It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, March 23, 2020
"The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda,"
"Yushchenko's Fascist: The Bandera Cult in Ukraine and Canada," Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society," Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017): 129-178. Per Anders Rudling
Viktor Yushchenko’s 2010 designation of Stepan Bandera, the war‐time leader of the most radical and violent branch of the Ukrainian far right, as a national hero constituted, in many ways, the climax of the third post‐Soviet Ukrainian president’s instrumentalization of history. Yushchenko’s political use of history triggered sharply polarized, and often emotional discussions of Bandera’s role in history, not only in Ukraine, but also in Canada, the United States, Poland, and Israel. This article analyzes the “Bandera debate” against the backdrop of the significant advances in the historiography of war‐time Ukrainian nationalism since the openings of archives in recent decades.
"Memories of 'Holodomor' and National Socialism in Ukrainian Political Culture" in Yves Bizeul (ed.) Rekonstruktion des Nationalmythos?: Frankreich, Deutschland und die Ukraine im Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2013), 227-258.
"Terror Remembered, Terror Forgotten: Stalinist, Nazi, and Nationalist Atrocities in Ukrainian 'National Memory"
Jarosław Suchoples, Stephanie James, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (eds.), World War II Re-explored: Some New Millennium Studies in the History of the Global Conflict (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), 2019
In the 1930s and 1940s, Ukraine experienced political violence on an unprecedented scale. Political violence by the Soviet government and the German occupation authorities resulted in the death of millions, through starvation, deportations, and massacres, and left wounds which still have not fully healed. Independently of the Soviets and the Nazis, mass political violence was carried out also by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) whose ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews left up to one hundred thousand dead, a legacy which could not be openly discussed or researched, neither in the Ukrainian SSR, nor in communist Poland. The Soviet Ukrainian historiography reduced the Ukrainian Nationalists to hangmen and collaborators with Nazi Germany, whereas emigre nationalists constructed an elaborate cult of these groups as heroes and martyrs. This instrumentalization of the recent past produced mutually exclusive narratives. Following the two Maidan revolutions in 2004 and 2013/2014, there have been ambitious attempts by the Ukrainian government to produce a new historical canon, in which the most radical wing of the OUN figures prominently. This narration requires some topics to be avoided altogether, whereas others are treated in a highly selective fashion. Official memory policy has triggered stormy discussions about the recent past, reflecting deep divisions in a post-Soviet Ukrainian society which has only begun the process to come to terms with a difficult past.
Eugenics and race played significant roles in Ukrainian interwar nationalism, yet remain largely unstudied. The Ukrainian nationalists’ understanding of the racial makeup of their imagined community was contradictory as they struggled to reconcile their desire for racial “purity” with the realities of significant variations between the populations inhabiting the enormous territories which they sought to include in their intended state project. The “turn to the right” over the 1930s placed an increased onus on race, and eugenics came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in Ukrainian radical nationalism from around 1936. In 1941, the leading Ukrainian far-right organization, the OUN had developed a project for eugenic engineering, for their aborted state, declared in L’viv on June 30, 1941. Racial conceptualiza- tions of the Ukrainian community figured prominently well into the Cold War era, gaining a new actuality and meaning in an émigré community dispersed across several countries. Doi: 10.1017/S0269889719000048 Publication Date: 2019
According to a columnist at the conservative Bulwark, Donald Trump is already setting in motion a plan to turn the coronavirus crisis he had a major hand in creating into a plus for his re-election campaign that appears endangered as the U.S. economy is collapsing.
With the president hijacking the daily White House coronavirus task force press briefings and turning them into his personal “Showtime,” columnist Richard North Patterson pointed out that Trump is engaging in a pattern of lies and personal grievances that have always played well with his rabid base.
Despite overwhelming evidence that the president downplayed the coronavirus health crisis just weeks ago, the president is now claiming, “I felt it was a pandemic before it was called a pandemic.”
As Patterson wrote, “By now we are numb to Trump’s grotesque grandiosity. But that sentence may be the most frightening Trump ever uttered: It is so transparently false, so shamefully self-contradictory, so baldly contemptuous of freshly-curated reality, that it lays bare the infinitude of his crippling pathology—and, one worries, our own.”
And that, as Patterson explained, was one of the first salvos Trump launched that previews how he will attempt to cast himself as the hero who saved America from a crisis he created.
Providing a timeline of Trump claims dating back to January, Patterson paints a portrait of evolving rationales and outright misinformation from the president that have led to his desire to appear at the daily coronavirus press conferences updates that have replaced his MAGA rallies when it comes to playing to his base.
“Once considered, Trump’s claim of foreknowledge is even more remarkable than it seems. Effectively, Trump is admitting to deliberately endangering his fellow citizens by squandering precious time while spreading falsehoods and Panglossian palliatives for his near- term political ends—thereby inducing his followers to stake their lives on his own callous blather,” the author wrote. “We have seen the markers of Trump’s pathological narcissism since the first day of his candidacy: The demented sense of self-importance. The unwarranted belief in his own superiority. The total inability to recognize the humanity of anyone else.”
“For Trump, every day is Showtime: a new soundstage for glorious self-reinvention,” he elaborated. “Now, he informs us, he’s ‘a wartime president’ —clearly re-imaging himself as a leader who, like FDR, will repel the Asian invader who has assaulted our shores. Indeed, ‘I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought, and it’ll be a complete victory.'”
According to the author, voters can expect a flood of self-promotion from the president who is trying to turn a negative into a positive.
“For Trump, forever chained to his hamster wheel of self, the past is always prologue. There will be more heroic posturing. More epochal incompetence. More political self-aggrandizement. More slanders against Democrats. More solipsistic press briefings. More efforts to subcontract federal responsibilities to struggling states and cities. More banishment of scientific truths and those who dare speak them. And much more misinformation – like the medical breakthroughs which never materialized, or the relief for embattled renters which doesn’t exist,” he wrote.
North suggests that strategy might eke out a victory for the president in November in much the same way he narrowly won in 2016.
“Because of the electoral college Trump need not muster a majority of Americans. He simply requires enough strategically-placed voters inclined to support the president who, in their hopeful imaginings, brought them to the brink of presumptive safety,” he wrote before warning, “After all, as even the historically-illiterate Trump surely knows, Democrats powered FDR’s reelection by insisting that ‘you don’t change horses in the middle of the stream.'”
Anthony Fauci reveals how Trump regularly spoils COVID-19 briefings in surprisingly blunt interview
On Monday, writing for the Washington Post, Aaron Blake of “The Fix” broke down the latest interview in Science magazine with federal disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci — and how it reveals his frustration with the position in which President Donald Trump has put him.
Much attention has been paid to Fauci’s line “I know, but what do you want me to do?” in response to charges that Trump’s remarks about coronavirus are factually wrong. But an even more revealing example of Fauci’s frustration came later, when he said, “somebody writes a speech. Then he gets up and ad-libs on his speech.”
This line reveals the impossible position Trump has created for medical experts in his employ — he has repeatedly downplayed the threat of coronavirus, or tried to spin the facts into the best possible light, which completely undercuts much of what government health officials are trying to tell the public. “It’s been evident for a while that Trump indeed ‘goes his own way’ on many things, despite that advice,” wrote Blake. “Fauci seems to be only so willing to downplay Trump’s unwieldiness in the face of a true crisis. He openly admits the things Trump says could ‘lead to some misunderstanding about what the facts are about a given subject.’ That’s far from an ideal situation.”
“If there’s one person in this whole saga who has built up vast reserves of credibility, it’s Fauci,” concluded Blake. “And even he seems to recognize that shooting straight might not be great for his long-term employability in the administration.”
On March 21, Medium.com published an article by Silicon Valley resident Aaron Ginn claiming that the mainstream media’s reporting on the coronavirus pandemic is wildly exaggerated and that COVID-19 isn’t spreading to the degree that the media are reporting. Medium has since removed Ginn’s article, which was republished on Zero Hedge — and which biology professor Carl T. Bergstrom vigorously debunks in an in-depth Twitter thread.
“This thread could be far longer than it is,” Bergstrom writes, “but I’m doing my best to only discuss the most glaring flaws.”
In his article, Ginn wrote that “hysteria” was driving the discussion over coronavirus and went on to use so-called “data” to make his argument. But Bergstrom, in his thread, explains why Ginn’s arguments are both misleading and dangerous.
Ginn claimed that “COVID-19 is spreading, but probably not accelerating.” According to Bergstrom, “The author discusses the apparent decline in daily growth rate irrespective of control measures. He begins with some truism about small numbers being easy to move; this is irrelevant in the face of the exponential growth that he stresses.”
1. I hate to invest precious time on taking apart the atrocious @aginnt article pictured below, but it is getting too much traction here and even in traditional media.
This thread could be far longer than it is, but I'm doing my best to only discuss the most glaring flaws. pic.twitter.com/EFA7ATQRbX — Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 22, 2020
Bergstrom goes on to write that Ginn “fails to see that this drop in apparent growth rates is heavily driven by left censoring and shifts in testing strategy. Testing started at different times in different countries, was influenced by case density, and early-on, tests individuals in all stages of disease.”
Ginn wrote, “Cases globally are increasing — it is a virus, after all — but beware of believing metrics designed to intentionally scare like ‘cases doubling.’ These are typically small numbers over small numbers and sliced on a per-country basis.”
Bergstrom, in response, tweets, “That the virus can cross national boundaries does nothing to negate the importance of spatial structure and within-country analysis.”
Bergstrom adds, “I hate to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but using this lie to sweep away the disaggregated data is such utter nonsense that I wonder how a Silicon Valley guy could make this claim by mistake.”
6. The author discusses the apparent decline in daily growth rate irrespective of control measures. He begins with some truism about small numbers being easy to move; this is irrelevant in the face of the exponential growth that he stresses in literally the previous sentence. pic.twitter.com/ZTGRlzEsZr — Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 22, 2020
Disaggregating data is essential to provide context, especially for transmission processes. That the virus can cross national boundaries does nothing to negate the importance of spatial structure and within-country analysis. Aggregating data obscures critical patterns. pic.twitter.com/UsD5a37kxK — Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 22, 2020
Ginn used the “bell curve” to make his argument that “hysteria” is driving the conversation on coronavirus. But Bergstrom asserts, “This is unsubstantiated bullshit. If the bell-curve were a ‘law of nature,’ it shouldn’t necessarily apply to the vast range of human responses that people take to stop epidemics. Yet this assertion is supported with data from places where interventions slowed things down.”
Ginn writes that “93% of people who (think) they are positive aren’t.” And Bergstrom responds, “This is just misleading. Being tested is not the same as thinking you are positive. Did your doctor ever order a rapid flu test or strep culture or a chest x-ray for pneumonia? When you did, did you think YOU were positive? Same deal with COVID19, esp in places like S. Korea.”
14. This is unsubstantiated bullshit. IF the bell-curve were a "law of nature", it shouldn't necessarily apply to the vast range of human responses that people take to stop epidemics. Yet this assertion is supported with data from places where interventions slowed things down. pic.twitter.com/ASrkdKzj6p — Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 22, 2020
Failures of American capitalism are laid bare with Coronavirus pandemic
March 22, 2020 By Bob Hennelly, Salon- Commentary As it turns out, American capitalism doesn’t hold up all that well under the stresses and strains of a virulent pandemic. In the face of the coronavirus, that stingy “real time delivery” dictum taught in business school to guide how we deploy labor and distribute stuff can be a recipe for needlessly high body counts and wealth destruction on the scale of the Great Depression.
Currently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is fashioning a coronavirus pandemic stimulus package that is fashioned after the Trump/ GOP $1.7 trillion tax cut — meaning, weighted to favor corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
To be fair, this was the same impulse we saw in the Bush/Obama response to the Great Recession. Their remedy led to Wall Street’s pillaging of MLK Boulevard and Main Street, the destruction of $20 trillion in household wealth, and accelerated wealth concentration. It also left tens of millions of households in a precarious position to face this pandemic.
And while President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression in the form of the New Deal was widely praised for uplifting working-class Americans, we must remember that it left out Americans of color. Consider the Faustian bargain that FDR made with the Dixiecrats to get basic labor protections and standards for workers that expressly left out domestic and agricultural workers.Greed dies hard.Now that the wolf (COVID-19) is at the door, we can see the reflex that many political leaders have to put wealth preservation above the common good. Four senators, including Sen. Richard Barr (R.-NC), chair of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, sold off significant stock holdings after being briefed on the impending coronavirus pandemic.
These guys can’t help themselves. When destiny asks them to choose between money or life, they pause to make a trade.
This is what happens when you organize every aspect of your society to promote wealth accumulation and nothing else. It’s really just physics. You invest everything in accumulating gold or money for security and all of the sudden your life gets cut short as your lungs no longer function because you caught coronavirus from some other person who accidentally became the real sculptor of your destiny.
This will come as a real downer for the wealthy elites who have structured their lives around pre-coronavirus social distancing behind the gated walls of privilege that won’t protect them now.
Similarly, our vaunted American health care system — which is designed to maximize shareholder profits and discourage patients from using it — turns out to be antithetical to promoting the public health. This for-profit model is based on scarcity, which rations access to care, ventilators and personal protection equipment for medical staff, all to feed the insatiable bottom line.
Works great until that doomsday scenario when everybody needs it.
Our whole socioeconomic framework was predicated on the notion that our society could function and feed off vast inequality, and that the day-in and day-out misery of tens of millions of American families was their problem.
It turns out that the country’s economic deprivation — reflected in hunger and homelessness — significantly complicates our ability to end the pandemic. And as this more vulnerable cohort falls ill as a consequence the inadequacy of this existing system puts the broader society at a greater risk.
Poverty may not be contagious. But COVID-19 is.
At the end of his life, as the Vietnam War raged, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called for a “revolution of values” when he suggested that instead of the phrase “Black Power,” activists should invoke the more inclusive rallying cry “Power for Poor People” in order to build a multi-racial coalition of the impoverished and disenfranchised.
Out of that call to action, the Poor People’s Campaign was formed. Just weeks after her husband’s murder, Coretta Scott King initiated a 14 day protest in Washington, D.C. on Mother’s Day, demanding passage of an Economic Bill of Rights.
The 21st century iteration of the Poor People’s Campaign has been calling for a “national call for a moral revival” in the throes of our current pandemic.
“With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency,” the Poor People’s Campaign writes on their website. “This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer-term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor, or a $400 emergency away from being poor.”
Long before this coronavirus pandemic, there was already an under-reported poverty pandemic that killed hundreds every day in America in the form of missed diagnoses and delayed care.
As Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Poor People’s Campaign wrote, “millions of people are in dire need of critical attention immediately. We call on you to fulfill your moral and Constitutional responsibilities: expand the COVID-19 emergency provisions to care for us all and enact our Moral Agenda immediately.”
They continue: “We cannot return to normal. Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting universal health care, expanding social welfare programs, ensuring access to water and sanitation, cash assistance to poor and low-income families, good jobs, living wages and an annual income and protecting our democracy.”
And this real-time national realignment “means ensuring that our abundant national resources are used for the general welfare, instead of war, walls, and the wealthy.”
Indeed, the Poor People Campaign’s list of demands is an essential foundation for our country’s survival:
1. Immediate, comprehensive and permanent paid sick leave for 100% of employees for this pandemic. Paid sick leave must become standard across all sectors of the labor market.
2. Immediate health care for all, including 100% free COVID-19 testing, treatment and quality care to all, regardless of income, age, disability, citizenship or any other factor, and including the uninsured.
3. A guaranteed and adequate annual income / universal income, including rapid, direct payments to all low-wage and temporary workers, from grocery, fast food and delivery workers, care workers, and pharmacists to other workers who remain on the front lines and are severely underpaid.
4. A national moratorium on evictions, tax foreclosures, rent hikes, and a national rent freeze. This includes an immediate halt to encampment sweeps and towing vehicles of unhoused communities. Federal resources must be directed to local and state governments towards opening and preparing vacant and habitable buildings, properties and warehouses to house and provide adequate care for all people who are homeless. This includes ensuring education, food assistance and health care for homeless children and provisions for medical testing, treatment and respite for the homeless.
5. Jubilee and debt forgiveness for medical debt, student debt, water, utilities and other forms of household debt.
6. Protections for our democracy and the right to vote with expanded opportunities to vote during this crisis and an expanded census to ensure every person is accounted for.
And there’s more — much more.
As we refashion America, we need “a national moratorium on water and utility shut-offs, a waiver of all late-payment charges, and reinstitution of any services that have already been cut off due to nonpayment, including access to cellular and the internet.”
But this remodeling at home has to come with a recalibration of our risk threat matrix that has us spending hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowed money on further notice wars abroad.
In the shadow of COVID-19, the greatest threat to our immediate collective well- being is the miserable circumstances of our poorer neighbors we had for all too long ignored, figuring their reality had nothing to do with the rest of us.
Trump began hijacking coronavirus task force press conferences after seeing praise heaped on Pence:
NYT reporterPublished March 22, 2020 By Tom Boggioni
Appearing on CNN early Sunday morning, New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman claimed that Donald Trump’s only concern over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is how it reflects on him and his desire to take credit for any successes.
Speaking with host John King, Haberman stated that Trump’s obsession with how he is perceived is the animating reason why he shows up at Vice President Mike Pence’s task force press conferences and takes over — to show that he is in command.
Noting that the president mainly uses the highs and lows of the financial markets as his personal “weather vane,” the NYT reporter said that Trump is only concerned with himself in the final analysis.
Saying the president feels his early decision to restrict flights from China was his “mission accomplished” moment, Haberman added, “Then the government proceeded to squander a lot of time in part because he did not want to be talking about this publicly.”
“He tends to look at these things only through the lens of how it affects him and how it is being played in the media, those are his driving, animating impulses and forces and you see it every day,” she explained. “You see it in part by the fact he is now, since last Sunday, it’s only been a week, he comes to the briefing room podium every day because Mike Pence had been there prior to that and was getting praise for how he was at least speaking publicly about it.”
“None of this is what one would call ideal crisis leadership, but it is, I think, the best he can do,” she dryly added.
A pandemic is no time to dismantle regulatory safeguards
By Phil Mattera, DC Report @ Raw Story - Commentary Published March 22, 2020 Thanks for your support! This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates. As much of the economy melts down amid the coronavirus pandemic, many large corporations are lining up for financial bailouts from the federal government.
Assuming the right safeguards are put in place, these payments may be justified.
Yet there is a risk that big business may also seek another kind of assistance whose benefit is more dubious: relief from regulations.
Some loosening of restrictions make sense in a crisis. Federal regulators are already taking steps to address immediate needs. The FDA is changing rules so that private labs and state health departments can more readily use COVID-19 tests developed outside of the agency. HHS is allowing healthcare providers to bill Medicare for telemedicine sessions.
Those are the no-brainers. But what about the decision by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to relax restrictions on truck driver hours for those making emergency deliveries? Do we want sleepy drivers on the road, even if they are doing essential work?
And then there are the calls from big banks for lower capital requirements and the easing of periodic stress tests. The point of those requirements is to make sure banks are in a position to weather a downturn. Relaxing the rules is something the big banks were urging well before the pandemic. Their push now may be little more than an effort to exploit the crisis.
We are likely to see more calls for regulatory easing both from corporations and from Trump administration agencies such as the EPA that have already been trying to undermine existing safeguards.
There is also a debate on whether regulatory rulemaking should continue at a time when many regulators are working from home and many advocates may have a harder time monitoring current proceedings.
Since many of those proceedings involve efforts by industry and the Trump Team to roll back or eliminate current rules, delays would provide a welcome obstacle to the deregulatory juggernaut. On the other hand, agencies may use the pandemic as an excuse to reduce the opportunities for public interest groups to intervene.
Another gnarly question is how to handle bailouts for corporations that have less than stellar records for regulatory compliance. We don’t want to ignore the needs of employees of those companies who might otherwise lose their jobs. But it also doesn’t feel right to be handing over large sums to firms that have flouted the law.
If those payments happen, among the strings that need to be attached could be provisions requiring companies to strictly adhere to all applicable laws and regulations. Scofflaws would be compelled to repay the money and face other serious consequences.
Big business should not be allowed to use the pandemic as cover for undermining safeguards that protect us from the many other dangers in the world.
Michigan governor blames GOP and ‘separation of church and state’ on failure to ban megachurch gatherings
March 22, 2020 By David Edwards Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said on Sunday that Republicans were to blame for an exemption that allows churches to gather in groups of 50 or more during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Whitmer told Fox News Sunday guest host John Roberts that GOP lawmakers contacted her after she issued an executive order on Monday banning gatherings of 50 or more.
“One thing that kind of puzzles me is that you have limited groups of people to 50 or fewer,” Roberts explained. “Yet, there is an exemption for places of worship. Why would a place of worship be any less likely to transmit diseases in a larger gathering than another place?”
“It’s not,” Whitmer agreed. “And we’re discouraging people from gathering at all.”
“So, why this exemption?” Roberts pressed.
“Well, you know, the separation of church and state, and the Republican legislature asked me to clarify that that’s an area that we don’t have the ability to enforce and control,” Whitmer said. “We are encouraging people though, do not congregate.”
