Category Archives: Politics & Government

The Fall of Berlin 1945

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I so thoroughly enjoyed Antony Beevor’s history of the siege of Stalingrad I ordered The Fall of Berlin 1945. I’m about halfway through the 430 page book and, like Stalingrad, it’s a page-turner. No work of fiction –movie, novel, TV documentary series– could ever capture the scope and horror of these events.

As with all (most?) non-fiction books, I’m reading with a marker in hand, highlighting the passages I want to save. Like so much of the history I’ve read, I’m finding eerie parallels to current events. Nazism and Trumpism; Hitler and Trump the most obvious example.

“We may go down, but we will take the world with us.” — Adolph Hitler (1945)

“(Hitler’s) monstrous vanity could not allow him to lose a foreign capital, even one which he had totally destroyed.”

“The Soviet armies advancing in huge, long columns were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, their T-34s churning up the earth as they dipped and rolled with the ground, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, open Chevrolets with tarpaulin-covered mortars in the back and tractors hauling great howitzers, all eventually followed by a second echelon in horse-drawn carts.”

“The population at large saw nothing of Hitler. He had disappeared from the newsreels, and they heard only Hitler’s very last broadcast on 30 January, marking twelve years of Nazi government. His voice had lost all its strength and sounded completely different.”

“Berlin’s population in early April (1945) stood at anything between 3 and 3.5 million people, including around 120,000 infants. When General Reymann raised the problem of feeding these children at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery bunker, Hitler stared at him. ‘There are no children of that age left in Berlin,’ he said. Reymann finally understood that his supreme commander had no contact with human reality.”

“On the evening of 12 April 1945, the Berlin philharmonic gave its last performance. It is said that after the performance, the Nazi party had organized Hitler youth members to stand in uniform, with baskets of cyanide capsules, and offer them to members of the audience as they left. “

“The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power. Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany.”

“A smaller size of (German)steel helmet had been manufactured for boy soldiers, but not nearly enough were produced.”

“On the morning of Saturday 21 April, just after the last Allied air raid had finished, General Reymann’s (Berlin) headquarters (was) swarmed with brown uniforms. Senior Nazi Party officials had rushed there to obtain the necessary authorization to leave Berlin. […] Over 2,000 passes were signed for the Party ‘armchair warriors’, who had always been so ready to condemn the army for retreating.”

“An intensive artillery bombardment of Berlin began at 9.30 a.m., a couple of hours after the end of the last Allied air raid. Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche, reported that the Führer, a few minutes after having been woken, emerged unshaven and angry in the bunker corridor which served as an anteroom. ‘What’s going on? he shouted at General Burgdorf, Colonel von Below and Günsche. ‘Where’s this firing coming from?’”

“(Hitler’s) severe personality disorder, even if it could not quite be defined as mental illness, had certainly made him deranged. Hitler had so utterly identified himself with the German people that he believed that anybody who opposed him was opposing the German people as a whole; and that if he were to die, the German people could not survive without him.”

“In the (Berlin) cellars and air-raid shelters distinctive subcultures had grown up during two years of heavy air raids. […] The ‘cellar tribe’ as one diarist called these curious microcosms of society, produced a wide variety of characters, whether in markedly rich or poor districts. Each cellar always seemed to have at least one crashing bore, usually a Nazi trying to justify his belief in the Führer and final victory.” […] “Many cellar tribes developed a particular superstition or theory of survival. For example, some believed that they would survive an almost direct hit by wrapping a towel round their head. Others were convinced that if they bent forward at the first explosion, this would prevent their lungs from tearing. Every eccentricity of German hypochondria seems to have received full expression.”

Cirsten Weldon, anti-vax QAnon promoter dies of COVID

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Katie Dowd reporting for SFGate, San Francisco

A QAnon promoter with tens of thousands of followers on Facebook and Telegram has died after contracting COVID-19. On her last video, posted on December 28, Weldon was coughing and admitted she felt “exhausted” and “weak.”

Weldon was virulently anti-vaccine, both online and in real life. In one video posted to her social media channels, she can be seen harassing people in line to be vaccinated against COVID-19. “The vaccines kill. Don’t get it,” she shouts. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccines.”

Weldon livestreamed constantly and posted relentlessly on Instagram, Telegram and Facebook, inadvertently tracking her own symptoms. She began showing signs of illness around Christmas. In a December 27 stream, she started off by saying, “Good morning, patriots, I didn’t think I was going to make it. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, and I’m very, very weak. I have no strength. I haven’t eaten in four days.”

On December 31, she posted a photo of herself wearing an oxygen mask with the caption, “Almost died at hospital in CA from Bacterial Pneumonia.” “Bacterial pneumonia” is a phrase commonly used in anti-vax circles to explain a COVID-related hospitalization without admitting to contracting the virus.

Weldon also posted on Telegram, where she had nearly 100,000 followers, that she rejected treatment with remdesivir.

“It’s like a Barbie Dream House miniature.”

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Washington Post: “How Trump jettisoned restraints at Mar-a-Lago and prompted legal peril”

On a typical day since leaving office, advisers said, Trump gets up early, makes phone calls, watches television and reads some newspapers. Then, six days a week, he plays 18 or sometimes 27 holes of golf at one of his courses. After lunch, he changes into a suit from his golf shirt and slacks and shows up in the office above the Mar-a-Lago ballroom or, when he is in New Jersey, a similar office in a cottage near the Bedminster club’s pool.

By evening, Trump emerges for dinner, surrounded most nights by adoring club members who stand and applaud at his appearance; they stand and applaud again after he finishes his meal and retires for the night. He often orders special meals from the kitchen and spends time curating the music wafting over the crowd, frequently pushing for the volume to be raised or lowered based on his mood. In the Oval Office, Trump had a button he could push to summon an aide to bring him a Diet Coke or snacks. Now, he just yells out commands to whichever employee is in earshot.

At times, Trump makes unannounced visits at weddings, gala benefits and other events being hosted by paying customers in Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom, basking as attendees mob him for selfies.

The MAGA movement is a bell curve… that has peaked

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The MAGA movement, based on aging white boomer victimhood is a bell curve. […] White boomers never faced the great depression, or a world war, yet we were particularly susceptible to the idea that we were victims of hardships. “Whatever the fuck is wrong here, it must be someone else’s fault. Women. Immigrants. Black people.”

After lifetimes of leaning into consumerism and mass consumption we boomers woke up to find ourselves angry and reactive to our own disconnection. Maybe a bigger SUV would help? Maybe a third marriage? […] Retirement is when a strange unnamed panic really set in for boomers. No longer able to rely on the stale connection of surface level workplace relationships, we were left sitting alone in our easy chairs staring at the Tucker Carlsons of the Fox News rabbit hole.

Trump is the ongoing final act of angry white boomers. No longer did we have to coyly perform the wink wink of coded racist language about welfare queens and urban crime. We were liberated to march with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, our creeping panic weaponized into authoritarian rage.

For MAGA boomers to admit now, at this terribly late date, that all the white privilege and rage in the world isn’t calming our loneliness or our growing panic, means looking back on 70 years or more and admitting we fell prey to our most selfish, ugly, bullying instincts.

Essay by Mark Greene

China Is a Paper Dragon

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In a recent article in The Atlantic (China Is a Paper Dragon) David Frum writes about a 2018 book by Tufts University professor Michael Beckley. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Following are some excerpts from Drum’s article and Beckley’s book:

American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school. (Beckley)

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories. (Beckley)

More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms.