Greetings from Ottawa. For more perspective on Applebaum, who indubitably
wrote among the more valuable histories of Stalin's genocidal starvation of
"Ukraine, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" (2017), as well as an
important work on the Soviet camp system, "Gulag: A History" (2003), which
won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, this piece by David
Klion in The Nation might be worth reading from January last year:

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/anne-applebaum-twilight-democracy/

It delves into some backstory concerning Applebaums's growing sense of
estrangement over the last couple decades from her neoliberal fellow
travelers as many of them moved further and further to the right, but it
fails to dismiss her work with the kind of sweeping generalizations
concerning her political identity triggered by Patrice's posting of her
piece here, which in my view justifiably links what the Russians are doing
to the Ukrainians right now to what the Stalinist regime of the USSR did to
the Ukrainians between 1932-1933, the Holodomor.

My own view is that I while find it very difficult to forgive Applebaum for
her enthusiastic support of George Bush's utterly lawless (that is,
criminal) invasion of Iraq in 2003, her recent analysis on the
mechanisms by which authoritarian governments are forming what amounts to
international mutual support networks despite ostensibly widely disparate
ideological backgrounds, "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of
Authoritarianism" (2020), was an important contribution to the global rise
of an authoritarianism that threatens all of us. To say nothing of the two
other rather significant books previously cited. If we always pre-screen
this or that author to ensure that they are in scrupulous conformity with
our own ideological views, we will end up painted into the corners of our
own echo chambers. (Mixed metaphor alert.)

Anyway I'm posting that Nation piece below for the record.

Best wishes,
Michael

Ex-Friends: Anne Applebaum and the crisis of centrist politics.



By David Klion



The Nation, JANUARY 11, 2021



Anne Applebaum’s new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of
Authoritarianism, opens two decades ago with a rollicking New Year’s Eve
party that she and her husband threw at their renovated country estate in
Poland to celebrate the triumphant end of the 20th century. Applebaum is a
historian of Eastern Europe under communism, the author of Red Famine and
the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag: A History; her husband, Rados?aw
Sikorski, is a center-right politician who at various times has served as
Poland’s foreign and defense ministers. Unsurprisingly, the guest list
included many center-right intellectuals, journalists, and politicians from
the three countries this power couple calls home—the United States, the
United Kingdom, and Poland. But as we soon learn, in the 20 years since
then, many of the guests have migrated from the center-right to the far
right. “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were
at my New Year’s Eve party,” Applebaum writes. “They, in turn, would not
only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had
ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party
would no longer speak to the other half.”



Readers unfamiliar with Polish politics may not recognize names like Ania
Bielecka, the godmother of one of Applebaum’s children, who has recently
become close with Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski, the leader of the far-right Polish
governing party Law and Justice; or Anita Gargas, another of Applebaum’s
guests, who now spreads conspiracy theories in the right-wing
newspaper Gazeta Polska; or Rafal Ziemkiewicz, who now spews anti-Semitic
rhetoric on Polish state television. But an Anglo-American audience will
likely recognize some of the other people who were once her center-right
comrades in arms—from the disgraced conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza and the Fox
News prime-time hate-monger Laura Ingraham in the United States to
former National Review editor in chief John O’Sullivan and current Prime
Minister Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. (O’Sullivan now spends most
of his time in Hungary, where he runs a think tank, the Danube Institute,
backed by the far-right ruling party.)



For Applebaum, the question is how her peers—all of whom, at the turn of
the century, supported “the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market”
consensus that dominated not only center-right but also most center-left
politics after the fall of communism—have come to avow reactionary
conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia and to show a slavish
loyalty to demagogues like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Twilight of
Democracy is her attempt at an answer; in other words, it is Applebaum’s
effort to explain why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to
be fascists.



Insofar as the book offers intimate portraits of the sorts of intellectuals
who have ended up working to empower the far right, it’s a valuable
document. Drawing inspiration from Julien Benda’s The Treason of the
Intellectuals, Applebaum makes explicit that she is not setting out to
explain what makes today’s populist strongmen tick nor what makes ordinary
voters support them, but specifically why some in her orbit—all highly
educated, urbane, cosmopolitan journalists, academics, and political
operatives—have joined their cause. Up to a point, her main argument is
persuasive: that her former friends are motivated less by ideological
conviction or material suffering than by humiliation and resentment. In
particular, they are driven by a sense that their natural talents have been
inadequately recognized and rewarded under the supposedly meritocratic
rules of a liberal elite that has dismissed them as mediocrities. They are
the losers of liberalism’s cultural hegemony—or so they claim—and in the
illiberal politics of the far right, they have found a way to win.



It’s a plausible theory, but implicit within it is an unexamined assumption
that liberal meritocracy has worked and will continue to work on its own
terms. Applebaum’s blind faith in the center-right strains of neoliberalism
and meritocratic mobility also conveniently absolves her and her remaining
friends of any responsibility for the present crisis. Their success, when
they had it, was well deserved; to the extent that they are now powerless
against the dangers presented by their estranged cohort, it is only because
real merit is no longer being rewarded. It never seems to cross Applebaum’s
mind that having had so many erstwhile friends who ended up on the far
right might say something unflattering about her own judgment—and more
generally about the center-right political tradition to which she belongs.



Twilight of Democracy is not a long book. Its six chapters are structured
as a series of personal recollections and reporting trips framed by
abstract political digressions. From her New Year’s Eve party, Applebaum
takes us first to contemporary Poland and Hungary, then to post-Brexit
Britain, then to Spain and Trump’s America, and finally back to her Polish
country home for another, more recent party—this one attended by a younger,
more liberal, and more comfortably post-national crowd, including her sons’
friends from school and university. “No deep cultural differences, no
profound civilizational clashes, no unbridgeable identity gaps appeared to
divide them,” she writes optimistically, though the possibility that they
might not present a socioeconomically representative glimpse of the West’s
future doesn’t seem to occur to her.



The most effective moments in these journeys come when Applebaum offers
sharply rendered portraits of her far-right subjects. Her contempt for each
of them is deeply personal, and she has a knack for understated but cutting
observation. Of the director of Polish state television, she writes:



Jacek Kurski is not a radically lonely conformist of the kind described by
Hannah Arendt, and he does not incarnate the banality of evil; he is no
bureaucrat following orders. He has never said anything thoughtful or
interesting on the subject of democracy, a political system that he neither
supports nor denounces. He is not an ideologue or a true believer; he is a
man who wants the power and fame that he feels he has been unjustly denied.
To understand Jacek, you need to look beyond political science textbooks
and study, instead, literary antiheroes.



Of the Danube Institute, the think tank run by O’Sullivan:

Hungarian friends describe its presence in Budapest as “marginal.” As a
rule, Hungarians don’t read its (admittedly sparse) English-language
publications, and its events are unremarkable and mostly go unremarked. But
O’Sullivan has an office and a Budapest apartment. He has the means to
invite his many friends and contacts, all conservative writers and
thinkers, to visit him in one of Europe’s greatest and most beautiful
cities. I have no doubt that, when they get there, O’Sullivan is the jovial
and witty host that he always was.



Of Laura Ingraham:



"Some mutual friends point out that she is a convert to Catholicism, and a
breast cancer survivor who is deeply religious: she told one of them that
“the only man who never disappointed me was Jesus.” The willpower she
required to survive in the cutthroat world of right-wing media—especially
at Fox News, where female stars were often pressured to sleep with their
bosses—should not be underestimated. These personal experiences give a
messianic edge to some of her public remarks."



A number of these people refused to speak to Applebaum for the book; others
had only brief, testy exchanges with her by phone. One, the right-wing
Hungarian historian Mária Schmidt, met with Applebaum and then published
her own heavily edited transcript of the interview online, without
Applebaum’s permission, after which it appeared on the official website of
the Hungarian government. “It had been a performance,” Applebaum realizes,
“designed to prove to other Hungarians that Schmidt is loyal to the regime
and willing to defend it.”



Applebaum’s character sketches are compelling, in part because they are
fueled by an implicit, if unacknowledged, self-recognition. She is able to
get into her subjects’ heads because she used to be so close with them—and,
though she may not consciously understand this, because they are not so
different from her. For instance, she writes about two subtly different
shades of nostalgia. Reflective nostalgics, including herself, love old
photographs and letters but don’t actually wish for a return to the past,
while restorative nostalgics, like two of her former friends in Britain,
the conservative writers Simon Heffer and Roger Scruton, have channeled the
romance of the past into the disruptive politics of Brexit and the UK
Independence Party. Applebaum still remembers—with nostalgia!—what it felt
like to bond with Heffer and Scruton over English literature and country
cricket matches, which lends some pathos to her break with them over
Britain’s future.



This intimacy can also be found in Applebaum’s profoundly unsettling
account of the 2010 Smolensk air disaster—a horrific tragedy in which 96
people, including Poland’s then-president and a large swath of the
country’s political elite, died in a plane crash en route to a
commemoration with the Russian government for the 70th anniversary of the
Katyn massacre. Here Applebaum captures how a nation’s deeply felt trauma
can devolve into something more sinister:



"A kind of hysteria, something like the madness that took hold in the
United States after 9/11, engulfed the nation. Television announcers wore
black mourning ties; friends gathered at our Warsaw apartment to talk about
history repeating itself in that dark, damp Russian forest. My own
recollection of the days that followed are jumbled and chaotic. I remember
going to buy a black suit to wear to the memorial services; I remember one
of the widows, so frail she seemed barely able to stand, weeping at her
husband’s funeral. My own husband, who had refused an invitation to travel
with the president on that trip, went out to the airport every evening to
stand at attention while the coffins were brought home."



The crash was ruled an accident, one that initially united Poles and
Russians in national mourning. But right-wing Polish intellectuals,
including Applebaum’s former friend Gargas, soon developed a set of
elaborate conspiracy theories to explain it. Applebaum aptly compares the
Smolensk theories to birtherism and QAnon in the United States, and she
sees in such viral falsehoods a useful tool for autocrats: If adherents can
accept one false premise, one “medium-sized lie,” then every establishment
narrative becomes suspect and an alternative, fact-free political reality
beckons them.



As an eyewitness to how these paranoid alternate realities took root among
the elites of multiple countries, Applebaum brings a useful perspective,
one rooted in her own subject position and not easily found in a political
science textbook. But as she moves from one chilling anecdote to the next,
the reader may begin to notice a self-flattering absence haunting Twilight
of Democracy: Applebaum is willing to skewer her erstwhile friends, but she
is unwilling to interrogate her own culpability and that of the
center-right establishment more generally. To whatever extent she may now
regret some of these friendships with the benefit of hindsight, she does
not acknowledge how her past and present worldview—one supportive of
neoliberal economics, military adventurism, and elite meritocracy—might
also have created the room for the far right.

Applebaum may be well versed in the soap-operatic intrigues of her set, but
her grasp of Western political theory is at times superficial by
comparison. Typical of the many interchangeable best sellers of the
anti-Trump resistance, Twilight of Democracy is the sort of book that skips
briskly from Plato to Cicero to Hamilton in order to note that elites have
always been skeptical of democracy, and it dutifully cites Tocqueville,
Lincoln, and King in affirming the compatibility of the liberal tradition
with American exceptionalism. Meanwhile, she is dismissive and simplistic
toward political figures of the past who are still identified with
radicalism today. At one point, she goes on a diatribe against Emma Goldman
for her anarchist criticisms of American patriotism a century ago, a
tradition that Applebaum then traces through to the Weather Underground,
Howard Zinn, and parts of the contemporary left.



Applebaum uses these more abstractly political digressions to reaffirm her
long-established center-right priors, relying on Cold War–era talking
points in an attempt to locate salvageable elements of conservatism amid
the current wreckage. Her second chapter, for example, starts off with a
bold claim: “the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the
world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in
Russia, starting in 1917. In the political science textbooks of the future,
the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not just for his
Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political
organization.”



This is at best a debatable claim, dependent on how one views, for
instance, Napoleon Bonaparte, his eventual heir Napoleon III, or any number
of Latin American dictators and caudillos of the 19th century. But there’s
a reason that Applebaum advances it. As the author of multiple books about
the horrors of 20th-century communism and as a defender of the conservative
intellectual tradition, she has a stake in holding the left to account
while diagnosing the right’s slide into illiberalism: It means she doesn’t
have to hold the center, and her center-right flank of it, accountable.



To be fair, Applebaum anticipates this line of criticism. “Although the
cultural power of the authoritarian left is growing,” she writes, “the only
modern clercs who have attained real political power in Western
democracies…are members of movements that we are accustomed to calling the
‘right.’?” But that acknowledgment notwithstanding, Applebaum is convinced
there is a growing “authoritarian left,” which includes many factions that
in reality are often fiercely at odds with one another. It’s a left that
encompasses Chavismo in Venezuela, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, the “openly
radical, far-left” Podemos party in Spain, “a generation of far-left campus
agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students
can say,” and “the instigators of Twitter mobs who seek to take down public
figures as well as ordinary people for violating unwritten speech codes.”
(Disclosure: Applebaum has blocked me on Twitter.)



None of this should be terribly surprising, given that Applebaum is among
the signatories of the Harper’s Magazine letter decrying cancel culture and
has backed Yascha Mounk’s like-minded Persuasion newsletter. For this
increasingly vocal segment of the centrist intelligentsia, the cultural
excesses of wokeness are every bit as threatening as far-right politicians
wielding actual state power.



But Applebaum’s distaste for the left isn’t just a matter of petty campus
and Internet feuds. By drawing parallels between the left and the far
right, she is attempting to absolve the center of any blame for its role in
the current crisis, even though it has held a virtual monopoly on political
power in the post–Cold War period. Applebaum is eager to psychoanalyze
anyone she regards as politically extreme in either direction, but she is
far less willing to interrogate her own unconscious assumptions or those of
her remaining friends in the center—let alone the material results of their
preferred policies.



To the common charge that the neoliberal economic order hollowed out the
Western working and middle classes via deindustrialization, paving the way
for Brexit and Trump, Applebaum writes, “In the Western world, the vast
majority of people are not starving. They have food and shelter. They are
literate. If we describe them as ‘poor’ or ‘deprived,’ it is sometimes
because they lack things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago,
like air-conditioning or Wi-Fi.”

This line of argument would have been risible even before Covid-19,
but Twilight of Democracy went to print recently enough that Applebaum was
able to include her account of the frantic international border closings
last March—which is to say, recently enough that she could have registered
that food and shelter may be out of reach for tens of millions of Americans
right now and that austerity and neoliberalism bear as much responsibility
for this calamity as Trump. Even to the extent that she is right about
minimal material needs being met, it’s frankly astonishing that she doesn’t
understand how ordinary people—as opposed to her well-connected
friends—could be experiencing a crisis of meaning and dignity in a
political order that expects them to be satisfied with cheap consumer goods
and privatized essential services.



These are concerns not just in the United States or the United Kingdom but
in Eastern European nations as well, including the one that hosts her
country estate. Civic Platform, the center-right party that governed Poland
from 2007 to 2015 and in which Applebaum’s husband served, presided over a
staggering rise in economic inequality. It imposed austerity measures in
the wake of the post-2009 eurozone crisis, raising the retirement age and
phasing out pensions for farmers, miners, police, firefighters, and
priests. At the same time, it embraced free trade to attract foreign
businesses like Google, and its leaders were recorded flaunting
ostentatious new wealth as the impoverished regions in the east stagnated.
These regions would become the stronghold of the far-right Law and Justice
government, which came to power by campaigning against Civic Platform’s
fiscal cruelty. Civic Platform also weathered a series of corruption
scandals, none of which get any acknowledgment in Applebaum’s account of
Law and Justice’s rise to power.



Then there’s the matter of foreign policy, something Applebaum cares about
a lot more. If she rejects the argument that globalization and inequality
led to the far-right revival, she doesn’t even glancingly acknowledge the
argument that the post-9/11 wars and crackdowns on civil liberties might
also have played a role. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Applebaum
supported, is discussed at any length just once, when she mounts a defense
of Atlanticism—or at least the version of it championed by her husband at
the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which sought to build
ties between the United States and Europe by embroiling both in endless
wars in the Middle East. “There was a genuine coalition of the willing that
wanted to fight Saddam Hussein, including [José María] Aznar in Spain,
British prime minister Tony Blair, Danish prime minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski, and a clutch of others,”
she writes approvingly, before noting briskly that the war has haunted
politicians like Blair ever since.



For Applebaum, the main significance of Iraq seems to be that it drew the
US and Polish governments closer together. Whatever impact it had on Iraqis
themselves, on traumatized veterans returning home, and on an entire
generation’s willingness to trust the very Atlanticist project to which she
remains committed escapes her notice. So does the propagandistic
disinformation campaign that the Bush and Blair governments deployed to
whip up support for the war—essentially a conspiracy theory, and one
significantly advanced by Applebaum’s current social circle.



I bring up Iraq in part because if Applebaum is going to write a book about
the sins of her former friends, it’s also worth noting the sins of the
friends she still has. According to the acknowledgments for Twilight of
Democracy, these friends include David Frum, the author of George W. Bush’s
2002 “axis of evil” speech; Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor in chief
who commissioned the essay on which her book is based and who also reported
for The New Yorker in 2002 about the since-discredited connection between
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; and Leon Wieseltier, who championed the Iraq
War and who fell from grace in 2017 after multiple women accused him of
sexual harassment during his long tenure as literary editor of The New
Republic.



Another friend who read drafts of Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum proudly
tells us, is Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute who has been condemned by the Southern Poverty Law
Center for her involvement in Gamergate, the far-right online movement
widely seen as a forerunner of Trumpism. At least as recently as 2016,
Sommers was an associate of Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right provocateur
whom even Applebaum describes as a “sad figure” who has “ceased to have
much influence in the United States.” The bilious mouthpieces of the far
right and the center-right are never all that far apart—indeed, Applebaum’s
husband has had to deny that he once joked that Barack Obama’s ancestors
were cannibals.



All of this is to say that if Applebaum was blindsided by the turn that
some of her friends have made to the far right over the past decade, she
may not be the best judge of which intellectuals carry latent fascist
tendencies today, let alone a trustworthy critic when it comes to
understanding the ties between her center-right politics and those of the
far right.



In her section on US politics, Applebaum describes her own break with the
Republican Party. In 2008, she wrote an article for Slate explaining why
she couldn’t bring herself to vote for John McCain for president, a
decision she attributes to “the ascent of Sarah Palin, a proto-Trump, and
the Bush administration’s use of torture in Iraq.” Although she denounced
the GOP’s slide into illiberalism, at the time she had mostly positive
words for McCain, a fellow Cold War hawk who had spoken at the Washington
launch party for her history of the gulag.



McCain was Applebaum’s kind of Republican: a champion of the liberal
international order; an occasionally idiosyncratic, self-styled centrist; a
friend to countless journalists; and a wisecracking, backslapping
establishment elite. Early in the book, she describes her present cohort of
center-right intellectuals as aligning with “the Republican Party of John
McCain.” But she never fully reckons with how a figure like McCain
facilitated the far right’s mainstreaming—not only by elevating Palin to
national stature but also through other efforts over his long career to
dog-whistle to bigots, such as his infamous opposition to Martin Luther
King Day. Applebaum notes, tellingly, that after she criticized Palin’s
selection, McCain never spoke to her again.

Regardless, now that Trump has been defeated by the doggedly centrist Joe
Biden—who appointed the senator’s widow, Cindy McCain, to the board of his
presidential transition team—Applebaum can rest assured: Not only will
centrist Republicans never be held accountable for empowering the far
right, they will also be actively rewarded by the ascendant centrist
Democrats.



Both in Twilight of Democracy and in her recent interviews and tweets,
Applebaum has insisted that the authoritarian temptation exists on both the
left and the right, even if right-wing authoritarianism is the more
immediate threat. That’s true to an extent, and it’s understandable that
someone who has studied Stalin’s reign of terror in such detail would say
so. But it’s also a dodge. Today’s rising leftists in the United States and
the United Kingdom, by and large, aren’t calling for a return to Stalinism
but for a social democratic model that would seek to repair the enormous
human damage done by decades of the untrammeled neoliberalism that
Applebaum and her friends have consistently championed.



Unlike her and her centrist peers, these leftists are also offering a
constructive alternative to both the far right and the failed status
quo—and one that might stand a better chance of saving liberal democracy
than anything proposed in this book. Perhaps Applebaum should consider
throwing them a party.



[END]



On Mon, 2 May 2022 at 06:00, <nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org> wrote:

> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
>         nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>         http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>         nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
>         nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Anne Applebaum (carl guderian)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 2 May 2022 11:32:07 +0200
> From: carl guderian <ca...@vermilion-sands.com>
> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> Subject: Re: <nettime> Anne Applebaum
> Message-ID: <1bb9aa74-ff7f-48ea-8333-1426cf414...@vermilion-sands.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Hi all,
>
> You can count me among those who used to look askance at Applebaum. Back
> in the Noughts, she was a regular and legitimate target of Sadly, No!, a
> blog I used to frequent. She?d even received from Orban (I think) the same
> far-right Hungarian honor also given to Trump hanger-on Sebastian Gorka,
> the one that lets you add ?v? to your last name. Her husband is Polish and
> had been a cabinet minister in an earlier center-right government there. He
> and they were swept out when Poland went further right and, maybe, seeing
> where it was leading, she seems to have mellowed somewhat. From her
> articles since then, she seems to have stopped moving to the right and
> maybe even piulled back a bit, while the right races toward fascism. Or
> maybe the world going crazier, she just seems relatively sane and more
> liberal now.
>
> I still don?t entirely trust her, but she appears to be more of an ally
> these days, and did warn about neofascism and Putin. Has she learned
> anything since the last Cold War? We?ll see...
>
> Your mileage (kilometrage) may vary, and some settling may occur during
> shipping.
>
> Carl
>
>
> > On 1 mei 2022, at 22:21, Ted Byfield <tedbyfi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Allan, WRT Russia/Ukraine one notable feature of the current US
> political landscape is that a fair number of ostensible leftists are making
> arguments that are remarkably similar to fascist trolls like Tucker
> Carlson. I'm no fan of Applebaum's at all, so when I saw her name I was
> skeptical; but as I read through her essay, nothing she said jumped out at
> me as outrageously skewed. Since your comment didn't offer any specific
> criticisms, could you be persuaded to do so?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Ted
> >
> > On 1 May 2022, at 15:00, allan siegel A Train wrote:
> >
> >> Hello Nettimers
> >> I find it odd that Anne Applebaum's questionable commentary on the
> events - and historical references - in Ukraine are uncritically posted
> here. Anne Applebaum is a notorious right-wing ideologue of the
> unquestionable neoliberal persuasion who has been lauded for her attacks on
> left-leaning politics (to say the least). As the conflict in Ukraine
> becomes increasingly enmeshed in the myopic politics of the cold-war and as
> America descends into pre-civil rights post war policies it becomes
> increasingly important to consider who is describing reality and from what
> vantage point. Most people in the U.S. still believe that the atomic bomb
> was used to save the lives of U.S. soldiers and to end WW II. A very
> questionable assumption. Saber rattling by Biden and others indebted to
> military contractors won't bring democracy to Ukraine or necessarily even
> peace.
> >> Best
> >> Allan
> > #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> > #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> > #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> > #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> > #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> > #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>
> End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 176, Issue 4
> *****************************************
>


-- 
Michael Benson
*Kinetikon Pictures *
michael-benson.net
kinpix2...@gmail.com
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Reply via email to