?
I have a birch tree on my lawn?
And birch groves left behind a lifetime
ago came to me, bowed and flowed —
cloudy branches of that Celtic night
when the blindfold of time slips loose
and we see behind and beyond —
just as now that I can barely walk,
memories of mountain hikes
alight on my mind: Angel’s Landing,
Never Summer, Dead Man’s Pass.
Surprised by the brilliant crescent,
I walked on. The last of Halloween
children dressed as flame-red
devilkins or pink ballerina angels
were shooed by mothers into cars.
Only the souls of trees walked with me —
birches and beeches, maples, pines.
I whispered to them: Remember me.
They replied: It’s not important to be
remembered — only to be beautiful.
The moon flowed in the sky,
a slender canoe: Get in,
and not later but now.
~ Oriana
*
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: “Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!” The first translations into Western languages in 1974—just fifty years ago—proved almost as sensational. No longer was it so easy to cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the USSR. In France, where Marxism had remained fashionable, the book changed the course of intellectual life, and in America it helped counter the New Left celebration of Mao, Castro, and other disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
What was it that made this book so effective? And what did Solzhenitsyn mean by calling it “literary,” even though everything in it was factual? To answer these questions is to grasp why Gulag towers over all other works of the Soviet period and, indeed, over all literature since the middle of the twentieth century.
Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been “repressive,” but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: “I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!” “The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.” Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.
Begin with numbers. Solzhenitsyn instructs: from 1876 to 1904—a period of mass strikes, peasant revolts, and terrorism claiming the lives of Tsar Alexander II and other top officials—“486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country,” a figure that includes “ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!” During the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko, and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 2,200 persons were executed,” a number contemporaries described as an “epidemic of executions.”
By contrast, Soviet judicial killings—whether by shooting, forced starvation, or hard labor at forty degrees below zero—numbered in the tens of millions. Crucially, condemnation did not require individual guilt. As early as 1918, Solzhenitsyn points out, the Cheka (secret police) leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice to disregard personal guilt or innocence and just ascertain the prisoner’s class origin: this “must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.”
On this basis, over five million peasants (classed as “kulaks,” supposedly better off than their neighbors) were forcibly exiled to completely unsettled wastelands with no food or tools, where they were left to die. The same punishment later befell whole nationalities deemed potentially disloyal (such as ethnic Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars) or dangerous because of the possibility of receiving subversive support from a foreign power (as in the case of Koreans and Poles).
“The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was followed by the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. All food for a large area of what is now Ukraine was requisitioned, and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited, so that over the next few months inhabitants starved to death. Idealistic young Bolsheviks from the capital enforced the famine. In total, Stalin’s war on the countryside claimed more than ten million lives. As Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this crime is not nearly as well known among intellectuals as the Great Purges, which claimed fewer victims, because many purge victims were themselves intellectuals.
Arrests also took place by quotas assigned to local secret-police offices, which, if they knew what was good for them, petitioned to arrest still more. After World War II, captured Russian soldiers in German slave-labor camps were promptly transferred to Russian ones, as was anyone who had seen something of the Western world. Even soldiers who had fought their way out of German encirclement were arrested as traitors, simply because they had been behind German lines. Still more shocking, the Allies—who could not imagine why people would not want to return to their homeland—forcibly repatriated, often at bayonet point, over a million fugitives, some of whom committed suicide rather than face what they knew awaited them.
Of course, individuals, as well as groups, were charged with political crimes, a category including more than prohibited actions. The code also specified “Counter-Revolutionary Thought” and what Solzhenitsyn calls a “very expansive category: . . . Member of a Family (of a person convicted under one of the foregoing . . . categories).” There was even a special camp for wives of enemies of the people; their teenage children were arrested to forestall possible vengeance. As the prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko explained, “we protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.”
Punishments were both more numerous than in tsarist times and much harsher. The conditions Dostoevsky described in his autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62) seem like paradise compared with Soviet prisons and camps. After all, Solzhenitsyn points out, when Catherine the Great detained the radical Alexander Radishchev, he was not subjected to torture, and no one thought of arresting his relatives. In fact, “Radishchev knew perfectly well that his sons would serve as officers in the imperial guard no matter what happened to him . . . . Nor would anyone confiscate Radishchev’s family estate.”
“Seven attempts were made on the life of Alexander II himself,” Solzhenitsyn also notes. “What did he do about it? Ruin and banish half Petersburg, as happened after [the prominent Communist Sergey] Kirov’s murder? You know very well that such a thing could never enter his head.” As for the taking of hostages, “the concept didn’t exist.” Or consider Lenin’s career. Even though his brother had been hanged for an attempt on the life of the tsar, Lenin not only remained free, he was even admitted to the Kazan University law faculty. When he was expelled for organizing a student demonstration against the government (“in our day he would have been shot”), this younger brother of a would-be regicide was at last banished—not to a desolate wilderness but to his family estate of Kokushkino, “where he intended to spend the summer anyway.”
Despite this record, Lenin was allowed to take the bar exam and become a lawyer. When he was arrested for founding a revolutionary organization, he was sent to prison for one year, not twenty-five. There he was allowed to receive as many books as he needed and to write most of The Development of Capitalism in Russia. He could buy whatever food or medicine he liked. Many revolutionaries regarded prison as an opportunity to meet each other and organize seminars for the study of radical texts.
When Lenin was again banished—not to the frozen North but to “a land of plenty”—he was allowed before departing to go about the capital for three days on his own and leave instructions for revolutionary circles, then to do the same in Moscow. What’s more, he was not packed into a cattle car so crowded that there was not even room for everyone to stand, as in Soviet times, but permitted to travel unsupervised in a private train compartment to his place of exile. There he published revolutionary works and, “when mosquitoes bit him while he was out hunting, he ordered kid gloves.” Pre-Soviet conditions were so lax that Stalin was able to escape from banishment four times. As Solzhenitsyn observes, “Laziness would seem to be the only reason for not escaping from Tsarist places of banishment.”
*
Things were rather different under the Soviets. There “is no comparison anyway,” Solzhenitsyn explains, “because none of our revolutionaries ever knew what a really good interrogation could be.” The chapter on interrogation famously begins:
~ If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. ~
As millions were forced to confess to crimes everyone knew were fabricated, interrogators soon found the daily torture routine boring. “The fact is that the interrogators like some diversion in their monotonous work, and so they vie in thinking of new ideas.” The types of torture were unregulated, Solzhenitsyn says, and “every kind of ingenuity was permitted, no matter what.” What happens to a person who can literally do anything to others? Tolstoy wrote about the “attraction” of power, Solzhenitsyn recalls, but for Soviet interrogators, “attraction is not the right word—it is intoxication!”
One invention that became popular, and inspired all sorts of variations, was placing a person just arrested and still utterly confused in “the box . . . which sometimes is dark and constructed in such a way that he can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several hours . . . or a day.”
The prisoner in the box knows nothing, not even if he will die there. One ingenious variation was the “divisional pit,” a hole in the ground about ten feet deep and exposed to the weather, which for several days becomes for the prisoner “both his cell and his latrine.” Yet another creative variation was the “alcove,” where a prisoner “could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, nor turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water onto his scalp . . . which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours.”
Similar ingenuity was applied during arrests. The innocent person apprehended can only ask “Me? What for?” But he soon discovers that his life is irrevocably split in two. “That’s what arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.” You suddenly lose everything: position, connections, family—for even if you survive your term, and are permitted to return to your family, they will no longer be able to understand you. You have been away so long, and endured a world so incomprehensible to anyone who has not endured it, that for them only your name is the same. Such reunions are almost never successful. So are encounters between former prisoners and anyone who has never been arrested. “We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.”
*
“The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it,” Solzhenitsyn observes. “Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.’ ” But for the arresting officers, the whole procedure is often an exercise in creativity. One young woman, who had just bought some material for a dress, shared a cab with a young man—who arrested her. Important people were sometimes given new, desirable assignments and sent off in a private railway car, where they were arrested en route. Irma Mandel, a Hungarian, was given two front-row seats to the Bolshoi. She and the man courting her “sat through the show very affectionately, and when it was over,” he took her to prison in the Lubyanka (secret-police headquarters).
~ One has to give the Organs their due: in an age when public speeches, the plays in our theaters, and women’s fashions all seem to have come off assembly lines, arrests can be of the most varied kind. They take you aside in a factory corridor after you have had your pass checked—and you’re arrested. They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest—just let him try! They ’ll take you right off the operating table—as they took N. M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer. . . . You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street . . . .
People never knew when they might be arrested, or by whom, and so “there was a general feeling of being destined for destruction.” Since failure to denounce was itself a crime, and stool pigeons were everywhere, one could trust no one. In theory, socialism brought people together, but in fact it created complete atomization and utter loneliness. So anxious did some people become that arrest brought relief “and even happiness!”
*
What is the point of such cruelty? Why so many arbitrary arrests, and why so much energy spent on extracting unbelievable confessions that no one would ever see? Some have explained the system economically, as a source of slave labor, but Solzhenitsyn shows that the gigantic expense incurred by the state furnishing countless interrogators and guards, transport, watchtowers, and barbed wire ensured that the system never paid its way.
What economic sense did it make to take a scientist with years of training and deport him to the far north to dig frozen earth and die soon of exhaustion and hunger? If one wanted to eliminate enemies, wouldn’t it be easier just to shoot them all? And why arrest people who were completely loyal? One difference between the USSR and the Third Reich was that Germans who were neither Jews nor members of some other disfavored group, and who supported the regime, did not have to live in constant fear of arrest.
Soviet terror was an end in itself. Torture alone was not cruel enough, Solzhenitsyn points out. No, the goal was absolute dehumanization, reducing people to quivering masses of flesh who had forgotten who they were and who had lost the ability to feel normal emotions one by one until only anger was left. George Orwell understood this aspect of the regime as other Western observers did not. The new society, O’Brien explains to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is
~ the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. . . . Always, at every moment, there will be . . . the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face—forever. ~
*
Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn’s catalogue of horrors grow boring? You read three long volumes about boots trampling on human faces and your attention never flags. One reason is that Solzhenitsyn, like Edward Gibbon, is a master of ironic narration. At times, the book is unexpectedly funny. Along with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it stands as one of the great satires of world literature.
But it is the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s “experiment in literary investigation” that best explains why this book remains riveting. Gulag is structured as what might be called a collective autobiography. Readers learn about Solzhenitsyn’s personal experiences, and the author also records the analogous experiences of others. He seems to say: here is how I was arrested, and now here is how it happened to others; here is how I addressed the moral choices I faced; others reacted differently. Stalin is supposed to have said that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. Through collective autobiography, Solzhenitsyn allows the reader to sense, if not a million tragedies, then at least many thousands of individual ones.
Solzhenitsyn does not present himself as a paragon:
~ I remember very well that right after officer candidate school, I experienced the happiness of simplification, of . . . not having to think things through; the happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived . . . the happiness of forgetting some of the spiritual subtleties inculcated since childhood. ~
As an officer, he regarded himself “as a superior human being” and enjoyed ordering subordinates about. Yes, “pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig,” he says of himself. “Even at the front, where, one might have thought, death made equals of us all, my power soon convinced me that I was a superior human being,” Solzhenitsyn confesses. In his arrogance, he addressed “fathers with the familiar, downgrading form of address” and calmly sent ordinary soldiers to their deaths. “I ate my officer’s ration of butter with rolls, without giving a thought as to why I had a right to it, and why the rank-and-file soldiers did not.” Even when arrested, Solzhenitsyn, still thinking of himself as the officer he no longer was, made another prisoner carry his bag. The Lubyanka changed all that.
“The day after my arrest my march of penance began,” Solzhenitsyn recalls, and over hundreds of pages we trace the gradual changes in his character as we might trace a heroine’s development in a multivolume English novel. A key moment occurred when he met the Jewish prisoner Boris Gammerov. Commenting on a prayer offered by President Roosevelt, Solzhenitsyn “expressed what seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it: ‘Well, that’s hypocrisy of course.’” Trembling from emotion, Gammerov asked why Solzhenitsyn could not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God.
This reply, coming from someone born and educated after the Russian Revolution, shocked Solzhenitsyn. He recalls that he could have given the standard response, “but prison had already undermined my certainty . . . and it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from the outside.” The insight is crucial: one may not believe what one thinks one believes; it may really be an idea “implanted from outside.” How, then, does one recognize which beliefs are truly one’s own?
Learning to separate true and implanted beliefs: that is the story Solzhenitsyn tells. Gammerov and his friend Ingal kept challenging his formulaic ideas:
~ At the time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it “the hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgeoisie,” or the “militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia.”
Solzhenitsyn slowly learned to judge for himself. The process of spiritual ascent had begun.
*
In “The Ascent,” the book’s key chapter, Solzhenitsyn recalls how, lying in a prison hospital, he realized it was “a good time—to think! Think! Draw some conclusions from misfortune!” He asked himself: faced with a life of torment they could not have imagined, why did so few prisoners commit suicide—fewer, even, than people on the outside?
~ If these millions of helpless and pitiful vermin still did not put an end to themselves—this meant some kind of invincible feeling was alive inside them. Some very powerful idea. ~
Could there be something beyond the survival instinct and the quest for happiness? “Poverty and prison . . . give wisdom,” we hear, but what is that wisdom? Not just Solzhenitsyn, but also many others asked this question. This collective autobiography guides us through their answers.
“Here is how it was with many others, not just with me,” Solzhenitsyn explains. One’s first prison experience resembles the sky over Pompeii or the heaven of the Last Judgment “because it was not just anyone who had been arrested, but I—the center of this world.”
One thought occurs to everyone: one must vow to survive at any price. And one soon realizes what that means: “at the price of someone else.”
~ And whoever takes that vow . . . allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world. ~
This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go the left—you lose your conscience.
Solzhenitsyn concedes that at that fork, “at that greater divider of souls,” most choose survival. Intellectuals—resembling many of his Western readers—usually acted swinishly because they could always find a way to justify anything.
One could also expect the worst from those who “accept that pitiful ideology which holds that ‘human beings are created for happiness.’” That, of course, is what most secular Americans take for granted. Reading this book, they are likely to ask: what else could life be about if not individual happiness? Exiled to the West, Solzhenitsyn shocked educated people by criticizing the shallowness of such thinking. Life is not just about oneself, he insisted, and one can expect arrogant bosh from those who think it is. They often responded by dismissing him as a religious fanatic.
Although most prisoners chose survival, many chose conscience, and Solzhenitsyn describes a few he met. They all knew that, according to official Bolshevik atheism, there are no transcendent values. Lenin and his followers scorned such ideas as “human dignity” and the “sanctity of human life.” No, Soviet citizens were taught, only the material result counted, and that meant the only moral standard was the interest of the Communist Party. People who accepted this way of thinking readily concluded that, on the individual level, too, all that matters is what promotes one’s own welfare.
Choosing conscience meant rejecting such thinking. You gradually recognize that “It is not the result that counts . . . but the spirit! Not what—but how.” You begin to change. Instead of being sharply intolerant, you begin to forgive. “You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others.” In short, “you are ascending.”
“Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering.” For the first time you examine your life sincerely and “remember everything you did that was bad and shameful.”
Solzhenitsyn recalls how, when he was in the hospital, the deeply wise Dr. Kornfeld, a convert to Christianity, explained to him that although you are innocent of the crime for which you were imprisoned, “if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply,” you will be able to find real transgressions worthy of such punishment. As it happened, Dr. Kornfeld was murdered that very night. “And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance.”
Solzhenitsyn was not sure that everyone’s punishment was in some way deserved, but he accepted that idea for himself:
~ I had gone over and re-examined my life quite enough and come to understand why everything happened to me . . . . And I would not have murmured even if all that punishment had been considered inadequate. ~
Solzhenitsyn realized that he had been telling his life story backward:
~ What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary. ~
In his most evil moments, Solzhenitsyn was convinced he was doing good, and he was most mistaken when he considered himself infallible. By the same token, it was when he was most certain there was no God that God was with him. As he wrote in a poem: “God of the Universe! I believe again!/ Though I renounced You, You were with me!”
*
Solzhenitsyn discovered that “the meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.” Recognizing he would not have discovered that meaning without suffering, he disagrees with all those writers who “considered it their duty . . . to curse prison. . . . I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: ‘Bless you prison, for having been in my life!’”
Strangely enough, then, this book about countless deaths, unimaginable cruelty, and the worst of human nature turns out to be, in the final analysis, optimistic. It tells us how, even in the depths of evil, one can discern and choose the good.
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-masterpiece-of-our-time/
Mary:
I do remember that "New Left" rejection of Solzhenitzen's "Gulag,"...shrugging it off as propaganda without recognizing that very dismissal as also propaganda. These were the Mao enthusiasts, Soviet apologists, Leninists who also had nothing bad to say about even Stalin. I am ashamed to say I accepted their dismissal and never read the book. Can't even claim the blind enthusiasm of youth as I had no trouble questioning other “Authorities" — while taking my chosen alliance on faith and adolescent hero worship. Time and age have given me perspective, but no real grounds for apology. The fervors of youth appear strange and idiotic in retrospect, even though they may have sprung from the most idealistic of intentions.
How different are these political doctrines from Thomas More's battles against "heresy?" Any ideological system can become as tyrannical as any fundamentalist religion, with a list of doctrines to observe and enemies to purge and punish. Strict devotees become inured to the cruel eradication of opposition, in whatever real or imagined shape it takes. Blind self righteousness can lead to the enthusiastic burning of books, progressing to mass murder of all "heretics," sinners, counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the state. Terrorism becomes inevitable...and ordinary. Again and again and again.
Oriana:
I remember the statement I came across not long after coming to the US: "Capitalism has moral deficiencies, but socialism has capital deficiencies." It sounds like something that Oscar Wilde (the author of the essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism") might have coined, had he lived at a later time.
There is no denying that socialism/communism in theory sounds very attractive; it's only in practice that the enterprise fails in a dreadful way, since it needs to be based on coercion. One exception is religious communities. A small monastery can function quite well without private property or any wage-based labor — it is indeed, more or less, a loving, supportive family. But even that is an idealized image, since we know that families, too, are not exempt from friction and trouble. What to some is paradise, to others may be a kind of prison. When we ponder ideologies and religions, we need to bear in mind that nothing is perfect, nobody is perfect, and one size doesn't fit all.
And nobody needs to be ashamed of youthful idealism. It's just part of the human nature to go through that stage, especially when one is excited by ideas. And when a dedication to a religion or an ideology goes too far, life usually finds a way to correct it. Now and then the corrective mechanism fails — and then tragedy is often right around the corner.
*
TO PUTIN, NO LIVES MATTER
Putin believes that any losses are justified, if he can get what he wants. All hundreds of thousands of killed Russians — that’s the sacrifice Putin is prepared to make.
The Russian commanders are making fortunes on killed soldiers: they send them into meat assaults and continue pocketing their wages for months.
5 killed soldiers = 1 million ruble ($10,000) per month in wages.
The more “missing” soldiers a commander sent to death, the richer he becomes.
When families of the soldiers are trying to find them, they simply get no answers anywhere.
The superiors of the frontline commanders are getting their share of the stolen cash, of course. That’s why these commanders are never fired, even when there is evidence of them shooting soldiers for disobeying an order (refusal to go into a “meat attack”) or retreating without permission.
Another reason is that there are no other commanders to replace them — the Russian army is running ridiculously short of officers.
There are more and more reports that conscripts serving the compulsory 1-year military service are booked by their commanders as army contractors — compulsory conscripts are not supposed to be sent to fight in Ukraine, while these who sign the contract (i.e. become professional military men) can be sent anywhere, including fighting in Ukraine.
20-year-old conscript Kirill Vyunov and 6 other boys — all of them compulsory conscripts from the Kurgan region — received ₽405,000 ($4,000) one-off payout for signing a contract into their bank accounts — despite refusing to sign contracts on request of their commander. The commander simply forged their signatures.
Now, the boys are expecting to be sent to Rostov, and then to the front. They attempted to go to the bank to send back the money, but were blocked from leaving the military unit.
Conscripts from other regions also informed their mothers about the same situation — commanders signed army contracts on their behalf. As mothers were trying to contact the ministry of defense, the boys were sent to the front — and many of them were killed.
inmates from Volgograd
From the Volgograd region, 108 inmates from IK-24 prison were sent to ‘Storm V’ army penal unit 40463 on the frontline in Ukraine, in April 2024.
102 out of 108 didn’t return from the very first “meat assault” and are now considered "missing in action."
Numerous prisons in Russia are getting closed down, because tens of thousands of criminals have been sent to the war in Ukraine.
Criminals committing heinous crimes are getting released days after their arrests — and sent to the war in Ukraine.
In August 2024, in the Tomsk region, a man who was drunk killed and dismembered another man. He was detained — and released just after 5 days.
Because he signed up to go to Ukraine to kill people there.
In the Tomsk region alone, there are already dozens of similar cases. Russia-wide, thousands of criminals who were caught are getting released and sent to the war to kill Ukrainians.
Criminals in Russia can do anything — and the worst outcome would be that the Russian ministry of defense will pay them big money (by Russian standards) to do killing in another county.
The criminal case will be closed, no court hearing, no sentence, no prison time.
Then these criminals come on vacation from the front — and rape, rob, steal, and murder again. And if they are caught, they are simply sent back to the war.
And all of this is done in Russia according to the laws!
But those who speak against the war are thrown into prison. Also in full accordance with Russian laws.
The actual horror in Russia will start when all these hundreds of thousands of killers come back home, when the war ends.
Because the killers who got used to getting “big money”, who survived for years in the territory of total lawlessness, aren’t going to turn into model citizens overnight.
I wish Russians were taught logic at schools. Their inability to foresee the consequences of their actions is astounding. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
American Belarus:
On the other hand:
1) They will send criminals to war continuously, and according to the statistics chances of them surviving are less with each deployment (Pros: cleaning nation, less money spent on prisons Cons: some collateral damage in raped and killed civilians — Ruzzians don’t care )
2) As quoted in other articles, most of the people signing up to go to war are 40–50 yr old or blood thirsty idiots. They get killed at a fast pace. Pros: kill off no-good alcoholics, sadists and sick people that are putting strain on healthcare and will be collecting retirement soon Cons: some are trained professionals and will be hard to replace (Ruzzia’s economy so f..ed, nobody cares).
See, nation is cleansing and getting ready to be accepted into China. Chinese people will appreciate all the women, land and natural resources.
John Fox:
It is so sad that collective brainwashing of young minds goes unseen by most Russians that have effectively been conditioned to accept dictatorial rule without question and will go on doing so until Putin has killed Russia completely and all by himself. Blind obedience by the masses works for him. He will now start killing North Koreans too, and fat well fed Kim ding dong is going along with, brilliant strategy. We need to just keep Ukraine supplied and with troops, as NK has now joined the war. Putin has changed the rules himself.
Elena Gold:
NK soldiers are probably not cheaper. Putin likely pays for them dearly to his friend Kim. Or maybe as rumors go, he shared with Kim the mini-nuke technology (backpack sized bomb).
Putin’s goal is to involve another country into the war. He couldn’t get Belarus to send troops.
Azazello:
Putin has already realized that the more Russians die in his war, and the more Russian men are sacrificed, the more 'sacred,' 'meaningful,' and 'just' it will be perceived by the Russian people. When a “core Russian” is asked why he considers a piece of foreign land to be 'Russian,' he often responds that it’s because his grandfather shed blood on it.
*
IS PUTIN TRYING TO BRING BACK RED TERROR THAT HIS BELOVED HERO, LENIN, BEGAN?
This photo of Russian merchant L. Polenov with his family was made in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl region, in 1916. All the people in this photo were shot on September 4-5, 1918, during Lenin’s "Red Terror" campaign.
The Rybinsk District of the “Extraordinary Commission” (Cheka, a predecessor of the KGB) compiled a list for executions, which lasted for 2 days.
Individuals and whole families were on the list. Families of Rybinsk merchants Durdin, Zherebtsov, Sadovykh and others were also shot.
The Red Terror executions were following a simple scheme.
The chairman of the Rybinsk Cheka Golyshkov summoned his subordinates and gave them the task of executing specific individuals.
A squad of 4-5 Chekists was assembled.
This group went to a specific address. First they searched the home and confiscated valuables.
Then the owner (or several members of the family) were taken out of the house under the pretext of sending them to the Cheka for questioning.
However, the arrested were not taken to the Cheka, but to the forest or a barn and shot there.
Some of the confiscated valuables of the killed were divided between the members of the squad, the rest was handed over to the Cheka.
The executions were also carried by the Red Army soldiers, and they acted the same way.
On the occupied territories of Ukraine, Russians did the same things.
When the Russian troops arrived to towns of the Kyiv region in February 2022, they had “execution lists” and sent soldiers to arrest individuals or whole families, telling them they needed to take them to the military administration office for checks.
The families were told not to worry, that the father/brother/son will come back soon. Then the men were thrown into basements, questioned, tortured, and executed.
Some whole families of Ukrainians were executed as well.
When Russians were pushed away by the Ukrainian armed forces, they left mass graves behind, as well as bodies with arms tied behind their backs, shot in the back of the head, in city streets. The bodies were lying in the streets for weeks, to terrify other civilians.
In total, 1,370 civilian residents of the Kyiv region were killed as a result of the Russian occupation that lasted 5 weeks: from February 24 to April 2, 2022.
It was the same in other occupied regions that Ukrainians liberated: Kherson, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy. Everywhere, there were torture chambers, mass graves, people shot in the back of their heads.
Putin is copying the most barbaric and heinous tactics of suppression from all the tyrants of the recent past.
It’s just weird he fails to remember how they all ended.
Geoffrey Anderson:
The “man” who murdered millions of Russians has a mausoleum in Red Square at the wall of the Kremlin. It needs to be fumigated and destroyed.
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IS RUSSIA DUE FOR ANOTHER REVOLUTION?
Russia’s imperial ambitions will sooner or later (not much later) cripple the economy beyond what Putin and his enablers can disguise. As happened with the USSR’s adventure in Afghanistan, Russia’s closely held and carefully edited economic data will encourage leadership to push beyond what is healthy (or survivable!) for the country — in the name of geopolitical pride and posturing.
Russia will never return to Ukraine the eastern regions where it has worked so hard and spent so much to dominate the population. True, Ukraine simply does not have the wherewithal to retake the eastern regions militarily — but Russia’s domination of those regions has come at a sky high cost, not just for the military invasion but for the decade of terror, sabotage, and incredible hostility it will face from those Ukrainians it has turned into implacable enemies.
In order to maintain order and a semblance of prosperity in the occupied regions of Ukraine Russia will have to continue to invest heavily on security and infrastructure. In order to rebuild its shattered armed forces Russia will have to invest heavily on material and technology. In order to repay China and other nations that have turned a blind eye to its adventurism Russia will have to follow through on bargain deals promised on natural resources. Moving forward toward prosperity will be very difficult for any Russia government.
Putin’s government will be suffocated and undercut by the sacrifices required to follow trough on the geopolitical strategy used in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova. Russia’s theft of the Donbas will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back — but the social and political maneuvering and manipulation have created a domestic electorate that is disoriented and confused by the background of lies it has been fed, and it’s fully possible that Putin’s successor will be an ultra nationalist who will continue to pour Russia’s resources into a desperate attempt to recreate the Soviet Union. ~ Bruce Killingsworth, Quora
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PUTIN NEEDS TO RELY TO NORTH KOREAN SOLDIERS TO TAKE BACK KURSK
Ukrainian intelligence reported that the first units from North Korea have already been spotted in the Kursk region.
Putin simply has no troops to "liberate Kursk" — and that’s why he had to beg North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to send him some men.
Russian propagandists are absolutely ecstatic about NK soldiers fighting to defend Russia! Let the “hardened” citizens of the world’s largest concentration camp die to liberate the Russian territory — because Putin refuses to get out of Ukraine, and Russia doesn’t have enough troops to defend its own border regions.
Meanwhile, the North Koreans hadn’t fought a war since 1953, they don’t use Internet, computers or mobile phones, and have no idea about the drone warfare.
I’m sure we’ll see the first North Korean POWs soon — interviews with them will be a YouTube bombshell! These POWs will be able to tell us a lot about Kim’s regime.
It’s been 11.5 weeks since Ukraine invaded the Kursk region of Russia and all attempts of the regular Russian army to “squeeze them out” so far failed — despite Russian pilots heavily bombing their own Russian villages under Ukrainian control.
Knowing how the Russian troops advance in Ukraine — razing Ukrainian towns into ruins, sending countless men into “meat assaults” to capture the ruins — and after weeks of losing thousands of men, finally moving forward and erecting a Russian tricolor banner over the ruins, full of bodies of killed soldiers and civilians who for some reason didn’t evacuate — knowing Russia’s modus operandi, it might take Putin another half a year to bomb all the towns in the sector invaded by the Ukrainians.
And then Ukrainians might invade nearby Belgorod region. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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MISHA IOSSEL ON TRUMP
A deeply senile 78 year-old man with an orange face, tiny hands, strong fascistic proclivities, and no redeeming human qualities, is publicly, loudly and in a vulgar hoarse voice rhapsodizing about the size of a deceased famous golfer's penis. Tens of millions of Americans, unburdened as they are either by a lack of ignorance or a surfeit of self-respect, view him as the second coming of Christ and want nothing more in life than for him to become their sovereign dictator. America, 2024. Two weeks to the presidential elections.
Oriana:
“Senile” = “demented.” Not in the loose sense, but as a clinical diagnosis.
More from Misha on Trump:
MAGA is all about cultural grievances, Trump fans hardly ever talk about anything else. Yet none of those were actually improved or even marginally alleviated during Trump presidency. In fact, the opposite often was the case. The full scope of Trump's "accomplishments" in office is as follows: billionaires got a tax cut and an anti-Roe majority was installed on the SC. That's it. And of course, he also, relentlessly, tried to take healthcare away.
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Tel Aviv Azrieli Towers
The Israeli Police and the the internal security agency of Israel, Shin Bet security service recently thwarted a plan in which five Arab Israeli citizens were planning to carry out a car-bombing attack at Tel Aviv’s Azrieli towers. The five Arab Israeli who were working for the Islamic State terror group (ISIS) has been caught in this connection.
These five residents of Taybeh in central Israel formed a terror cell allied to ISIS, the terror group that originated in Iraq and Syria.
In a secret investigation that ran for a month the five Muslims were arrested. The leader of the group were Mahmoud Azam and Ibrahim Sheik. The above two recruited three others to accomplice them. The other three Muslims are Sajed Masarwa, Abdullah Baransi and Abdel Kareem Baransi.
Israeli Police said that the five had studied footage of terror attacks in Syria and had ascertained the amount of explosives needed to bring down Tel Aviv’s iconic Azrieli towers.
Azrieli towers are big and centrally located towers in Tel Aviv. The towers consist of apartments, offices and malls and it is a crowded place. Any blast in the tower would have caused thousands of lives.
Here also all the five names are from Islam. Though all Muslims are not terrorist but if you go to any country terrorist caught will be Muslims only. ~ PUGB, Quora
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SIR THOMAS MORE AND THE HERETICS
Thomas Moore is often thought of as a family man who died for his principles, not a burner of books and heretics
Richard Bayfield, a relapsed protestant described for Sir Thomas More as ‘a dog returning to his vomit’, is burned, from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Southern Methodist University Bridwell Library.
The fame of Sir Thomas More, who became Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor in 1529, rests in great part upon his authorship of Utopia. This novel, written in Latin and published in Louvain in 1516, is generally regarded as the quintessence of Christian humanism in its English context, a brilliant manifesto of social idealism within the tradition of the reforming ideas of Erasmus.
More’s vision of human progress was modeled on Plato’s Republic and conceived in terms of imagining a perfect society as the best means of achieving at least its partial realization in an imperfect, materialist world. Subtitled ‘The Best State of a Commonwealth’, Utopia held out the promise of a basic subsistence to the working classes, a six-hour working day, national health, state education, universal adult suffrage, religious toleration, and the ordination of women.
But the primary ideal of Utopia was not liberty, but discipline. No one was entitled to waste time or arrange anything to suit himself; no wine-shop, ale-house, brothel, 'lurking hole' or 'secret meeting place' was to be permitted. People were obliged instead to work or play according to government regulations, subjected to a system which was totalitarian par excellence . As Chambers, More's leading biographer, wrote, Utopia was influenced 'by some of the most severe disciplines the world has ever known. Through Plato's Republic it goes back to the barrack life of a Spartan warrior, through More's own experience to the life of a Charterhouse monk'. For instance, discussion of public policy outside strictly official channels was punishable by death to discourage subversion of the constitution — political coercion with a vengeance.
A similar obsession with discipline characterised another aspect of More's public career, namely his attitude to heretics. More could champion the ideal of religious toleration in Utopia because he was writing in 1515 and 1516. The fragmentation of the Western Church caused by the Reformation had not yet begun. But in October, 1517, Europe was challenged to public disputation by Dr. Martin Luther, an obscure German friar and university teacher, who boldly argued that the sale of indulgences contravened the teaching of the Scriptures.
Nothing thereafter was the same, for the German Reformation was to fracture the unity of Christendom; in particular, the atmosphere of Erasmian free-thought which had generated Utopia was irrevocably soured. It became necessary for humanists in England like More, John Colet, William Warham, Cuthbert Tunstall and Richard Pace, who put high value on the maintenance of the unity of Christendom, to demonstrate their absolute fidelity to Catholic orthodoxy, and to rejuvenate the intellectual rigor of the Middle Ages in a concerted attack on heresy and heretics.
On June 15th, 1520, Luther's books were burned by Papal order at Rome in the Piazza Navona. Not long afterwards, the university accounts at Cambridge included an allowance to the deputy vice-chancellor, 'for drink and other expenses about the burning of the books of Martin Luther'. By March, 1521, Warham had confessed to Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor of England, that Oxford, too, was 'infected with Lutheranism.'. On May 12th following, a public holocaust of Luther's books was organized in London by Wolsey and Pace. A bonfire took place in St. Paul's churchyard, while Bishop John Fisher of Rochester preached a two-hour sermon, declaring that Luther 'hath stirred a mighty storm and tempest in the Church'.
Erasmus remarked that burning Luther's books would remove them from the libraries but not from men's minds. A policy of Catholic repression was unavoidable after 1520, and More's involvement began on a literary plane. In the first half of 1521 he assisted Henry VIII by 'sorting-out and placing the principal matters' contained in the King's own book against Luther, entitled Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. The Assertio was an attack on Luther's The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), a propaganda piece which Tunstall had warned must be kept out of England at all costs.
In it Luther had denied the validity of four of the seven sacraments — marriage, orders, confirmation and extreme unction — and Henry responded with a vigorous defence of Catholic theology that earned him the title 'Defender of the Faith' from Pope Leo X. Catholic apologists loudly praised the royal author for being as adept with the pen as he was with the sword — just possibly a backhanded compliment and Cardinal Campeggio, one of the Cardinal Protectors of England, expressed the enthusiasm of many when be called him 'Lutheromastica'.
MeanwhiIe, More's precise share in the Assertio's composition remains obscure: he himself said that he was an editor, not a co-author, and Henry stated that the book 'is well knowen for myn and I for myne avowe it'. More was naturally bound to take a back seat, since the Assertio's prime polemical value was that it was written by a king. On the other hand, the work's stylistic mediocrity supports the King's claim to sole authorship. Luther, however, remained incredulous, jibing that Henry was a stooge who had put his name on a book written by others. This rankled, as did the fact that Dr. Martin's Contra Henricum Regem Angliae (1522) was a work of unusual violence and vulgarity. Henry did not deign to reply. Instead, he commissioned Thomas More to give Luther a trouncing on his behalf. The result was More's Responsio ad Lutherum (1523), published under the unlikely pseudonym of William Ross — the name of a deceased victualler of Calais who had been highly regarded in Germany.
In the course of writing the Responsio, More developed a deep and complex commitment to Catholic repression in the interests of the peace and unity of Christendom. His attitude became biased, emotional, intransigent and at times abusive or, as Erasmus disapprovingly remarked, 'imperious'.
More saw heresy as a raging disease which infected all doctrines held by the heretic and corrupted all his morals. Luther was a heretic and a pervert, according to the Responsio, a man totally evil, 'who does not allow the priests who take wives to be joined to any other than public strumpets'. More believed this prophecy fulfilled when Luther married a nun in June, 1525. Similarly, Luther's followers were criminals who 'bespatter the most holy image of Christ crucified with the most foul excrement of their bodies destined to be burned’.
‘The Seven Heads of Martin Luther’, a caricature of Hans Brosamer showing Luther as a doctor, a monk, a Turk, a preacher, a fanatic, a church visitor, and a wild man, 1529.
As a King's Councillor, More then became personally active in the task of detecting heretics and policing printers and booksellers. About 1523 he battled successfully for the soul of William Roper, his son-in-law, during its temporary apostasy. In March 1526, he joined Wolsey in a campaign to prevent the import of Lutheran books into England. One night in January, 1527, he organized a raid on the German Steelyard, the London depot of the merchants of the Hanseatic League. With a large force, More burst in on the Germans after supper in search of Lutheran books, and although nothing was found returned next day to issue a stiff warning for the surrender of anything hidden.
Six months later, More helped Wolsey devise a Star Chamber order against heresy and seditious preaching. With Sir William Kingston, More next interrogated Humphrey Monmouth in May, 1528. Monmouth was a rich merchant of All Saints, Barking, who in 1524 had sponsored William Tyndale and William Roy on a visit to Germany to study under Luther and to make an English translation of the Bible. Tyndale worked in Wittenberg and Cologne, and published a complete translation of the New Testament at Worms in 1526. Monmouth, it was suggested in 1528, had then arranged the importation and distribution in England of this influential but plainly Lutheran Bible. More and Kingston accordingly arrested the merchant, interrogated him and searched his house. Monmouth's papers and ledgers were examined page by page, but nothing incriminating was found. Nevertheless, More had the man committed to the Tower on suspicion, allegedly by Wolsey's authority.
Despite strenuous efforts at control by the government, a growing quantity of Protestant literature began to flow into England from continental presses. In addition to Luther's and Tyndale's works, there were soon also available pithy tracts by Roy, Jerome Barlow and Simon Fish — authors who knew how to spice their heresy with popular political satire. It became clear that heretical books had not only to be outlawed, but their arguments had also to be publicly refuted in a propagandist counter-offensive.
More volunteered for the job, and obtained a license from Tunstall, Bishop of London since 1522, permitting him to read and retain heretical books in order to defend the Catholic faith. Issued in March, 1528, the license noted that since More was able to 'rival Demosthenes in our vernacular as well as in Latin', he was the best man to write in English books that would help the common man to 'see through the cunning malice of heretics and so keep him alerted and better fortified against these traitorous subverters of the Church'.
Sir Thomas subsequently wrote six such books: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), The Supplication of Souls (1529), The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer (1532-33), The Apology of Sir Thomas More (1533), The Debellation of Salem and Bizance (1533), and An Answer to a Poisoned Book (1534). In addition, More's son John joined the battle of the books in 1533, publishing an exposition of Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist translated from a sermon by Fridericus Nausea, later Bishop of Vienna.
On October 25th, 1529, Thomas More was appointed Lord Chancellor in succession to Wolsey. He quickly placed the total extermination of heresy high on his official list of priorities, an attitude which it should be said was firmly in line with Henry VIII's current policy. What was exceptional in a layman was the passionate zeal which More brought to the task. First revealed in the Responsio ad Lutherum, it was further developed in the Preface he wrote for The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer. Henry VIII, he reasoned, desired nothing on earth as much as 'maintenance of the true catholic faith', being deservedly styled 'Defender of the Faith’.
Now seeing the king's gracious purpose in this point, I reckon that being his unworthy chancellor, it appertaineth... to help as much as in me is, that his people, abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from infection.
Sir Thomas More, after Philips Galle after Hans Holbein, c. 1572-1662. Rijksmuseum
Heresy was a poisonous cancer eating away the good in society. It must be ruthlessly eliminated, punishment of offenders being especially valuable as a deterrent to those still unaffected. Heresy was often incurable, and the burning of heretics was necessary when nothing would do but 'clean cutting out' of the part infected in order to safeguard the remainder of society. As the highest magistrate under the King, More believed he had a fiduciary duty to this end by virtue of his Chancellor's oath, and by 'plain ordinance and statute’.
More began his attack on heresy with a proclamation against heretical books. Promulgated on June 22nd, 1530, this was wholly concerned with the need for censorship, and implemented the findings of a conference which Henry VIII had held the previous month. Specific titles by Tyndale, Fish, Frith and others were formally proscribed, and it was now laid down that no other vernacular books printed outside England on any subject at all should in future be imported into the realm, the same titles being forbidden also in French or Dutch translations. All banned books were to be handed over to the bishops within fifteen days, and the authorities were to arrest persons possessing proscribed books thereafter and present all suspects before the King's Council at Westminster. For the future, no new Scriptural books or translations of the Bible were to be printed in England unless 'examined and approved' by a bishop, and books approved and printed were to include the names of both examiner and printer.
Thomas More, Lord Chancellor, 1527
This was also the moment at which More became convinced that it was impossible to issue even an approved Bible translation because the mere fact of such an issue would appear 'to give succour to heretics'. The point here is that the Lollard heresy had been disseminated through vernacular translations of the Scriptures. The view of Henry's conference, which More had attended, that the Bible in English was 'not necessary' was thus repeated in the proclamation, Sir Thomas had capitulated to the bishops on this point, the reason given being 'the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of people to erroneous opinions'. Scripture was, instead, to be expounded in sermons. Nevertheless, More announced that if the people abandoned all heresies, the King would go ahead, after all, with an official English Bible, a concession that was Henry's personal contribution to this proclamation. Lastly, More ordered all existing English, French or Dutch Bibles in print or manuscript to be surrendered to the bishops within fifteen days.
These proclamations codified More's policy of Catholic repression. They stood in line with the policies of such rulers as Charles V in the Netherlands and Francis I in France, but a material difference was the intensity of More's devotion to press censorship. Fundamental to his scheme, too, was the rule announced by the June proclamation that offenders were to be brought before the King's Council rather than their bishops. It was as if More despaired of the bishops' real concern to stamp out heretical literature. Plainly, he now intended to attack Protestant literature by using his prerogative powers as Lord Chancellor. He had erected an Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and had empowered himself to enforce it in Star Chamber by virtue of the Council's inherent but hitherto seldom used powers to punish breaches of proclamations. It was, in fact, the beginning of Star Chamber's jurisdiction in the field of censorship deemed most odious a century later under Archbishop Laud.
Even more controversial was More's role in events leading up to several burnings for heresy. In close co-operation with Stokesley, More arrested George Constantine for heresy in 1531. Constantine was a dealer in Protestant books, who gave away much information about his fellow reformers before escaping in early December. More had had him imprisoned in the stocks at his house in Chelsea, which he kept in his porter's lodge. But Constantine broke the frame, scaled More's garden wall and fled to Antwerp. Sir Thomas joked in his Apology that he must have fed the heretic properly for him to achieve this feat of strength. Yet More's humor was sadly inappropriate. It was on information gleaned from Constantine that Richard Bayfield, a Benedictine monk and book pedlar, was seized, interrogated by Stokesley and burned at Smithfield.
More resigned the Chancellorship on May 16th, 1532, for reasons which had nothing to do with heresy. Yet by the time of his departure, his repressive discipline, already too close for comfort to the totalitarianism of Utopia, had become unacceptable to many people. Anne Boleyn, who became Henry VIII's second wife in 1533, and Thomas Cromwell were in the ascendant, and both were crypto-Lutherans dedicated to the destruction of Rome's supremacy in England. It was said that Anne had even encouraged Henry VIII to read Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528). Central to this work was Luther's doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the prince. We have been taught as babes, Tyndale's prologue announced,
to kill a Turk, to slay a Jew, to burn an heretic, to fight for the liberties and right of the Church as they call it... It is the bloody doctrine of the Pope which causeth disobedience, rebellion and insurrection. For he teacheth to fight and to defend his traditions and what so ever he dreameth with fire, water and sword, and to disobey father, mother, master, lord, king and Emperor.
As the story goes, Henry delighted in this philosophy, saying 'this book is for me and all kings to read'. By contrast, More recognized the piece at once: like Tyndale's Bible translations, it was 'the worst heresies picked out of Luther's works, and Luther's worst words translated by Tyndale, and put forth in Tyndale's own name'. But the fact remained that it was Tyndale's 'heretical' translation which later formed a cornerstone of the Great Bible issued in 1539, the Bible finally authorized by Henry VIII's government for use in every parish church in England.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/sir-thomas-more-and-heretics
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IT SEEMS THAT RUSSIANS ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE PUTIN
85% of Russians watching a video of Putin’s press-conference on pro-government NTV channel, clicked on “dislike” button as opposed to 15% who clicked “like” (34 thousand of dislikes vs. 6 thousand likes).
Certainly, these percentages only apply to YouTube viewers — a slightly different demographics to the general population. But even in Russia, most older people are already using internet and watching videos on YouTube.
One thing that most foreigners can’t grasp is the fact that Russians are not allowed to have their own opinions.
The only opinion they are allowed to voice is the opinion that is expressed on state TV today.
The currency of the opinion is important, because “politically correct” opinions sometimes change 180 degrees — today we are friends with Turkey, and tomorrow Turkey is an enemy NATO country. And next week, Turkey is a lifelong ally again.
Not expressing any personal preferences becomes the learned reaction. That’s why Russians repeat like a mantra, “I’m not interested in politics,” — as well as: “We are small people,” “It’s not all black and white,” and “We will never know all the truth.”
It’s not that Russians “aren’t interested in politics” — they are told all their lives that “the bosses know better”, so their job is to follow orders and keep to themselves. Loyalty and obedience is rewarded, and questions and criticism is punished — by now criticism can get you in jail, casually tortured (“casually” because torture in Russian prisons is part of the system).
This week, 2 Russian women are being tried in courts for “fakes about the Russian army” — both are in pre-trial jails for months.
68-year-old pediatrician from Moscow Nadezhda Buyanova is in jail for 6 months.
She was arrested on a complaint of a mother of her young patient, who was furious when Buyanova allegedly said that the woman’s husband, who was killed fighting in Ukraine, was a legitimate target for the Ukrainian military.
There were no witnesses of the conversation, except allegedly the woman’s 7-year-old son, but the authorities still decided to arrest and prosecute the doctor, who could have actually already retired, but instead, stayed at her job treating kids. She has been working as a doctor for 40 years.
Yesterday, the vehicle in which Buyanova was taken (in handcuffs) from prison to court, got in an accident. The vehicle wasn’t equipped with safety belts for prisoners, so Buyanova hit her head and got scratches. She complained of pain, but she was nevertheless taken to the court, put in a cage, and the trial continued.
Buyanova asked to be let out under house arrest and promised she wouldn’t try to run away — but her request was denied.
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In St. Petersburg, a case of 18-year-old Darya Kozyreva is being heard.
There are dozens of similar cases being heard in Russian courts all over the country.
This shows how dangerous is to have one’s own opinion in Russia — and voice it.
That’s why the vast majority of Russians try to keep their opinions to themselves — and actually try not to even think too much about things beyond their daily lives. When asked, they express the opinion that they believe to be “the correct opinion”, hoping they wouldn’t get in trouble.
If Putin were removed today, and another leader were appointed, who’d denounce Putin as a foreign spy tasked to destroy Russia — they would accept this new leader and update their “official opinions” accordingly.
Since Joseph Stalin, every long-term Soviet leader was denounced after his death — his political course was criticized, and a new direction was announced to the Soviet people.
The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed by the same communist Politburo that picked Leonid Brezhnev decades before. The change of the Soviet system to a freer and more open society was initiated from above.
Russian people of today became similar to people from the Soviet times. Brainwashed and confident in their rightness, loyal to the state — but ready to change their views in an instant, to the new ideology instigated from above. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
KS: WHY LITHUANIANS DON’T LIKE RUSSIA
As one who was born in Soviet prison and now live in freedom, this is such tragic and gut wrenching truth, when I have to empathize with unfortunate minority and at the same time despise the main population. What foreigners don’t understand is how close this society is to Orwellian 1984 book. Read it and you’ll understand all the tragic. It’s like looking at an animal with rabies, very sad thing but no way to save him. He is sick, aggressive and brain damaged.
Then someone asks “why Lithuanians don’t like Russia”. Would you like such animal, who kidnapped you and kept you hostage for 50 years? Life in fear, distrust and constant brainwashing. Damaged trust, self esteem, no self worth, erased and constantly rewritten values. Just slavery existence. For many it’s very hard event to try to understand. And I’m very happy about it. Just don’t choose ignorance.
Marcus Hartman:
Russia and China, NK and Iran harbor live copies of the characters and events in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I read it as a teenager, and am reading it again now. Very accurate in its premonitions. Big Brothers club are presently meeting in Kazan and getting a pat on the head by Guterres.
Dougie:
Then they are simply robots, there to promote state sanctioned propaganda. What a life.
There are some interesting interviews with Russian people on Daniil Orain’s YouTube channel. Most say they have no interest in politics, many express their support for the military and Putin but there are a few who condemn the war and their government policies.
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BUT SUPPOSE RUSSIA WINS IN UKRAINE?
Josh Somebody:
This war became Irrational from Russia’s perspective a long time ago. The only thing left to be decided is the Body Count and the Economic Cost.
Russia winning would be like the U.S. “winning” Mexico. Except Mexico has just been given several hundred billion dollars in top of the line NATO weaponry. Congrats you have 30 million impoverished people with very little to lose and a bitter hatred of Russia.
Import sanctions on Russia are seriously starting to bite. Every new release by Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung and TSMC puts Russia further behind. In addition it was mostly Germans helping them with their gas industry and mostly experts from BP helping them with their oil industry. Now these experts have left Russia. China is already moving in on Russian territory. Xi-Jinping wants subsidized Gas at the same price Russians get as a sign of the “unlimited partnership,”
The Chinese are going to extort Russia mercilessly.
Eric Wicking:
Whether Russia manages to claim Ukraine or not, Russia has already lost.
The sanctions on Russia will remain for decades to come, rendering Russia a third-degree
banana republic that no one cares about and children have never heard of. It’s economy will be so pathetic, North Koreans will visit it to take pictures with the backward, hungry Russian natives begging for tips.
Even if Russia claims just a few oblasts, Russia will never be able to develop them because they won’t be able to afford to. The attempt to claim the natural resources and get rich off of them will fail because Russia won’t have the money or the technology to develop them.
Few nations will ever take Russia seriously again, now that Russia’s military has been exposed as a fraud. Russia’s hold on its republics will be more tenuous than ever.
Whether Russia wins or not, they’ve lost. Russia is a failed state.
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THE RUSSIAN WINDOWS
Another former executive of a Russian oil company fell out of a window in Moscow. 64-year-old Mikhail Rogachev, former executive of YUKOS Oil, was found dead in front of his home at elite Protopopovskiy Alley in Moscow. The preliminary official reason of his death, "injuries sustained due to a fall from a height.”
Mikhail Rogachov
Also yesterday, one of the most knowledgeable figures of the FSB, 67-year-old Colonel General Konstantin Romodanovsky, died. He also fell down — from the stairs of his own house, and broke his neck.
The rate at which high level witnesses of what has been cooking in the Kremlin kitchen are falling to their deaths is becoming legendary.
Defenestration is Russia’s new hidden epidemics, caused by standing too close to an open window while displeasing comrade Putin.
And no one in Russia says a word.
Paul Moran:
They're literally falling for the big lie
Markuu Herd:
It’s death by natural causes in Russia.
Gravity is natural after all.
Francis Kong:
Apparently the higher up you get in the Russian society, the more clumsy you end up being.
And also gravity seems to find you more attractive than ordinary folks.
Oriana:
The famous Defenestration of Prague took place in May 1618. The Protestant nobles threw three Catholic officials from the council room window of the Hradčany Castle. Amazingly, the three Catholics survived by falling onto a dungheap. The event marked the start of the bloody Thirty Years’ War.
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WHY RUSSIANS ARE RELUCTANT TO EXCHANGE THEIR OWN PRISONERS OF WAR
To release them and give the opportunity to tell the public what they saw at war? Cannon meat attacks and generals’ total indiference to soldiers’s lives for the sake of gaining a betetr geo position?
To share how it really turned out, as opposed to what is shown/said on TV?
That the Russian prisoners were gaining weight in the Ukrainian prisons? To compare with captive Ukrainians who return home looking like ghostly skeletons? According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets, Ukrainians released from Russian captivity are often in serious condition. They lose an average of 20-25 kg of weight.
Nazi POWs vs Russia's Ukrainian POWs
That Ukrainians don't cut off prisoners' arms, legs or gouge out their eyes?
That Ukrainians follow the rules of warfare established by the Hague? etc. etc.
That no one ever saw the NATO fighting men and/or local “terrible” fascists??
The Kremlin does not want to have them returned home at all; it wants its own people to die like heroes, who solemnly sacrificed their lives in the fight against the “Nazi Kiev” regime. The Russian prisoners of war saw the truth about the war, and cannot be fooled any more by the criminal warmongerish nonsense of the Russian television.
Back home they would be interrogated for the whole month at concentration camps by the FSB men and then pushed back to the front!! Silly sheep think it is all over for them! No, far from it.
The military contract has a small font clause that the army dismissal is never possible before the end of the so-called special military operation that Putin had invented to avoid the word the “War”, which will result in a criminal case as per Russian Constitution!
At best, the RU military management will be keen to declare the prisoners of war as found missing in action to avoid paying military compensation in the amount of up to enormous 12,000 euros to their families.
The logic is primitive: “no person — no problem”: the best known Stalinist beastly motto.
~ O. Vischmidt, Quora
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RUSSIA’S DEADLY ABANDONED NUCLEAR GENERATORS LEFT TO RUST AWAY
There are abandoned and potentially dangerous nuclear generators in Russia, specifically Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs scattered around the country. These devices were deployed extensively across the country, particularly along the Arctic coastline, to provide power for remote lighthouses and navigation beacons. The Soviet Union produced over 2,500 RTGs using radioactive isotopes such as strontium-90, which is a byproduct of nuclear fission.
The primary purpose of these RTGs was to supply electricity in locations that were too remote for traditional power sources. They convert heat generated from the decay of radioactive materials into electricity, allowing them to operate autonomously for extended periods—typically between 10 to 20 years. However, many of these units have now exceeded their operational lifespans and are in dire need of decommissioning.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, maintenance and oversight of these RTGs significantly deteriorated. Many units became neglected due to a lack of funding and organizational chaos. As a result, hundreds of RTGs have been left unmonitored or poorly maintained. Reports indicate that some have been vandalized or stolen by metal thieves seeking scrap value, exposing radioactive materials to potential human contact.
There have been several documented incidents involving exposure to radiation from these abandoned generators. For example, in 2002, three men in Georgia stumbled upon an unprotected RTG canister while seeking warmth; tragically, one man died from radiation sickness after prolonged exposure. Additionally, there have been cases where scrappers stole components from RTGs or even discarded radioactive materials into bodies of water.
Today, it is estimated that over a thousand RTGs remain scattered across Russia’s remote areas. Many are completely unprotected against theft or accidental discovery by unsuspecting individuals such as hunters or villagers. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has expressed concern about the potential for these devices to be misused by terrorists who could create “dirty bombs” using the radioactive materials contained within them. ~ Brett Kriger, Quora
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BLAME-SEEKING FOR THE DEFEAT OF THE CONFEDERACY
Immediately after the Civil War, the public was swamped with war stories, journals, memoirs, and battle descriptions. Former army commanders renewed wartime arguments about tactics and strategies in print—the pen and the printing press now their only weapons. Battlefield opponents, and sometimes former comrades, aired the dirty laundry of their respective commands before an awaiting public.
Southern apologists, particularly, tried to rationalize their loss by finding unexploited opportunities, scapegoats, excuses, and martyrs. Many pointed to the exhausted condition of the Southern manpower pool and its economic infrastructure as proximate causes for the South’s surrender — not its defeat. For quite some time — in fact for almost as long as the veterans of the war lived to tell and retell their experiences — this was the stuff of Civil War history. Many of these authors drew sweeping conclusions from sometimes superficial and anecdotal evidence.
Ultimately it was the series of articles written by former Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s that established the Lost Cause as a long-lasting and often used literary phenomenon.
In 1881, Francis M. Palfrey–a federal veteran and war historian embittered by the increasingly sympathetic light in which the Army of Northern Virginia was being portrayed–wrote, “A few more years, a few more books, and it will appear that Lee and Longstreet, and a one-armed orderly, and a casualty with a shotgun, fought all the battles of the rebellion and killed all the Union soldiers except those who ran away.”
The term “Lost Cause” first appeared in 1866 in the title of a book by historian Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Southern writers, like Pollard, made it clear that the arguments over states rights and secession, and not slavery, were the precipitating controversies of the war. As expressed by one abolitionist, the prominence of secession as a cause of the war becomes obvious: "Who cares now about slavery. Secession, and the Oligarchy built upon it, have crowded it out.”
Although anti-slavery was a prominent reform movement of the period, other causes, such as temperance, women's rights, religious revival, public education, concerns for the poor, and prison reform, were as zealously pursued by activists. Of these only slavery and states rights became politically charged issues in the antebellum period; and as the middle ground of compromise on such issues was eroded, only the extreme positions became viable, until disunion (secession) brought on armed conflict. Universal abolition, never an overall war aim of the North, was not even recognized by the proclamation of emancipation of 1863. Only in the afterglow of victory did the Federal government dare to propose the universal abolition of slavery.
In 1865, Alexander H. Stephens was imprisoned for several months in Fort Warren in Boston harbor. As former vice-president of the Confederacy, Stephens had been a lack-luster leader often at odds with the policies of president Jefferson Davis. Denied his seat in the 1866 U.S. Senate by the Radical Republicans, Stephens undertook to write a book justifying the course of the South in the recent unpleasantness detailing the route from states rights to secession, war, and defeat. Like many Southerner writers, he became immersed in the process of political rationalization that characterized the “Lost Cause.”
A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States was a work in two volumes written by Stephens and published in 1868 and 1870 respectively. Stephens played down the slavery issue as a cause of the war and played up the controversy over states rights–the absolute ultimate sovereignty of the several states in the federal system. The book sold well and was widely read especially by southerners. The case for states rights had flourished for more than seven decades before the war, and it would seem, from an unbiased reading of the record, that the secessionists had at least an arguable case for disunion on their side. By comparison, the case for a perpetual union and the supremacy of the Federal government had been a recent product of the sectional conflicts of the 1850s. Moreover, its fundamental legal principles, especially with regard to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, were far from perfect, and the logic behind its arguments was fraught with ambiguity.
Stephens argued that the conflict from 1861-1865 had been no civil war, but a “war between the states.” This position was a reaction to the Radical Republican demand that the unreconstructed states be treated as territories under the rule of Federal political and military authorities. Southerners adopted the concept of a “war between the states” to reinforce their political position, and they insisted upon using the designation for the recent conflict although the phrase had been seldom if ever used before Stephens proposed it in 1868.
Jubal Early claimed that his inspiration for the series of commentaries came from Robert E. Lee, who wanted the world to understand the odds against which the Confederate Army (and the Army of Northern Virginia, in particular) had to contend. John Bell Hood, J. E. B. Stuart, and even Jefferson Davis were made scapegoats for the loss of Confederate independence, but the most powerful image used by Early was the failed attack on the third day of Gettysburg known as Pickett’s Charge. When asked what had happened, Pickett famously replied: “Well, personally, I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.”
Early blamed the failure squarely on Lee’s premiere subordinate, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, accusing him of failing to carry out his part in the attack. Longstreet was widely disparaged by Southern veterans during the postwar decades–not so much for his behavior during the war, which was laudable in most cases–but for his support of federal reconstruction and his defection to the Republican Party. This made him the key villain in the Lost Cause mythology. Robert E. Lee, who had ordered the attack against an entrenched and numerically superior enemy, across open ground, free of protective cover, and obstructed by two substantial fence lines, received no scrutiny during his lifetime (and for some considerable time after his death).
Lee’s admitted tactical and strategic brilliance remained sacrosanct in the Lost Cause debate. He was viewed in the postwar period as the ideal Southern gentleman–sage, pious, unflappable, and honorable–who had selflessly sacrificed himself for the cause.
The problems with the Lost Cause mythology are numerous and are well documented in the literature of Civil War memory. The fact was that the South had not merely lost the war. It had been beaten and beaten badly. Its economy, industry, agriculture, and population had been sorely pressed.
The end of Reconstruction had restored the right of the South to be, once more, fully American. Yet Southern men and women were not willing to uproot their traditional way of life and replace it with machines, railroads, and factories. They clung to their “un-machined ways” and yielded only reluctantly to progress.
Above all, white Southerners feared and resisted most of all changes of any kind that threatened their “biracial world, the fabric of white control of Southern life–a control which might be cruel or benevolent depending on time and place, but which in their view had to be unquestioned.” ~ James Volo, Quora
Mary:
The mythologizing of the Civil War as the "War Between the States" and the " Lost Cause" is a prime example of recasting the past as propaganda to serve a particular ideology...to reinforce here and maintain the power structure of the slave holding South, keeping the black population disenfranchised and powerless through Jim Crow laws long after chattel slavery was abolished. This is the same kind of reframing past history to serve current political purpose as Putin's efforts to re frame the history of Russia and Ukraine — even to his casting of Ukranians as Nazis and his invasion as an heroic replay of Russia's role in WWII.
Oriana:
It's interesting that both the victor and the defeated start rewriting history. It seems to take several generations of historians to start trying to get at the "objective truth." Such a thing may not exist in pure form, but at least the defensiveness -- and boastfulness — on both sides have become diminished with time. Or so we may hope.
One thing that got established early on: the American Civil War was the bloodiest civil war in human history. At least there is full agreement on that.
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MORE DEMENTIA ON DISPLAY
In a Bronx barbershop, Trump was asked how he would deal with the lack of healthy organic food in urban communities. This was his answer, in full:
“So, Bobby Kennedy, right, everybody likes Bobby. And he's so big into the health, food, and women, things, everything, he wants to do things — and the environment. And he endorsed me, the first time a Kennedy has ever endorsed a Republican. Maybe it's going to be the last, but I doubt it. And he's a great guy.
“He would be so perfect. He doesn't like artificial foods, and he doesn't like pesticides and all the stuff they put on him. And if you listen to him for 10 minutes, I mean, he says, "Other countries that don't do anything are healthier than us, OK?" We're not that healthy To put it mildly. So, no artificial foods. We don't want artificial — we have plenty of food. The food isn't our problem. And our farmers are great, and our farmers aren't allowed to do their job. You know our farmers did great. Four years ago, they were doing the — just about the best they've ever done.
“They're not doing well at all now. We're not going to have artificial foods. We don't want artificial foods, we want healthy foods. And a lot of things are going to be going. And I'll tell you, I'm going to have Bobby Kennedy involved in it. He's a great guy. And even the way — when I mentioned his name, all of you guys — and you’re tough cookies.
“You know, you wouldn't think — sometimes, you'd say, maybe you wouldn't like a guy like Bobby. But he — he's a person that talks more about food and health than anything else. So I think that's cool. So, we'll get it — we'll get it taken care of.”
So, what is he going to do to increase organic foods in urban communities? Bobby Kennedy. The old man is sundowning. ~ John Scott, Quora
~ Godfrey "Biscuit" Brent, Lord of Biskerton:
Truly masterful ‘weave’
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DIVIDED WE STAND
America, it is often said, has never been more divided. Gone are the days when politicians routinely brokered deals across the aisle, and Republican and Democratic voters could disagree on policy yet still get along over the dinner table. Instead, polarization has transformed the democratic process, which once thrived on compromise and respectful dialogue, into a winner-takes-all battleground of dysfunction and animosity.
Congress, mired in perpetual gridlock, struggles to pass even the most essential legislation, undermining the principles of democracy. This legislative stalemate reflects a broader societal trend where Americans increasingly see those with opposing views not merely as adversaries, but as enemies.
This revelation has caused scholars to reevaluate the historical assumptions about what divides us as citizens: Is it anti-immigrant nationalism that pushes us towards the poles, or is it the widening chasm of inequality? Could the culprit be unchecked online vitriol and the diminished gatekeeping role of traditional media? Or perhaps it’s the allure of strongman leadership in uncertain times?
These deep divisions, which have intensified since the 1980s, were once deemed a largely American saga, with many experts blaming the country’s unusual two-party system. But in the past decade, political scientists have uncovered a similar trend across the globe — not just in countries with two invariably dominating political parties but in nations with diverse societal compositions, governing structures and levels of economic development. Such divisions have been reported in well-established multiparty democracies like Switzerland, Denmark and New Zealand, and in emerging economies such as Bulgaria, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Poland.
While there is no one explanation for why countries worldwide are fraying into extremes, recent findings suggest a common denominator: namely, that the key driver of polarization is more about emotion and identity than policy positions — a phenomenon known as “affective polarization.” Researchers are increasingly focusing on how people’s emotional and identity-based attachments to their political groups fuel hostility toward the opposition.
This shift in understanding emphasizes that the divide isn’t merely about differing opinions on issues. It is deeply rooted in the perception of political opponents as threats to one’s way of life and core values.
Once upon a friendlier time
The US wasn’t always so polarized. In fact, there was a time when some experts argued that American politics wasn’t polarized enough. In the 1950s, the American Political Science Association published a study concluding that the parties needed to become more distinct and coherent. “What the political scientists were saying in the 1950s was, ‘Nobody can tell the difference between our parties, nobody knows who to vote for, because we’re not making it clear, and so we need to be more different,’” says political psychologist Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University, coauthor of the 2022 book Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy.
That ’50s report was widely criticized by the political science community at the time, but the decades that followed would set in motion sociopolitical changes that, eventually, more than fulfilled its vision.
The 1960s were the starting point of a sharper alignment in American politics, as civil rights legislation prompted many Southern Democrats to switch to the Republican Party, initiating a sorting that eventually grouped economic and racial conservatives together. Today, the increasing party distinctiveness is unmistakable in Congress. Between the 1950s and 1970s, typical members of Congress voted with their party on divisive questions just more than 60 percent of the time; in the 1990s, this figure rose past 80 percent, and since 2000, it has exceeded 87 percent.
In 2023, the average Democratic senator voted with President Biden 99 percent of the time on issues where Biden had a clear stance, according to the ABC News-owned polling website 538. In the House, that figure was 93 percent, while the average Republican voted with the president only 5 percent of the time.
However, that doesn’t mean politicians are farther apart on policy issues than in the past, says Frances Lee, a political scientist now at Princeton University who wrote about the effect of party polarization on governance in the 2015 issue of the Annual Review of Political Science. What is often missed, Lee explains, are changes in the scope of policy issues over time. For example, even though measurements show increasing party division over what are categorized as civil rights issues, many of today’s votes are narrower in their effects than the 1960s civil rights legislation. This makes historical comparisons difficult.
In fact, Lee adds, while some measurements suggest more division, what they actually show is simply that the voting behavior of politicians has become more predictable. Unlike the bipartisan support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, today’s politicians tend to vote strictly with their party on divisive topics. Voting with one’s team may have become more important than policy.
A common ground ignored
Citizens may not be as far apart on policy as commonly believed.
For example, a 2022 study published in The Journal of Politics shows that Americans severely misestimate the extent of ideological extremism of the opposing party’s voters. The authors surveyed over 13,000 Americans selected to reflect the demographics of the US population. Forty-nine percent of respondents said that voters belonging to the opposite party are extreme in their policy positions and frequently discuss politics; in reality, only 14 percent of voters behave that way.
“One thing we know is that it’s a very small slice of the public that has genuine, deep, ideological roots,” says Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who coauthored the study. “If you could give an essay quiz and ask people to explain liberalism and conservatism, that’s the domain of a small set of political activists and political hobbyists.”
Americans regularly misperceive people with different political loyalties. Participants in this survey reported their perceptions of the “typical” member of the rival party — how ideologically extreme their positions were as well as how frequently they engaged in political discussions. These ratings were then compared with actual behaviors among survey respondents.
The rest of us couldn’t explain the underlying philosophy of our policy positions. Rather, Levendusky says, people look to their party for guidance on what positions they should take, such as being in favor of more stringent gun control and climate policy if you’re a Democrat and being pro-gun rights and anti-tax if you’re a Republican.
In other words, as politicians increasingly prioritized party loyalty over policy deliberation, the electorate followed suit. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the Republican Party had become the camp of white Christian America, while the Democratic Party became a mix of everyone else, Mason says. Geographically, the divide grew: While members of different parties used to meet at church or the grocery store, Democrats increasingly became identified with urban and coastal areas, and Republicans with rural and heartland regions.
As a result, party affiliation evolved beyond political preference and became linked to racial, religious, cultural and geographical identities, Mason and coauthor Julie Wronski wrote in a 2018 paper. This alignment, they noted, intensified loyalty to one’s own party and diminished tolerance for opposing partisans. The growing focus on identity in American politics has been evident in the past decade, reflected in policy priorities, campaign strategies, media coverage and the actions of social movements.
Interestingly, Mason and Wronski’s research suggests — despite what some commentators posit — that Republicans are more susceptible to identity-based politics than those on the left, due to their party’s social homogeneity.
Mason also notes that even when Republicans and Democrats agree on policy, these identities can still foster animosity. To her, rather than carefully weighing the policies of a given party, supporters are becoming just that — supporters. In essence, we’re acting more like fans of a football team going to a game than a banker carefully choosing investments, she says.
The Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly distinct in their demographic and ideological compositions. The Democratic Party has seen a growing representation of Blacks, Hispanics, seculars and liberals, shifting from a predominantly white coalition to one characterized by diversity and inclusion of nontraditional groups. In contrast, the Republican Party has solidified its base among whites, Christians and conservatives, reinforcing a homogeneous profile. This clear demographic sorting has led to a widely accepted view of Democrats as champions of racial diversity, religious secularism and liberalism, while Republicans are generally identified as white Christian conservatives.
Taking the political temperature
Other researchers have also concluded that mass polarization in the United States is less about policy-based division and more about people liking their own political camp and disliking the opposing one. A 2019 article in the Annual Review of Political Science, coauthored by Levendusky, shows that such affective polarization has increased drastically in the last four decades. Using survey data from the American National Election Study (ANES), the review measured feelings of warmth or coldness toward one’s own party and the opposing party on a “feeling thermometer” scale from 0 to 100.
Affective polarization, calculated as the difference between these ratings, rose from 22.64 degrees in 1978 to 40.87 degrees in 2016.
While warm feelings toward one’s own party remained stable at around 70, sentiment toward the opposing party worsened significantly, dropping from the high 40s to just above 25.
More recent ANES data show that between 2016 and 2020, both warm feelings toward one’s own party and cold feelings toward the opposition increased even further, with affective polarization jumping from 41 to 52.2 degrees.
Negative feelings toward the rival party have worsened significantly, while positive feelings toward one’s own party have remained relatively stable. The trend illustrates rising affective polarization, with partisan sentiments becoming increasingly negative toward the opposition.
Researchers have found evidence of a similar dynamic playing out in other countries. For instance, one 2019 study — using the same feelings-thermometer score system — assessed supporters’ feelings toward their preferred and opposing parties in 22 European democracies and the United States between 2005 and 2016. It found that affective polarization was acutely present in European party systems — especially in Central Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.
As in the United States, hatred between voters in Europe isn’t necessarily connected to policy-based division, the study showed. But the link between the two appears to be stronger in structured, Western democracies with clear left-right spectrums, such as Germany and Sweden, notes political scientist Andres Reiljan of the European University Institute near Florence, who authored the study. Conversely, in poorer and less stable countries like Bulgaria and Montenegro, issues such as corruption and perceived incompetence might be more likely to drive hatred than policy divisions, the study suggests.
A 2021 study across 51 countries reported similar results, with countries like Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic among the most polarized nations, while Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands appeared significantly less divided. Interestingly, these two studies showed the US as only moderately polarized when compared with other countries, but Reiljan, for one, notes that in his study, the categorization was based on figures from 2016. “Now, with our more recent data, I will say that, yes, it is comparatively also very highly polarized,” he says. “And it’s increasing faster, I would say, than most other countries.”
Reiljan’s suspicion received support from a study measuring trends in 12 OECD countries over the last 40 years. Of the countries included, the US experienced the largest increase in polarization. A 2023 study using the latest available data showed similar results, with the Unites States leading the pack in polarization if measuring the whole electorate, while affective polarization increased most noticeably in the United States and Germany among those who report a partisan identity.
Identity and emotion lead the way
One potential explanation for the intensity of partisan hatred in the US comes from a 2022 study published in the British Journal of Political Science. Examining data from 20 Western democracies since the mid-1990s, it found that people’s anger over political disagreements on issues like migration, religion and LGBTQ+ rights has intensified more than disagreement over economic issues.
These findings hint at what other scholars have proposed in the US context: that polarization today has much to do with identity and emotion. The most central topics in politics, such as abortion rights or racial policy, are essentially identity-based issues, Mason says. “And when the issue is about a group, about their very existence or status, or whether they are respected equally as Americans, or whether they have the same rights as other Americans, it doesn’t feel like an issue for that person. It feels like an existential threat.”
“That change, from debates about the economy to debates about cultural issues, based on our research, has been most dramatic in the United States,” says James Adams, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, and a coauthor of the British Journal of Political Science study. “That may be one of the reasons why affective polarization has intensified dramatically in the United States over the last 25 years or so.”
Parties across Europe have also homed in on cultural issues, especially populist leaders who leverage explosive topics to rally voter blocs. But while most experts see the rise of extremist parties as a key driver of polarization, studies may fail to fully capture this. Measuring affective polarization in the multiparty context seen in many European countries is challenging because traditional metrics, such as the feeling thermometer, are designed for two-party systems. In multiparty systems, voters may intensely hate one party but feel neutral toward others, diluting the final score.
Despite this, there’s a clear polarizing trend to be seen, with these intensely disliked populist parties growing stronger and disliking the mainstream in return, says political scientist Markus Wagner of the University of Vienna, who specializes in research on party competition and political behavior.
Negative campaigns deepen the divide
Research suggests that affective polarization is also fueled by the negative campaigning that has become a staple of modern electoral communication. A 2024 paper analyzing surveys and 17 elections between 2016 and 2020 found that political leaders’ attacks — on opponents’ policies, records or character — exacerbate affective polarization. This effect is more pronounced among those with strong partisan leanings.
Study coauthor Alessandro Nai, who specializes in political communication at the University of Amsterdam, explains that the whole system is part of a toxic spiral, with increased aggressiveness between politicians radicalizing the public, and the public — which is now more radicalized — demanding more aggressiveness from politicians.
Nai also has evidence that more extreme, populist followers are more likely to appreciate negative campaign messages, finding them more amusing and fair than moderate citizens do, and are more apt to respond to such messaging with increased affective polarization. People on the populist extremes score higher in traits such as aggressiveness, narcissism and callousness in studies, Nai notes, adding that a “cold” person is therefore more likely to buy the aggressive playbook from politicians.
Importantly, some of Nai’s preliminary research also suggests that negative messaging from one’s own camp stokes more dislike than do attacks from adversaries. In other words, if one’s own preferred politician attacks an adversary, this boosts affective polarization much more than if an adversary attacks your preferred politician.
That might be especially true in today’s siloed, targeted and viral media environment. In their 2022 Journal of Politics paper on how Americans overestimate each other’s political extremeness, Levendusky and coauthors suggest that the caricatured image of “the other side” as extreme ideologues is fueled by social media, where much of the political content is created by people who are disproportionately committed to politics.
As a result, what comes to mind when people think of those from the other party, the study argues, are “fervent partisans pleading their cases,” rather than neighbors or colleagues who rarely discuss politics. The mass media’s focus on political conflict has further enforced this partisan stereotyping.
Simple but effective interventions
The negative impacts of severe polarization are clear. When democratic institutions are viewed as battlegrounds for existential issues rather than arenas for reasoned policymaking, it leaves legislators in gridlocks, judiciaries stacked with loyalists and erodes democratic norms. A crisis of interpersonal trust is added to one of institutional trust: Fellow citizens are reduced to loathed enemies with malicious aims; civility is replaced by hostility as public discourse deteriorates — all while the doorway widens for populist leaders who exploit our emotions by peddling divisive rhetoric and extremist ideologies.
Experts worldwide are now thinking hard behind the scenes about how to pull our societies back from the brink. It’s a mammoth task, especially if considering broader underlying issues. For example, Adams’ research highlights that inequality and unemployment drive affective polarization, and that winner-takes-all electoral systems — such as those in Canada, Britain and the United States — also tend to exacerbate the animosity. These are systemic, structural issues that can’t be solved by focusing on polarization alone. However, researchers have found that some — surprisingly simple — interventions can nonetheless be very effective.
An analysis by a research consortium studying anti-democratic sentiment identified 25 ways to reduce partisan animosity; out of those, three stood out as particularly promising.
One successful intervention involved participants watching a commercial where pairs of individuals with opposing political views formed bonds despite their differences. The video highlighted disagreements on topics like climate change, feminism and transgender identity, yet showed the two people collaborating and ultimately choosing to socialize together. This intervention yielded a 10.47 percent decrease in animosity, based on survey questions conducted before and after the intervention.
In another intervention, participants read book quotes arguing that the news media creates polarization to maximize its audience and that most Democrats and Republicans are part of an “exhausted majority” that rejects polarization. Participants also saw data suggesting that increased consumption of news media correlates with more distorted perceptions of opposing views. Participants were then guided on retaking control from media influence and asked to advise others on achieving this. It resulted in a 10.22 percent decrease in animosity.
A third intervention had participants read about the pivotal role of democracy in America’s leadership in technology and culture, and how extreme partisanship threatens this. They learned that research shows that the vast majority of Americans support democracy and that, contrary to popular belief, most members of both parties support democratic rules, disapprove of violence, and like one another. Participants were then asked to write about their two favorite things about being American. The intervention resulted in a 9.20 percent decrease in animosity.
By appealing to people’s sense of camaraderie, common nationality and resistance to exploitative media, these simple methods proved capable of reducing partisan animosity, at least in study settings. In her 2022 book on American partisanship, Mason similarly notes how minimal interventions can have significant impacts. “We found that just reading a quote from either Joe Biden or Donald Trump that says violence is not OK makes people less approving of violence,” she says.
Adams emphasizes the need to dial down the aggressive rhetoric among leaders, where Democrats and Republicans publicly demonize the other side. He references a working paper on the 2022 US elections that found a reduction in Twitter toxicity with this unusual method: Researchers informed politicians that they were monitoring their accounts and that their tweet toxicity scores would be sent to a non-governmental organization for possible publication just before the election.
Another effective method, Adams says, might be demonstrating to politicians that toxic rhetoric doesn’t necessarily benefit them. An additional working paper found that although politicians who frequently use insults gain more media attention, they generally perform worse than politicians who focus on policy: They’re assigned to less powerful committees, don’t perform better in elections and don’t raise more campaign funds.
Researchers are only starting to understand the prevalence and drivers of polarization around the world. And while there is no silver bullet to close the yawning social and political gaps dividing our societies, it’s a hopeful sign that the issue has now entered the public consciousness. Only five years ago, Adams says, few academic journals paid any mind to research about affective polarization. “I think a lot of political scientists just thought, ‘Well, it’s only about people’s feelings,’” he says. Then came January 6 and the storming of the US Capitol. “Suddenly, now, everyone is interested in affective polarization.”
Reiljan tells a similar story — that when he started his research as a PhD student in 2015, there was barely any cross-country scholarship on the topic available. Some months back, he hosted a conference on polarization where scholars from across Europe and North America gathered to brainstorm strategies to reduce it. ~
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2024/latest-research-what-causes-political-polarization
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“SINGLE AND HAPPY” — GENERATION Z VALUES AUTONOMY
When I was a young adult, all I wanted was to find someone nice to settle down and raise a family with. I did find someone nice, and we did settle down to raise the standard family of two kids and a dog. When I look back now as an empty nester, I don’t regret any of the decisions I made. But I also realize that the things I thought I wanted were the things I was told I should want. I lived my life according to a script someone else had provided for me.
In industrialized societies at least, marriage rates have been declining for decades, and the number of single persons—whether pre-marriage or post-divorce—has been on the rise. Research has consistently shown, at least until recently, that people are happier when they’re in a steady romantic relationship than when they’re unpartnered. There’s certainly a prevailing social attitude that you need a significant other to make you “whole.”
Then along came Gen Z, challenging traditions and living by their own rules. According to a team of German psychologists led by Tita Avilés, the Zoomers, or people born between the years 2007 and 2012, are waiting longer to get romantically involved. And what’s more, they’re quite happy being single. The researchers analyze the reasons for this trend in an article they recently published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
AUTONOMY OVER INTIMACY
For this study, Avilés and colleagues drew from a large-scale multiyear survey on intimate relationships and family dynamics to analyze data from nearly 3,000 people who were not in a romantic relationship. The sample consisted of four cohorts: Gen X, born 1971-1973; Early Millennials, born 1981-1983, Late Millennials, born 1991-1993, and Gen Z, born 2001-2003. Participants in each cohort responded at three age milestones: Adolescence (roughly age 16), Early Adulthood (roughly age 26), and Established Adulthood (roughly age 36). Of course, later-born cohorts have not yet reached all three age milestones.
Compared with the early-born cohorts, the later-born cohorts reported more satisfaction with their single status and more life satisfaction in general. This was particularly true for the Zoomers, who have so far responded only at the Adolescence age milestone.
For earlier generations, adolescence was a time when people began dating and entering into romantic relationships. The adolescents of Gen Z, however, seem to value autonomy over intimacy. From these data, the researchers can’t determine exactly why this is the case, but they do consider a number of social changes that may be driving this shift in attitudes.
LESS STIGMA SURROUNDING SINGLEHOOD
Rates of singlehood have been going up for decades, and Avilés and her colleagues note that social attitudes about being single have changed. In the past, being single was a sign of failure, marking the person as being unable to build or maintain an intimate relationship. People internalize these kinds of social judgments, and this is likely one reason why members of earlier generations reported being unsatisfied with single life.
However, the researchers point out that there’s a lot less stigma surrounding singlehood these days, especially among Zoomers. That is, members of Gen Z don’t see anything wrong with being single, so they don’t judge their peers for being romantically unattached. This means that Zoomers can decide for themselves whether to be single or not without fear of being discriminated against by those whose opinions they value most.
Avilés and colleagues also point out that members of Gen Z tend to be more individualistic and value autonomy more than previous generations. You may have plans for your life, but if you’re in a relationship, you need to take your partner’s goals into consideration as well and compromise on your own. This seems to be something that Zoomers are less willing to do.
DELAYING DEVELOPMENTAL MILESTONES
Another reason for Gen Z’s preference for singlehood is the observation across several generations that younger people are passing through major developmental milestones later in life. Although children reach puberty at a somewhat earlier age than they did a century ago, largely due to better nutrition nowadays, their social and psychological development tends to be delayed. Young people stay in school longer, start their careers later, and wait longer to get married or start a family, even when they do have a romantic partner. There’s even evidence suggesting that Zoomers are waiting longer to have sex as well.
On that topic, we also need to point out that sexual attitudes have changed significantly over the last half-century. Boomers like me were “liberated,” unlike our parents. We had no qualms about premarital sex, but we did mostly confine it to within committed relationships. However, Zoomers are more open to casual sex, and they have the apps to help them find it. They’re also more accepting of alternative sexual relationships, such as friends with benefits. Other research has shown that people are happier with their single status when their sexual needs are met.
Prolonged “childhood” in the 21st century, in which young adults may still be financially dependent on their parents well into their 20s, is likely one reason why Zoomers delay careers, marriage, and family. At the same time, life expectancy has increased significantly over the last century, so young people today have the reasonable expectation that they’ll have more time available to them and needn’t rush into commitments that will tie them down.
If this is the case, we can perhaps expect Zoomers to start settling down in their late 30s, unlike their Boomer parents, who tended to be married by their late 20s. It’s also important to keep in mind that the Boomers married later than their parents did, and for the same reasons, namely that it took longer to get established in a career and that life expectancies were increasing.
It will be interesting to see, in coming decades, whether Gen Z follows a delayed but traditional life trajectory or forges new and unexplored pathways through life. I wish them a happy journey. ~ David Ludden Ph.D.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/202408/why-gen-zers-are-single-and-happy-about-it
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THE QUESTION OF ABORTING A BABY IF IT HAD DOWN’S SYNDROME
My wife would have aborted without hesitation and with my full support. We didn’t want a defective child. Before reading what I have to say, read Aimee’s answer, typical for a pro-lifer. Note that her husband divorced her when she refused to abort, a common price to pay for having the baby.
Those of us who taught Medical Biochemistry were required to cover inborn errors of metabolism in detail. We biochemist faculty members could do a good job teaching the basic science of the disorders but needed help from clinical faculty to make the subject “real” for the students. One of our best clinicians was Eric, who had followed a patient named Jerry for 20 years. At birth, the little boy had phenylketonuria instead of Down syndrome, but what we learned from this case is what life is like for the parent of a child with special needs.
Jerry’s mother consented to lengthy, videotaped interviews with Eric so others could learn from her experience. She was an articulate, caring woman who was nevertheless transformed from cheerful to bitter and burned out as years of unrelenting stress took their toll. In the first interview, she led the viewers through a tutorial on the protocols for managing her child’s condition. Her kitchen looked like a small biochemistry lab, with bottles of amino acids, spatulas, weighing boats, and precision balances of various sizes.
Jeremy was on a strict diet, which she had to formulate daily like a lab tech doing experiments with rats. Not only was this tedious, but the cost of feeding Jeremy was astronomical. I can’t remember how much her co-pay was, but we were shocked when she told us.
Unlike a Down patient, Jeremy was not retarded, but his IQ was well below average. He could go to school, but the big problem was ensuring he didn’t eat regular food. The poor kid was constantly tempted to cheat because his special diet tasted awful. We were given samples in class, and it tasted like medicine.
The bottom line was this mother’s life revolved around Jerry and nothing else. Her husband was supportive for many years but couldn’t take it indefinitely, and the marriage ended in divorce. While the diet worked for a long time, Jerry eventually needed a liver transplant. We don't know the outcome because Eric left the university, ending that series of clinical correlations.
My wife and I have known many couples with special needs kids, and the story is the same whether the kid has Down syndrome or something else. If the parents have other children, they are neglected, so they become casualties—innocent victims—of the mother’s decision not to abort. Most of the family’s financial resources are poured into the special needs kid, so the other kids are deprived of that, too.
As I said at the top, Aimee’s story is typical for pro-lifers. They are religious fundamentalists who can rationalize their fate as God’s will and believe that whatever happens in this life is not a tragedy because it is a mere passage en route to the eternal afterlife.
Unless you can buy into this fantasy or have the money to hire full-time help, my advice is to abort. ~ Mark Roseman, Quora
Sandra Smith:
Although lovable, my Down's syndrome sister never learned more than 4 words, and never responded to verbal warnings. My parents tried to keep her at home, but by age 5 she was too big and strong for my mother to manage alone. They sent her away to a special school. She coped there, but in the subsequent program she was not advanced enough to profit from the program. She was warehoused there with a couple of adults who were kept in cribs. I couldn't bear to see her there, and stopped going with them when they visited. When she was older she was switched to a group home. Three Down's adults with a family that took care of them. She would take a coloring book and carefully put one crayon mark on each page. At age 50, she choked to death on a piece of food she was eating when no one was watching. If they had know in advance she had that disease, they would have tried to procure an abortion, although it was illegal in 1949.
Yvonne Smith:
A Down’s person is often able to take care of the basics, eating, getting dressed etc, but there are also many who CAN’T. Even those who are higher functioning tend to need care for their whole lives.
Mary Ritchie:
The poor outcomes of people with Down’s precede techniques of early intervention and the intensive stimulation kids with Down’s can receive from infancy through their school years. There is an increased risk of a comorbidity of Trisomy 21 with autism and those are the people with Down’s who have the worst outcomes. Just as children with severe autism are.
Louise Rutledge:
Pediatric neurologists see these families disintegrate all the time. Divorce always is around the corner. Father becomes workaholic both for financial reasons but also because he doesn’t want to come home to the endless issues with a disabled child.
And yes the other children can never be fully cared for… it is always about the severely disabled child. No one really has the time to fully counsel these parents regarding what they will face, and many simply do not want to believe the nurses or doctors. You would have to literally force each one to spend at least a week with a parent who has to care for a severely disabled child and actively do all the work themselves. And do so one at a time. Tragic way to live a life.
Mark Roseman:
I don’t know how doctors who specialize in inborn errors can go to work every day. Most of these diseases cause the kids to suffer physically because mental retardation is usually not the only symptom. One of the most gruesome we had to teach was Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, where kids have to be restrained because they self-mutilate. They usually die between the ages of 10 and 20. So, parents who refuse to abort are committing an act of cruelty by bringing these children into the world, in my opinion.
Rose Steele:
Glass child syndrome.
“The term "glass child" comes from the idea that parents caring for children with special needs may "look right through" their healthy siblings. The word "glass" is also used because the children appear strong, but in reality are not.
Mark Roseman:
One of my family members has lived next door to a family with an autistic kid, and they have the same story to tell. There are resources available to the parents, but it means institutionalizing the kid (who is now 20 y/o), and they cannot bear to do that. I don’t think he has been violent recently, but he howls all day and night.
Mary:
The question of whether to abort DownSyndrome fetuses is part of the value decisions we make as individuals and as a society. There is no question that raising and caring for special needs children can be destructive to the caregivers and other children in the family. The examples cited are of children with very severe disabilities..but not all Down Syndrome children are so severely affected. There is a whole range of disability...some may be able to function even with a moderate degree of independence---and while there are co morbidities they may be manageable and these children may have a life span to middle age. But these things can't be known ahead of time...and potentials are also increased by new programs of stimulation and education...again, for some.
Hard choices. We have already effectively made choices in resources devoted to saving infants born prematurely — earlier and with such low birth weights their survival is — or would previously have been considered impossible or miraculous. Enormous amounts of money, resources, work and time has been lavished on these miracles. Even so, many survive but with serious deficits that will hamper their lives, will need special care. These heroic efforts continue, largely unquestioned...and both the efforts and the results are a choice made by our society, a choice made that these small lives are worth saving at almost any cost.
However, in contrast to the ever increasing ability to save these fragile infants, our record with mothers is shockingly bad. Maternal mortality/morbidity in the US is shamefully high...one of the highest in the developed world. In regarding these facts it is evident we have, as a society, made a choice.
Oriana:
Once, as a part of a college project, I visited a school for special-needs children (they weren't yet called that, but it's a vast improvement over "retarted"). I was stunned by how luxurious the school was. Well, I don't mean crystal chandeliers or any of that kind of nonsense, but the pleasant layout of the classrooms and schoolyard, the small size of the class (six per teacher, if I remember correctly), the restroom attached to each classroom, and the infinitely patient and well-trained teacher assigned to each "class." I put "class" in quotation marks, because what were they learning? To flush after using the toilet, and wash their hands. Perhaps also to count to ten and the names of colors, or how to play with certain toys, though my memory is hazy on that. What stayed in my memory was the great emphasis on how to use the bathroom.
It was not a private school. Of course it wasn't an ordinary public school, but quite an extraordinary one, with specially trained teacher giving special attention to their small flock. Never a harsh word, only kindness, and that infinite patience I already mentioned.
Later, I couldn't help talking about my impressions, and practically everyone reacted the same way: "Well, if any children deserve such good treatment, then certainly those kids do." I didn't dare to argue with that — and of course I didn't bring up the question of cost. But my unspoken question was why the ordinary schools were so drab, with too many children per teacher, with no special attention given to the gifted students. Those who could read several grades ahead were not given more interesting reading matter (in college used to work part-time as a teacher's aide, so I speak from experience).
Yes, I heard that there were also programs for the gifted children, but I never witnessed one such program, and I doubt that those children enjoyed the kind of luxury (it struck me as nothing short of luxury, including the beautifully kept lawn) that the special-needs children had access to. It's true that gifted children manage to learn quickly, often in their own creative way, but even they could use attention and mentoring. I couldn't help but feel that the values were somehow upside down. The "special needs" of the best students were ignored.
Whenever I pointed this out, there was again a typical response: "Yes, American public schools are bad. But colleges are excellent." That's a long time to wait, those years when capable children could be learning all kinds of skills and subject matter.
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MEGA METEORITE TORE UP SEABED AND BOILED EARTH’S OCEANS
The meteorite was 40-60km in diameter and left a crater 500km across
A huge meteorite first discovered in 2014 caused a tsunami bigger than any in known human history and boiled the oceans, scientists have discovered.
The space rock, which was 200 times the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, smashed into Earth when our planet was in its infancy three billion years ago.
Carrying sledge hammers, scientists hiked to the impact site in South Africa to chisel off chunks of rock to understand the crash.
The team also found evidence that massive asteroid impacts did not bring only destruction to Earth — they helped early life thrive.
“We know that after Earth first formed there was still a lot of debris flying around space that would be smashing into Earth,” says Prof Nadja Drabon from Harvard university, lead author of the new research.
“But now we have found that life was really resilient in the wake of some of these giant impacts, and that it actually bloomed and and thrived,” she says.
The meteorite S2 was much larger than the space rock we are most familiar with. The one that led to the dinosaurs’ extinction 66 million years ago was about 10km wide, or almost the height of Mount Everest.
But S2 was 40-60km wide and its mass was 50-200 times greater.
It struck when Earth was still in its early years and looked very different.
It was a water world with just a few continents sticking out of the sea. Life was very simple — microorganisms composed of single cells.
Eastern Barberton
Nadja and her colleagues went to the Eastern Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa to collect rock samples
The impact site in Eastern Barberton Greenbelt is one of the oldest places on Earth with remnants of a meteorite crash.
Prof Drabon traveled there three times with her colleagues, driving as far as possible into the remote mountains before hiking the rest of the way with backpacks.
Rangers accompanied them with machine guns to protect them against wild animals like elephants or rhinos, or even poachers in the national park.
They were looking for spherule particles, or tiny fragments of rock, left behind by impact. Using sledge hammers, they collected hundreds of kilograms of rock and took them back to labs for analysis.
Prof Drabon stowed the most precious pieces in her luggage.
"I usually get stopped by security, but I give them a big spiel about how exciting the science is and then they get really bored and let me through," she says.
The team traveled with rangers who could protect them from wild animals like elephants or rhinos (or human poachers)
The team have now re-constructed just what the S2 meteorite did when it violently careened into Earth. It gouged out a 500km crater and pulverised rocks that ejected at incredibly fast speeds to form a cloud that circled around the globe.
“Imagine a rain cloud, but instead of water droplets coming down, it's like molten rock droplets raining out of the sky,” says Prof Drabon.
A huge tsunami would have swept across the globe, ripped up the sea floor, and flooded coastlines.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami would have paled in comparison, suggests Prof Drabon.
All that energy would have generated massive amounts of heat that boiled the oceans causing up to tens of metres of water to evaporate. It would also have increased air temperatures by up to 100C.
The skies would have turned black, choked with dust and particles. Without sunlight penetrating the darkness, simple life on land or in shallow water that relied on photosynthesis would have been wiped out
These impacts are similar to what geologists have found about other big meteorite impacts and what was suspected for S2.
But what Prof Drabon and her team found next was surprising. The rock evidence showed that the violent disturbances churned up nutrients like phosphorus and iron that fed simple organisms.
“Life was not only resilient, but actually bounced back really quickly and thrived,” she says.
“It’s like when you brush your teeth in the morning. It kills 99.9% of bacteria, but by the evening they're all back, right?” she says.
The new findings suggest that the big impacts were like a giant fertilizer, sending essential ingredients for life like phosphorus around the globe.
The tsunami sweeping the planet would also have brought iron-rich water from the depths to the surface, giving early microbes extra energy. The findings add to a growing view among scientists that early life was actually helped by the violent succession of rocks striking Earth in its early years, Professor Drabton says.
“It seems that life after the impact actually encountered really favo
rable conditions that allowed it to bloom,” she explains.
The findings are published in the scientific journal PNAS.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4g455p8lo
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THE STRANGE AFTERLIFE OF PONTIUS PILATE
Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who faced the ultimate politician’s dilemma, was put to use as a Christian convert by the early church.
Christ before Pilate, from a French book of hours by Henri d'Orquevaulx, c. 1420-30.
Towards the end of the second century AD the pagan intellectual Celsus wrote an anti-Christian treatise mocking belief in Jesus Christ. If Jesus really had been the Son of God, he asked, why hadn’t God punished Pontius Pilate, the man responsible for crucifying him? Why had Pilate not been driven insane or torn apart, like the characters in Greek myths? Why had no calamity befallen him?
While there are plenty of later Christian traditions about the punishment of Pontius Pilate, all of these seem to belong to a period long after Celsus was writing. Celsus’ challenge, and the response of early Christians to it, suggests that there was more than a kernel of truth in the claim that the Prefect of Judea had evaded misfortune. This is implicit from the efforts early Christians made to absolve him of responsibility for the Crucifixion.
The only reliable statement we have about Pilate’s life after his time in Judea comes from the pen of the Jewish writer Josephus. In his Antiquities of the Jews, written about 60 years after the events, Josephus states that Pilate was recalled to Rome after his mishandling of a riot involving the Samaritans in AD 36. For this he would have expected to face a hearing before the Emperor Tiberius, the aged but uncompromising ruler who had appointed him ten years earlier. Pilate hurried back, but by the time he arrived, in March AD 37, the ailing Tiberius had died. A new emperor, Caligula, had taken up the reins of power.
What happened next is guesswork. Josephus says nothing more about him, implying that there was no hearing. Perhaps, in the general euphoria surrounding Caligula’s accession, his case was put on hold, or simply forgotten. Maybe the hearing did go ahead and he was acquitted. For all we know, he was given another posting.
The lack of a suitably grisly fate for Pilate put Christian apologists in a quandary. As governor, it was Pilate’s job to pass judgement in capital cases: he was the one who condemned Jesus to suffer on the cross. There was no circumventing his guilt. Divine punishment should have followed.
Yet in the early years of Christianity it was difficult to make such claims. The Roman state was suspicious of the new cult and, if Christians wanted to avoid confrontation, it was best not to accuse one of Rome’s officials of deicide. The canonical Gospels stressed that Pilate was not fully to blame. He could find no fault in Jesus: ‘I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty. Therefore I will have him punished and then release him’, Pilate declares in Luke’s Gospel. John has Pilate twice announce ‘I find no basis for a charge against him’.
The apocryphal Gospel of Peter, thought by many scholars to be among the earliest Christian texts, went even further. In this, Pilate and his soldiers play no part in the crowd’s mocking or torturing of Jesus. He himself declares ‘I am pure from the blood of the Son of God’ and, together with his soldiers, who guard the tomb of Jesus, he conspires to keep the miracle of the Resurrection secret from the Jewish priests.
The tradition of a blameless Pilate, a witness to the Passion, led to a strange early Christian fascination with him. By the second century AD, fake letters of Pilate, recounting the wondrous story of Jesus, circulated among the faithful. The so-called Acts of Pilate, allegedly deriving from the governor’s own records, portray Pilate as a convert. Tertullian, the late second-century Christian theologian, described Pilate as someone ‘who himself also in his own conscience was now a Christian’ and alleged that Tiberius was so convinced by Pilate’s reports that he would have placed Jesus among the Roman gods had not the Senate refused. So influential were the various versions of the Acts of Pilate that in the early fourth century the Roman state created and promoted an anti-Christian, ‘true’, pagan version in an attempt to discredit the Christian ones. Needless to say this was no more reliable than its rivals.
All of this might seem merely capricious, but the absolution of Pilate came at a terrible cost. The early Christians shifted the blame for the Crucifixion onto others. A rebuttal of the arguments of Celsus, written by the third-century bishop Origen, shows this clearly: ‘It was not so much Pilate that condemned Him,’ he wrote, ‘as the Jewish nation’. Celsus had chosen the wrong culprit; and the fact that the Jewish nation had been torn apart by the Romans and dispersed across the face of the earth was proof of God’s retribution. The fake letters and the Christian versions of the Acts of Pilate said much the same thing, as did other Christian apologists. The Acts went so far as to have the Jewish crowd telling Pilate that they willingly accept the blood-guilt, an echo of the Gospel of Matthew, which has the same crowd shouting ‘his blood be on us and our children!’
These claims formed a basis for Christian persecution of the Jews right up to modern times.
Pilate’s costly absolution was the product of specific religious and political circumstances. When the Roman Empire became a Christian state in the fourth century, there was no longer any need to emphasize his innocence. The Nicene Creed, formulated under Emperor Constantine in AD 325 and emended in AD 381, stated bluntly that Christ ‘was crucified under Pontius Pilate’. It became acceptable to cast Pilate as a villain and a range of myths developed describing his grisly end.
Some influential Christians demurred, however. Saint Augustine, writing in the sixth century, argued that when Pilate wrote on the cross ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, he really meant it: ‘It could not be torn from his heart that Jesus was the King of the Jews.’
While the West went on to develop the tradition of a ‘bad’ Pilate who was punished for his misdeeds, the Eastern Church preferred a more sympathetic interpretation. Not only was Pilate a Christian; he was a confessor and even a martyr. One eastern text, The Handing Over of Pilate, has Tiberius ordering the governor to be beheaded for having allowed the Crucifixion to go ahead.
First Pilate repents and then a voice from heaven proclaims that all nations will bless him, because under his governorship the prophecies about Christ were fulfilled. Finally an angel takes charge of his severed head. In some accounts he is buried with his wife and two children next to the tomb of Jesus – the ultimate martyr’s sepulcher.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate’s wife warns her husband not to harm Jesus and for this she achieved sainthood among Orthodox Christians. The Copts and Christians of Ethiopia took the next step and canonized Pilate himself. An Ethiopian collection of hagiographies lists St Pilate’s Day as the 25th of the summer month of Sanne, a day shared with his wife Procla and the saints Jude, Peter and Paul:
Salutation to Pilate, who washed his hands
To show he himself was innocent of the blood of Jesus Christ
Those familiar with the western tradition may find the idea of St Pontius Pilate curious or even absurd. But the fascination with Pilate never abates. From the Acts of Pilate to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margerita, the man who cross-examined and crucified Jesus remains an enigma, a shadowy metaphor for opposites: equivocation and stubbornness, cowardice and heroism, cruelty and clemency. His dilemma – to do the right thing or the popular thing – is every ruler’s quandary. Perhaps that is why people can sympathize with him: we too must sometimes face a difficult choice; though, fortunately for us,its legacy is likely to be less enduring.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/strange-christian-afterlife-pontius-pilate
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THE MICROBIOME’S ‘DANCE PARTNER’:VIRUSES LIVING IN OUR GUT
You've probably heard of the microbiome – the hordes of bacteria and other tiny life forms that live in our guts. Well, it turns out those bacteria have viruses that exist in and around them – with important consequences for both them and us.
Meet the phageome.
There are billions, perhaps even trillions of these viruses, known as bacteriophages ("bacteria eaters" in Greek) or just "phages" to their friends, inside the human digestive system. Phageome science has skyrocketed recently, says Breck Duerkop, a bacteriologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, and researchers are struggling to come to grips with their enormous diversity. Researchers suspect that if physicians could harness or target the right phages, they might be able to improve human health.
"There will turn out to be good phages as well as bad phages," says Paul Bollyky, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Stanford Medicine. But for now, it's still not clear how many phages occupy the gut – perhaps one for each bacterial cell, or even fewer. There are also bacteria that contain phage genes but aren't actively producing viruses – the bacteria are just living their lives with phage DNA tagging along in their genomes.
And there are lots of phages still unidentified. Scientists call these the "dark matter" of the phageome. A big part of current phage research is to identify these viruses and their host bacteria. The Gut Phage Database contains more than 140,000 phages, but that's surely an underestimate. "Their variety is just extraordinary," says Colin Hill, a microbiologist at University College Cork in Ireland.
Scientists find phages by sifting through genetic sequences culled from human fecal samples. That's where researchers found the most common gut phage group, called crAssphage. (named for the "cross-assembly" technique that plucked their genes out of the genetic mishmash.) In a recent study, Hill and colleagues detailed a light-bulb shape for crAssphages, with a 20-sided body and a stalk to inject DNA into host bacteria.
It's not clear whether crAssphages make a difference to human health, but given that they infect one of the most common groups of gut bacteria, Bacteroides, Hill wouldn't be surprised if they did. Other common groups, which also infect Bacteroides, include the Gubaphage (gut bacteroidales phage) and the LoVEphage (lots of viral genetic elements).
Phageomes vary widely from person to person. They also change depending on age, sex, diet and lifestyle, as Hill and colleagues described in the 2023 Annual Review of Microbiology.
Though phages infect bacteria and sometimes kill them, the relationship is more complicated than that. "We used to think that phage and bacteria are fighting," says Hill, "but now we know that they're actually dancing; they're partners.”
Phages can benefit bacteria by bringing in new genes. When a phage particle is assembling inside an infected bacterium, it can sometimes stuff bacterial genes into its protein shell along with its own genetic material. Later, it squirts those genes into a new host, and those accidentally transferred genes could be helpful, says Duerkop. They might provide resistance to antibiotics or the ability to digest a new substance.
Phages keep bacterial populations fit by constantly nipping at their heels, says Hill. Bacteroides bacteria can display up to a dozen types of sugary coats on their outer surfaces. Different coats have different advantages: to evade the immune system, say, or to occupy a different corner of the digestive system. But when crAssphages are around, Hill says, the Bacteroides must constantly change coats to evade the phages that recognize one coat or another. The result: at any given time, there are Bacteroides with different coat types present, enabling the population as a whole to occupy a variety of niches or handle new challenges.
We each have a unique phageome constantly interacting with our microbiome
Phages also keep bacterial populations from getting out of hand. The gut is an ecosystem, like the woods, and phages are bacteria predators, like wolves are deer predators. The gut needs phages like the woods needs wolves. When those predator-prey relationships are altered, disease can result: researchers have observed phageome changes in inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), irritable bowel disease and colorectal cancer – the viral ecosystem of someone with IBS is often low in diversity, for example.
People try to re-balance the gut microbiome with diets or, in extreme medical cases, fecal transplants. Tackling phages might provide a more fine-tuned approach, Hill says. As a case in point, scientists are seeking phages that could be used therapeutically to infect the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers.
Perhaps we should be grateful for the trillions of phages managing the gut's ecosystem. Without them, Hill suggests, a few kinds of bacteria might quickly come to dominate – potentially leaving you unable to digest some foods and subject to gas and bloating.
The wild and wondrous phageome is a dance partner for bacteria and humans alike.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240913-the-hidden-kingdom-of-viruses-living-in-your-gut
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COMBINED DECLINE IN GAIT SPEED AND COGNITION MAY BETTER PREDICT DEMENTIA RISK THAN EITHER ALONE
~ Declining cognitive function coupled with slowed walking speed is associated with greater dementia risk in older adults than one of these factors alone, according to an NIA-funded study published in JAMA Network Open. The findings suggest that adding walking speed assessment to dementia risk screenings may help health care providers more accurately identify at-risk individuals. The study was led by an international team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, Rush University Medical Center, the University of Melbourne, and Monash University (Australia).
Today, there are 50 million people living with dementia worldwide, and this number is projected to triple by 2050. Decades before the symptoms of memory loss appear, many molecular and cellular changes take place in the brain of a person living with dementia. These changes are challenging to detect, so scientists are searching for simple tests that can help clinicians better identify individuals at high risk of developing dementia.
One test that may help is gait (walking) speed. Previous research demonstrated that declining gait speed is associated with dementia. Further, several earlier studies showed that a dual decline in both gait speed and cognitive function is a better predictor of dementia risk than either measure alone. However, these previous studies either included a small number of participants who developed dementia or had other limitations.
For this latest study, the research team examined dementia risk by analyzing data from the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly (ASPREE) clinical trial, a longitudinal study focused on aspirin use in older adults. ASPREE followed more than 17,000 adults older than age 65 from the United States and Australia from 2010 to 2017. Every two years, ASPREE researchers measured participants’ walking speed and administered tests that measured cognitive decline. They also determined whether participants met the criteria for a diagnosis of dementia.
The researchers also considered which cognitive measure was most useful for assessing dementia risk when combined with a decline in gait speed. They looked at data from four different types of cognitive tests, measuring overall cognition, memory, processing speed, and verbal fluency. The scientists found that when the metrics were combined, declining gait speed and worsening performance on the memory test best predicted future dementia risk. Further, the dual decline was better at predicting dementia risk than either measurement alone.
These results indicate that regularly testing both gait speed and memory may help health care providers more clearly identify patients at risk for dementia. Still, the authors note several limitations to their study, including that it did not distinguish between different types of dementia, and the participants were healthier than the general population. Overall, however, these findings highlight the importance of including gait assessment in routine dementia risk screens. Future studies could explore how to implement such testing in primary health clinics.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/combined-decline-gait-and-cognition-may-better-predict-dementia-risk-either-factor-alone
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BENEFITS OF AVOCADO OIL
Avocado oil is delicious, nutritious, and easy to use. It’s rich in oleic acid, polyunsaturated fats, carotenoids, and other antioxidant-rich nutrients that are linked to improved heart, joint, skin, and eye health.
Unlike most other fruits, it’s rich in healthy fats and is often used to produce avocado oil. Though not as well known as olive oil, this oil is just as delicious.
Avocado oil also has numerous health benefits, largely related to its content of antioxidants and healthy fats.
Here are 8 evidence-based health benefits of avocado oil.
It is rich in oleic fatty acid.
Avocado oil is the natural oil pressed from the pulp of an avocado. Almost 70% of avocado oil consists of heart-healthy oleic acid, a monounsaturated omega-9 fatty acid.
This fatty acid is also the main component of olive oil and is believed to be partly responsible for its health benefits. Additionally, around 12% of avocado oil is saturated fat, and about 13% is polyunsaturated fat.
Avocado oil has a high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio (13:1), and we usually want around 3:1 or 2:1 for better health. But this shouldn’t be a concern, because the total amount of omega-6 is relatively small.
Most research suggests that a diet rich in unsaturated fats is beneficial for health and may reduce the risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease and dementia.
In summary, the most abundant fatty acid in avocado oil is oleic acid, a fatty acid that provides numerous health benefits. Oleic acid is the most abundant fatty acid in human cells.
Reduces cholesterol and blood pressure
Avocado oil is rich in unsaturated fatty acids, which are linked with better heart health.
In a small crossover study in 13 subjects, participants were first given either a control meal using butter (25 grams of saturated fat) or a test meal (25 grams of unsaturated fat) with avocado oil.
Over a 240-minute post-meal period, blood samples showed that the test-meal group had significantly lower levels of triglycerides, total and LDL (bad) cholesterol, inflammatory cytokines, and blood sugar compared with the control group.
One rat study compared avocado oil to losartan, a blood pressure medication, for 45 days. It found that avocado oil reduced diastolic and systolic blood pressure by 21.2% and 15.5%, respectively, and had similar effects to losartan in reducing blood pressure.
Another rat study found that avocado oil was effective in reducing levels of triglycerides and LDL (bad) cholesterol and did not affect HDL (good) cholesterol. This was comparable to olive oil, another heart-healthy oil.
High in lutein, an antioxidant beneficial to the eyes
Avocado and its oil are relatively good sources of lutein, a carotenoid and antioxidant that’s naturally found in your eyes.
Research has shown that a diet rich in lutein and another carotenoid called zeaxanthin is essential for eye health and may reduce the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration, which are common age-related eye diseases.
Since your body doesn’t produce lutein on its own, you must obtain it from your diet.
Fortunately, adding avocado and avocado oil to your diet is a great and easy way to support your eye health.
Enhances the absorption of important nutrients
Some nutrients need to be combined with fat to allow your body to absorb them, such as the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K.
In particular, carotenoids such as beta-carotene, lycopene, lutein, and zeaxanthin are poorly absorbed without fat. Unfortunately, many fruits and vegetables rich in carotenoids, such as watermelon and tomatoes, are low in fat.
Therefore, adding avocado oil or another type of fat to your meal may help you better absorb these nutrients.
One small study found that adding avocado oil to a salad with carrots, romaine lettuce, and spinach increased the absorption of carotenoids. The increase was substantial — 4.3- to 17.4-fold — when compared with a salad without fat.
Other studies have shown that olive oil, which has a very similar oleic acid content to avocado oil, is highly effective in increasing the bioavailability of carotenoids.
Therefore, adding avocado oil to a salad, marinade, or other dish may help your body absorb more nutrients.
In summary, there is good reason to include a healthy fat source like avocado oil when eating vegetables, as it may increase the absorption of carotenoid antioxidants up to 17-fold.
May reduce the symptoms of arthritis
Arthritis is a very common disease that involves painful inflammation of the joints. It affects millions of people worldwide.
While there are many types of arthritis, the most common type is osteoarthritis, which is associated with the breakdown of cartilage in the joints.
Numerous studies have found that extracts from avocado and soybean oil, called avocado/soybean unsaponifiables (ASU), may reduce the pain and stiffness associated with osteoarthritis.
In particular, ASU seems to be beneficial for people who have hip and knee osteoarthritis.
Improves skin and enhances wound healing
Avocado oil is rich in fatty acids and nutrients that may benefit your skin. It’s a good source of vitamins A and E, which are linked to skin membrane health.
One study in 24 people with plaque psoriasis found that a cream containing avocado oil (20%) and vitamin B12 improved symptoms of psoriasis after 12 weeks of treatment.
Other studies in humans and animals have also shown benefits to using avocado oil in psoriasis treatment and wound healing.
That said, most of the studies used avocado oil in conjunction with other ingredients, such as B12 and moisturizing agents, so it’s difficult to say whether avocado oil by itself would result in similar findings.
In addition to topical application, consuming a diet rich in unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins A and E, and antioxidants is associated with healthier skin.
Rich in antioxidants
A diet rich in antioxidants helps fight free radicals, which are unstable compounds that can damage cells over time. When an imbalance occurs, this can lead to oxidative stress and may contribute to conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.
By donating an electron to free radicals, antioxidants can neutralize them, preventing them from causing harm.
Fortunately, avocado oil contains a large number of antioxidants to benefit your health, such as carotenoids, tocopherols (forms of vitamin E), and various plant sterols.
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Avocado oil is highly versatile and easy to incorporate into your diet. You can add it to salads and use it as a cooking oil.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/9-avocado-oil-benefits
ending on beauty:
I too have been to Ravenna.
It is a small, dead town,
With churches and many ruins.
You can read about it in books.
You walk through and look around,
The streets are muddy and damp,
And have been mute for a thousand years
And everywhere grows moss and grass.
That's how it is with old songs —
You listen to them and no one laughs.
Everyone listens and everyone muses
Long into the night.
~ Hermann Hesse, fused translation
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Ich bin auch in Ravenna gewesen,
Ist eine kleine, tote Stadt,
Die Kirchen und viel Ruinen hat,
Man kann davon in den Büchern lesen.
Du gehst hindurch und schaust dich um,
Die Straßen sind so trüb und naß
Und sind so tausendjährig stumm,
Und überall wächst Moos und Gras!
Das ist wie alte Lieder sind,
Man hört sie an und keiner lacht
Ein jeder lauscht und jeder sinnt
Hernach daran bis in die Nacht.
~ Hermann Hesse
