The New York Review of Books: Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

But Mao’s mistakes are more than a chance to reflect on the past. They are also now part of a central debate in Xi Jinping’s China, where the Communist Party is renewing a long-standing battle to protect its legitimacy by limiting discussions of Mao. [...]

The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had already annoyed Mao by criticizing Stalin, whom Mao regarded as one of the great figures of Communist history. If even Stalin could be purged, Mao could be challenged, too. In addition, the Soviet Union had just launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, which Mao felt overshadowed his accomplishments. He returned to Beijing eager to assert China’s position as the world’s leading Communist nation. This, along with his general impatience, spurred a series of increasingly reckless decisions that led to the worst famine in history. [...]

On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work. Their most prominent spokesperson is Sun Jingxian, a mathematician at Shandong University and Jiangsu Normal University. He attributes changes in China’s population during this period as due to faulty statistics, changes in how households were registered, and a series of other obfuscatory factors. His conclusion: famine killed only 3.66 million people. This contradicts almost every other serious effort at accounting for the effects of Mao’s changes. [...]

Mao didn’t order people to their deaths in the same way that Hitler did, so it’s fair to say that Mao’s famine deaths were not genocide—in contrast, arguably, to Stalin’s Holodomor in the Ukraine, the terror-famine described by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum in Red Famine (2017). One can argue that by closing down discussion in 1959, Mao sealed the fate of tens of millions, but almost every legal system in the world recognizes the difference between murder in the first degree and manslaughter or negligence. Shouldn’t the same standards apply to dictators?

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The Atlantic: Calling the Trump Era by Its Proper Name

At the level of high theory, this meant learning about the checks and balances of the Constitution, and the discussions in the Federalist Papers about the intricate machinery of a lasting democracy. In practice it meant respecting the rules of American interaction at least as much as the results, and understanding that those rules included both written strictures and long-established norms. Respecting the process of trial by jury, despite disagreement with a particular verdict. Respecting the followup process of judicial review and appeal. Respecting open elections, even when they go against you. Respecting the obligations of long-term treaties and compacts, even when it would be more convenient to shirk them. Respecting the importance of unfettered debate and criticism, even when you feel—as most politicians do when being criticized—that the people doing the complaining have got it all wrong. [...]

I don’t know whether Trump has encountered the phrase l’etat, c’est moi, but he is showing us just what it means. Except for that odd passage in his inaugural address, there’s no evidence I can think of that he recognizes the claims, validity, or importance of a set of rules beyond his personal interests or aggrandizement. (The closest other possibility I can think of is when he responded to Doug Jones’s upset victory, in the Alabama Senate race over Roy Moore, not by claiming the results were rigged, as Moore did, but by tweeting “A win is a win.”) [...]

… Trumpocracy? This is the name of an excellent new book by The Atlantic’s David Frum, related to—but much broader than—his “How to Build an Autocracy” cover story, published just after Trump was sworn in. David describes the interlocking brands of corruption that together keep an autocrat in power, from straight-out financial payoffs (like Trump real-estate deals linked to Trump-administration policies) to the corrosion of law-enforcement standards to the abasement of an entire political party. What I observed when living in China is what the book says is becoming true of this era’s America: “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.” Franklin Foer’s astonishing new cover story about Paul Manafort, “The Plot Against America,” vividly describes how financial and political corruption interact.

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The Atlantic: Fear and Loathing in the Bundestag

Since the AfD’s historic arrival into the Bundestag last fall, its members have maintained their relentless focus on immigration and refugees. They have sought to provoke their fellow members of parliament, even once taking what they described as “revenge” by invoking a procedural rule to shut down debate after one of them was rejected in a bid for a committee position. Recently, one AfD lawmaker took to Twitter to call a German tennis star’s son a “little half-Negro,” while another claimed police are pandering to “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men” in Cologne. [...]

The AfD dilemma took on even greater importance after Merkel’s CDU, its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), and their center-left counterpart, the Social Democrats (SPD), began formal talks on January 26 toward building a government in the coming weeks. Should they agree to form a “grand coalition,” the AfD, as the third-largest party in the Bundestag, would officially take on the role of chief opposition. Per tradition, this means it will have the first chance to respond to the government’s position during parliamentary debates, giving it extra airtime and visibility. It also gets the chairmanship of the powerful budget committee and a handful of other parliamentary committees. In other words, the AfD’s power to disrupt will only grow. [...]

Last October, for instance, the AfD nominated Albrecht Glaser, a man who has argued that Islam is incompatible with religious freedom, as its Bundestag vice president. In response, the other parties voted him down repeatedly, and the AfD has yet to fill the position. And just last Wednesday, AfD members were elected to lead the Bundestag’s budget, legal affairs, and tourism committees, after winning the required votes from members of each respective committee. The traditional parties did not interfere. [...]

Before the AfD’s arrival, Liebich told me he and many of his colleagues would begin their speeches in parliament by acknowledging their “dear colleagues”; nowadays, they tend to stick with the much more formal “ladies and gentlemen.” It was also once customary to announce that a member had just completed their first address to the Bundestag. But in an effort to mitigate disruptive reactions (like booing) from AfD members, that announcement now occurs before the speech, effectively leaving no room for applause or congratulations. “Even when I sharply criticize the CSU, they’re not my enemies—they’re people who have a different political position than me, but they’re my colleagues,” he said. The AfD members, he said, don’t feel like colleagues.

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The Atlantic: Why Do Cartoon Villains Speak in Foreign Accents?

For their initial study in 1998, Gidney and Dobrow had a team of coders analyze 323 animated TV characters using measures such as ethnic and gender identification, physical appearance, hero/villain status, and linguistic markers. The coders tested a random sample of 12 shows, which spanned a variety of networks, air-times, and genres. Their findings suggested that lots of kids’ shows use language to mark certain traits in a given character. All but two of the shows studied correlated dialect (a term that refers here to any particular variety of a language) with characters’ personality traits in some way.

The kicker: In many of the cases studied, villains were given foreign accents. A modern-day example is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the bad guy in Phineas and Ferb who speaks in a German(ish) accent and hails from the fictional European country Drusselstein. Meanwhile, the study found that most of the heroic characters in their research sample were American-sounding; only two heroes had foreign accents. Since television is a prominent source of cultural messaging for children, this correlation of foreign accents with “bad” characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States. 

The most wicked foreign accent of all was British English, according to the study. From Scar to Aladdin’s Jafar, the study found that British is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. German and Slavic accents are also common for villain voices. Henchmen or assistants to villains often spoke in dialects associated with low socioeconomic status, including working-class Eastern European dialects or regional American dialects such as “Italian-American gangster” (like when Claude in Captain Planet says ‘tuh-raining’ instead of ‘training.’) None of the villains in the sample studied seemed to speak Standard American English; when they did speak with an American accent, it was always in regional dialects associated with low socioeconomic status. [...]

Language tropes can have far-reaching consequences, both for kids’ perceptions of those around them and their understandings of themselves. Research has shown that kids use TV as a key source of information about other ethnic groups, as well as about their own ethnic and racial identities. Linguists have also found that not only do people make judgements about their peers’ intelligence and education levels based on language characteristics (with those who speak standard dialects usually being viewed as smarter and better-looking), but also that those judgments often shape how a person or group of people is treated. These patterns imply that when children see a correlation between evil and foreignness, or between evil and low socioeconomic status, there’s a good chance they are internalizing negative perceptions of themselves or other groups.

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Jacobin Magazine: Italy’s Missing Euro Debate

To get a hint of how this question has been turned on its head, we need only note the reinvention of Silvio Berlusconi. In 2011, as Italian premier, he was unceremoniously dumped out of office with the connivance of European officials, seen as a demagogue hampering the resolution of the Eurozone crisis. In 2018 he has been recast as a bulwark against populism in Europe, a re-designation blessed in recent days by Angela Merkel.  

What is more, even the populists whom Berlusconi claims to be combating have abandoned plans for euro exit. Closer than ever to high office, M5S leader Luigi di Maio now defines himself against “extremist, populist, anti-European” politics. While his party spent the last decade calling for a referendum on euro exit, di Maio has now explicitly ruled out such a vote. The same is also true of the hard-right Lega, which has now joined Berlusconi’s own coalition. [...]

Most notable of all, in this picture, is the dramatic variation in support for the euro across the generations. This particular divide also points to something quite distinct from a Euroscepticism based on nostalgia or parochialism. For while the over-forty-fives favor keeping the single currency by a near three-to-one margin, among younger Italians there is a narrow majority for quitting the Eurozone. Hit hard by crisis, this generation feels unbound from the consensus that has united both center-left and center-right governments since the 1990s.  [...]

As the M5S draws closer to power it has tried to “mainstream” itself, in particular by taking a softer approach to the euro question. Having long been a member of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group in the European parliament (a hard-right grouping whose most prominent exponent is Nigel Farage), in January 2017 leader Beppe Grillo mooted a changed policy. He called on members to vote on joining Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), the federalist group involving figures such as Guy Verhofstadt and the Liberal Democrats. However, after 78 percent of voters supported the plan, ALDE rebuffed Grillo, forcing a renewed embrace of Farage.

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CityLab: The New Deal Landmark That's Cannibalizing Itself

In all three of the Depression-era greenbelt towns (so called because they were planned to be ringed by a “green belt” of undeveloped land), denser-than-average homes and charming public facilities are infused with utopian intent. Even Greenhills’ undulating streets reveal something of the planners’ social aims, said local preservation consultant Beth Sullebarger. “They were designed to be narrow and to not have four-way intersections, so that they would be safer,” she said. Planners in the Thirties were coming to grips with the automotive revolution and experimenting with ways to tame cars.

Inspired by the Garden City concept of British theorist Ebenezer Howard, Greenhills’ chief planner Justin Hartzog subdivided the village into roughly circular “superblocks.” Duplexes, townhouses, and apartments were built in a mix of Modernist and traditional styles, and many were oriented “backwards,” with living rooms looking out on parks instead of the street. After World War II, single-family houses were added for veterans. The federal government divested itself of the town in 1950.

At its inception, Greenhills was exclusively white. (New Deal progressivism stopped at the color line.) Today, per the 2016 American Community Survey, its population of just under 4,000 is 83 percent white, 14 percent black, and 4 percent Hispanic or Latino, with a median household income of about $57,000. Of the town’s 1,700 units of housing, the majority are owner-occupied, and homes recently on the market ranged from the high $40,000s to $155,000.

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Political Critique: Jarosław Kaczyński’s Jewish Question

This is not the first time Polish politicians have spoken out against “Polish death camps,” and the issue’s appeal is not limited to the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Indeed, the issue was first taken up by former Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski. But the new law does not mention death camps. It criminalizes blaming Poles for any wrongdoing against other nations. While the law includes exemptions for scholarly publications and artistic works, it applies to journalistic writing, posing a threat to open public debate. [...]

Indeed, Poland is risking its relationship with its three most important allies – the US, Germany, and Ukraine – which up until now have tolerated the antics of Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s de facto leader. Poland now faces the threat of isolation by the West and loss of international influence, leaving the country vulnerable to Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia.

Despite much of the Polish elite’s evident horror at the law, Kaczyński will not back away from it. To be clear, Kaczyński, like his deceased twin brother, Lech, is not an anti-Semite. As president, Lech Kaczynski was an enemy of anti-Semitism in Poland and celebrated Hanukkah in a synagogue. In fact, until now, Poland’s government was probably the most pro-Israel in Europe, reflected in its abstention from a recent United Nations General Assembly vote to condemn US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. [...]

At the same time, having expelled the most radical right-wing politicians from the government (Foreign Affairs Minister Witold Waszczykowski, Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, and Minister of the Environment Jan Szyszko), Kaczyński needs to regain the trust of far-right PiS voters. They will be pleased that Poland is standing up to Israel, Ukraine, and, indeed, the entire world.

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Politico: Italy shooting raises stakes in immigration debate

A 28-year-old man opened fire on a group of African immigrants in the town of Macerata, Saturday, wounding five men and one woman. The suspect, Luca Traini, reportedly wore an Italian flag around his neck and made a fascist salute before his arrest, according to local media. A copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was later found at his home.

The political reaction to the shooting split neatly along party lines, with the right-wing coalition led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi blaming the attacks on the rising number of immigrants residing in the country. [...]

Traini ran, unsuccessfully, for local elections last year with Berlusconi’s largest coalition partner, the Northern League, a once regional party that has been transformed by its leader Matteo Salvini into an explicitly anti-immigrant political force. [...]

Running under the slogan “Honesty, experience and wisdom,” Berlusconi has been trying to portray himself as a conservative alternative to his allies’ Trump-style populism — in coalition with the Northern League and the far-right Brothers of Italy, but also someone who could credibly join a centrist government with the Democratic Party. [...]

Luigi Di Maio, the lead candidate of the anti-establishment 5Stars Movement, which has taken a hard line on illegal immigration, refused to comment on the crime, saying he didn’t want to “exploit it.”

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IFLScience: Long-Lost 4,400-Year-Old Tomb Of An Ancient Egyptian Priestess Discovered Near The Pyramids Of Giza

In an announcement on Facebook, Egypt’s ‎Ministry of Antiquities said the tomb belonged to a woman called “Hetpet”, an elite member of the royal palace during the end of the Fifth Dynasty (2,494 BCE - 2,345 BCE) who served as a high priestess to the goddess of fertility and motherhood Hathor. [...]

The unique feature of her tomb is the paintings that cover the walls. Luckily for the project's archaeologists, the murals remain in remarkably good condition considering their age.

Along with depicting Hetpet herself in different hunting and fishing scenes, other parts of the mural show scenes of forging metals, picking fruit, and the building of papyrus boats. The walls also depict two monkey scenes, one showing a monkey dancing in front of an orchestra. Monkeys were commonly kept as pets at the time so it’s not uncommon to see them in paintings, however, this style of depiction is particularly unusual.

"Such scenes are rare... and have only been found previously in the (Old Kingdom) tomb of 'Ka-Iber' where a painting shows a monkey dancing in front of a guitarist not an orchestra," Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP.

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