Politics of Hopelessness

I started posting other people's twitter threads in part because twitter was (is) threatening to self-destruct, but also because there are some incredible gems that could disappear into the ether even if twitter remains. It's not set up to easily find that one post you read weeks ago - ever again. But it's curious to me how many people prefer to read things in little bite-sized chunks. I sometimes copy/paste long threads into a doc just to read them without being jarringly broken up into bits mid-sentence. Perhaps I'm old and stodgy like that and have just grown too accustomed to paragraphs. Anyway, check this one out, and I bring in Chomsky and his ilk at the end.

This is a fantastic thread by Dr. Henry Madison, professor of... history? anthropology? political science? The name's too popular to be able to find his credentials or location for certain, but his analysis feels spot on.

"POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food and water and were usually not tortured. 

In fact prisoners were often rewarded with sweets and cigarettes. Nobody tried to escape, despite the absence of barbed wire or often even armed guards. But prisoners would often sit in their huts with a blanket over their heads, and just die. After liberation, very few prisoners even wanted to do the basic act of calling family at home. And there was little camaraderie amongst survivors. The overwhelming culture of the camps and in survivors was one of hopelessness. 

That hopelessness was deliberately engineered. 

Personal Troubles and Public Issues

"People do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction." Developing a sociological imagination is necessary so that, "By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues....To understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them."        ~ C. Wright Mills in "The Promise"

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society"        ~ attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti in Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express

There was an excellent op ed on mental health, by Danielle Carr, in the New York Times yesterday. I'm saving pieces here. She looks at how we treat mental illness, and how futile some efforts have been. Many have been led to believe the problem is a matter of access to care, but she goes down a different road.

Are we really in a mental health crisis? A crisis that affects mental health is not the same as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

It's politics. She uses the term "reification" to explain the institutional gaslighting in which political problems are spun as personal problems which conveniently "abracadabras" away any nosy questions about who started it and who benefits from it. 

It's how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become 'social media addiction,' how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a 'heat wave'--and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become 'inflation.'

In medicine, it's called "medicalization," which focuses on an individual's body while ignoring the social system that's often at the root of the problem. Like with the mental health issues arising from Covid. Incidents of depression and anxiety have increased dramatically, but that's not surprising given the circumstances: "feelings of anxiety and sadness are entirely normal reactions to difficult circumstances, not symptoms of poor mental health." Looking at the data, economic security is the biggest predictor of a mental illness during a crisis: "it's not simply a question of the numbers on your bank statement - although that is a major predictor of outcomes - but of whether you live in a society where the social fabric has been destroyed."

Timothy Snyder's Talk on The Road to Unfreedom

I haven't read the book yet, but I stumbled on Timothy Snyder's talk about it from four years ago. Unfortunately, it's all still very relevant! 

"The things that are happening to us are not just bad but there's something weird, something unsettling going on."

He speaks of the politics of inevitability, that sense that things will run their course as they should, and how often that belief snaps and becomes implausible, like with the housing market crash in 2008. History isn't over, and there are always alternatives to our current path. Our ideas about which direction to take matter. 

Here's a bit of what he said on Trump's election, and much of it might apply to Poilievre too, who may have some connections with Gerald Chipeur, a lawyer with dual citizenship, tied to Stephen Harper and tight with Ted Cruz, and he may be benefiting from money on offer from the MAGA crowd: 

Timothy Snyder on the War on History

In "The War on History was a War on Democracy," Snyder compares Russian memory laws, which we're quick to recognize as propaganda, to American under Trump:  

By March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was financed by destroying traditional agrarian life. The five-year plan had brought “dekulakization,” the deportation of peasants deemed more prosperous than others, and “collectivization,” the appropriation of agrarian land by the state. A result was mass famine. . . . Mentions of the famine included an awkwardly long list of regions, downplaying the specificity of the Ukrainian tragedy. The famine was presented as a result of administrative mistakes by a neutral state apparatus. Everyone was a victim, and so no one was. In a 2008 letter to his Ukrainian counterpart, the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev flattened the event into an act of repression “against the entire Soviet people.” The next year Medvedev established the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests, a panel of politicians, military officials and state-approved historians ostensibly tasked with defending the official history of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. It did little in practice, but it did establish an important principle: that history was what served Russia’s national interests, and that all else was revisionism. . . . These Russian policies belong to a growing international body of what are called “memory laws”: government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.