The New York Review of Books: Scrubbing Poland’s Complicated Past

On February 7, Andrzej Melak, a Law and Justice member of parliament, called for Medallions to be provided with editorial commentary. He had discovered that Nałkowska uses phrases the recent Polish legislation was designed to combat. In the last piece in the collection, “The Adults and Children of Auschwitz,” Nałkowska writes: “Not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of human beings underwent manufacture into raw materials and goods in the Polish death camps.” And a few paragraphs later: “The Germans promised Jews arrested in Italy, Holland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia prime working conditions in Polish camps.” (My italics, in both cases.) There is the phrase, not mentioned in the recent law but reflecting precisely the language against which the amendment is aimed. Nałkowska is beyond the reach of a legal suit, and the wording of the law suggests it will not be applied to historians or artists, but this only raises the question of how and to whom it will be applied. In a statement in English on its website, the IPN points to “the media” as chiefly responsible for what it considers the repeated slander of Poland, but the fact that many scholars and artists involved in the debate on Polish-Jewish history are also regular contributors to media outlets makes it clear that they, too, may be liable for prosecution if their views receive a sufficiently wide airing. [...]

In Poland, as in virtually every country that has been occupied by hostile powers, the dead are unsettling presences not just because they are dead but also because invoking their real presences means acknowledging the humiliation involved in the kind of choices people were forced to make in wartime. In their statement, the historians at the IPN make the astonishing assertion that “the truth never humiliates.” But as much as we want them to sit still for us as martyrs (or criminals), the dead contain a discomfiting mixture of guilt and innocence. Some of the Polish soldiers who fought the Nazis and the Communists also engaged in murderous actions against Jews. Those whose identity and national pride are bound up with those soldiers may well feel humiliated by that fact. In a democracy, these complicated realities of human history cannot be left for state officials to adjudicate. These moral knots are the stuff from which the greatest Polish literature has sprung. This is why the kind of insidious ideological control that has returned to Poland under the Law and Justice party is so disturbing and bizarre. [...]

To try to fix a country’s history and victim status by force of law is both foolish and futile. Like Holocaust denial laws, the Polish law will not stop people from saying things the Poles find offensive. It also leads the government immediately into inconsistencies. The Polish government resents the judgment laid upon it by the European Court of Human Rights for facilitating the CIA’s torture program—both by making available a building in the town of Stare Kiejkuty that was used to interrogate terror suspects, brutally and unlawfully, in 2002 and 2003, and by letting the US use an airport to fly detainees in and out. But when it is the United States that Poland is helping, turns of phrase suggestive of complicity (“Polish black sites”) do not excite the same legislative fervor.

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The New York Review of Books: Homo Orbánicus

There is no personality cult around Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, who has been prime minister since 2010. Orbán has understood that authoritarian populism must never evoke images familiar from twentieth-century dictatorships: no violence in the streets, no knocks on doors by the secret police late at night, no forcing citizens to profess political loyalty in public. Instead, power is secured through wide-ranging control of the judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically.  [...]

Already in 2009 Orbán had announced that the country was in need of a “central political forcefield” that would dominate politics for fifteen to twenty years. The major check on power in the two decades after 1990 had been the constitutional court. After 2010, Fidesz first packed it and then took away most of its powers. From his defeat eight years earlier Orbán had drawn the lesson that his government’s achievements had not been communicated “efficiently enough.” Accordingly, Fidesz now took over the public and most of the private media. The government also started a campaign against foreign banks and supermarkets, levying special taxes on them. This economic nationalism distracted from the fact that Hungary today has both the highest value-added tax in the EU and the lowest corporate tax—hardly policy choices one would associate with “plebeian values.” [...]

Orbán’s strategy of presenting himself as the last protector of a Europe in which Christianity and the nation-state are sacred succeeded both domestically and internationally. At home, he outflanked Jobbik on the right. In the EU, Orbán managed to turn a conflict that should have been about institutions—could the EU tolerate the abolition of the rule of law in a member country?—into one about ideals: his “Christian national identity” versus what he derided as “liberal babble” from Brussels. Henceforth, critics of his attacks on the basic rules of liberal democratic governance were regularly dismissed as just having different, and subjective, values. [...]

At home, Fidesz has been extremely careful to avoid anything that could look like serious human rights violations. When tens of thousands demonstrated in the spring of 2017 against the threatened closure of the Central European University (founded and endowed by Soros), the police were restrained. Free speech is not suppressed in Hungary, at least not openly; bloggers are free to criticize the government, and all kinds of debates can be staged in Budapest coffeehouses. The government seems to use other means to control speech. In 2015, Hungary’s largest left-leaning newspaper was bought by a dubious Austrian investor and, a year later, abruptly closed down, supposedly for financial reasons.

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The Atlantic: John Bolton's Radical Views on North Korea

The Trump administration’s plan for dealing with North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program currently consists of two main components: an international campaign of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure against the Kim regime, plus direct nuclear talks this spring between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. The president’s new national-security adviser, John Bolton, doesn’t seem to believe that either of these approaches is likely to work. [...]

One of the few remaining options was to “persuade China” to “remove the regime in North Korea” and permit the reunification of the Korean peninsula. This was characterized as a “diplomatic option.” But Bolton doubted the Chinese could be convinced to reverse their longstanding policy of resisting regime change in North Korea. The United States is thus fast approaching a “binary choice”: live with a North Korea capable of attacking America with nuclear weapons, which Bolton claimed was intolerable, or take military action to avert that outcome, which he suggested was tolerable if unpalatable. [...]

If sanctions and diplomacy won’t stop North Korea from developing a long-range nuclear capability, and if a nuclear-armed North Korea is unacceptable, then that leaves no carrots and only the biggest of sticks: military force. In recent weeks Bolton has noted that North Korea is thought to be only months away from being able to deliver nuclear warheads to the United States, and that the U.S. might not be able to deter the reckless Kim regime from either using those weapons against America or selling nuclear and missile technology to American enemies like Iran or even terrorist groups. As a result, he’s argued, “striking first” to eliminate the “imminent threat” from North Korea qualifies as “self-defense” and “is perfectly legitimate.”

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The Atlantic: The Bidet's Revival

The bidet was born in France in the 1600s as a washing basin for your private parts. It was considered a second step to the chamber pot, and both items were kept in the bedroom or dressing chamber. Some of the early versions of the bidet look like ornamental ottomans; the basins were inset in wooden furniture with short legs. Often lids made of wood, wicker, or leather topped the seated portion, disguising its function to a degree.

The name is rooted in the French word for “pony,” which offers a helpful hint that the basin should be straddled. But it also picked up this moniker because royalty used it to clean up after a ride. Hauling water was a laborious process in that era, but bidet bathing was a regular indulgence for the aristocracy and upper classes. This little bathing workhorse was so much a part of high society that the artist Louis-Léopold Boilly, who painted French middle- and upper-class life, showcased a young woman with her skirts hiked over the washbasin in one of his works—providing a racy bidet counterpart to Degas’s bathtub portraits. They were such an integral part of civilized life that even the imprisoned Marie Antoinette was granted a red-trimmed one while awaiting the guillotine. She may have been in a dank, rat-infested cell, but her right to freshen up would not be denied. [...]

Throughout this bidet boom, the United States resisted its appeal, and the reason might have been the power of first impressions. Americans were introduced to bidets on a broad scale during World War II, when troops were stationed in Europe. GIs visiting bordellos would often see bidets in the bathrooms, so they began to associate these basins with sex work. Given America’s puritanical past, it makes sense that, once back home, servicemen would feel squeamish presenting these fixtures to their homeland. [...]

While wipes are far more accessible than washlets, costing a fraction of the super-thrones (a 252-pack costs $9.92), they’ve also created major damage to sewer systems. Once flushed, the wipes glom together with any fat from food waste and can form what are called “fatbergs”—iceberg-style blockages that can clog a whole system. To extract a fatberg and make the needed repairs can be incredibly pricey; in London back in 2015, one 10-ton fatberg cost the city $600,000. And last September, the city discovered another that’s approximately 140 tons, which could very well cost 10 times as much to remove.

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FiveThirtyEight: Religious Democrats, Young Republicans: What The Stereotypes Miss About Both Parties

According to Pew, 33 percent of self-identified Democrats1 are whites without a four-year college degree. They represent a larger cohort in the Democratic Party than whites with a four-year degree (26 percent), nonwhites without a four-year degree (28 percent) and nonwhites with a four-year degree (12 percent). Yes, President Trump carried non-college-educated white voters easily in 2016; the exit polls suggest Hillary Clinton won only about 30 percent of these voters. But, because they’re such a huge portion of the U.S. electorate overall (44 percent, according to Pew) that’s enough to make non-college-educated whites a big share of the Democratic flock.

And while the percentage of Democrats who are unaffiliated with any religion is growing and that group now makes up a third of the party, the majority of Democrats consider themselves Christians. And it’s not just black and Hispanic Democrats who account for the party’s churchgoing contingent: White Democrats who belong to “mainline” denominations, such as certain types of Presbyterians and Lutherans (12 percent), white Catholics (10 percent) and white evangelicals (7 percent) together form a is sizable percentage of the party — almost as large as the unaffliliated bloc. [...]

I don’t mean to dismiss the obvious: The parties do conform at least in part to their stereotypes, and that’s clear in the Pew data, especially the trends over time. In this era, it’s pretty easy to tell if you are attending a Republican or Democratic event without talking to anyone there — the Democratic group is more likely to be full of nonwhites and young people; the Republican one is more likely to be older and whiter. But it’s still pretty hard to guess which party an individual you meet on the street belongs to — particularly if they are white. And whites, according to Pew, still account for about 69 percent of America’s registered voters.

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Al Jazeera: Will Putin follow in Brezhnev's footsteps?

At the start of his fourth term, Putin's space for any domestic and foreign policy manoeuvring appears to be quite limited. And as he surpasses Leonid Brezhnev as the longest-serving leader in Russia's modern history (if Putin's term as prime minister is counted), critical voices in Russia and abroad have started comparing him to his Soviet predecessor, whose 18-year reign ended in 1982. [...]

While the parallel with the 1970s' Soviet Union is not complete (for one, Putin appears to be in excellent health, compared with Brezhnev, who succumbed to alcoholism and illness), Russia does appear to be entering a similar period of stagnation in foreign and domestic affairs. [...]

Medvedev's pursuit of rapprochement with the West precipitated Russia's abstention during the 2011 UN Security Council vote to approve a US-led intervention in Libya - a move that Putin sharply criticised. [...]

Putin himself is also not ready to make compromises on Russia's positions and, in a sense, admit that he made a mistake in Ukraine. For that reason, Galeotti says, it is unlikely that there will be a resolution of the Ukrainian crisis in the following six years. [...]

The biggest barrier to economic development, in his opinion, is the lack of investment in the Russian economy. There are two reasons for that: one, the economic sanctions which have caused a lot of Western capital to depart from Russia; and two, the lack of the rule of law.

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Quartz: Europe’s black population has increased by at least a million over the last decade

There were nearly one million asylum applicants from sub-Saharan Africa in Europe between 2010 and 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from Eurostat. While Pew Research Center isn’t able to speculate whether the inflow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will rise at the same pace in the coming years, a separate 2017 Pew Research Center survey conducted in six sub-Saharan countries found that many respondents said they would migrate to another country if they had the chance.

Sub-Saharan migrants in Europe arrive from a diverse set of origins. More than half of migrants who sought asylum in Europe in 2017 were born in Nigeria, South Africa, Somalia, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cameroon. Pew Research Center notes that the total number of Somali migrants in Europe increased by 80,000 people between 2010 and 2017. Over the same period, the total population of Eritreans living in Europe increased by about 40,000. [...]

It’s difficult to quantify the overall black population in Europe, simply because many European countries refuse to collect racial data on their citizens. Instead, some European countries collect data on the country of origin of its migrant population and the number of citizens who are children of migrants. With a pan-European black identity starting to emerge in recent years, there are calls for the EU to begin collecting racial data.

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Vox: Poll: most Americans say gun ownership increases safety. Research: nope.

f you ask the general public, most Americans say it does. According to a new poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 58 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “[g]un ownership does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves.” In comparison, 38 percent agree with the statement that “[g]un ownership does more to reduce safety by giving too many people access to firearms and increasing the chances for accidental misuse.”

This is a shift from 1999, when 41 percent of Americans agreed with the first statement and 52 percent with the second. [...]

Individually, several studies have found that the presence of a gun in a home elevates the risk of death. A 2014 review of the research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, for instance, found that access to firearms was associated with a doubled risk for homicide and a tripled risk for suicide. A 2017 piece by Melinda Wenner Moyer in Scientific American also ran through the evidence, concluding that gun ownership was associated with a higher risk of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings. [...]

The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

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Salon: In rare bipartisan show, Congress rejects Betsy DeVos’ education agenda

For the second consecutive year, Congress has rejected funding for DeVos' key policy proposals, which most notably included reduced federal funding for public schools and an effort to spend $1 billion promoting school-choice programs.

DeVos had planned to slash the Department of Education's budget by $3.6 billion (5 percent), but on Wednesday night, Congress included a $3.9 billion increase to the department in the massive $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, according to The Washington Post. The legislation must be passed by midnight on Friday in order to keep the government running. [...]

Instead, Congress is on track to increase department funding by $3.9 billion, with no funding for the school choice program DeVos envisioned. The spending bill, which must be passed by Friday to avoid another government shutdown, boosts investments in student mental health, including increasing funding by $700 million for a wide-ranging grant program that schools can use for counselors. The bill calls for an additional $22 million for a program to reduce school violence and $25 million for a Department of Health and Human Services program that supports mental-health services in schools.

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