BBC4 Analysis: The Return of Reality?

Before Covid-19 hit, the latest research showed we were more polarised than ever. We broadly agree on the issues - it's the emotions where things get tricky.

If someone is part of the other tribe then we want little to do with them. And the more polarised we are, the more prone we are to what philosophers call 'knowledge resistance' - rejecting information that doesn't fit our worldview.

If we're in a situation where identity trumps truth, is there anything that can pull us back to reality? Peter Pomerantsev, author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, looks at whether Covid-19 could bring us back towards a sense of shared reality - or whether it might push us further apart.

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The Society Pages: Memory, Trauma, and Survival in Japan and Beyond: A Conversation with Ran Zwigenberg

First and foremost, historically, it’s an anachronism. People of different eras did not experience trauma the way we experience it today. It doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer or have anxiety and other symptoms that we may now see as PTSD. But we have to be very aware of the fact that we are taking a category we have now and retroactively putting it onto different historical situations. They are also neglecting the cultural ethnocentricity of their concepts. The concept of PTSD was developed in 1980 in the U.S. in relation specifically to the Holocaust, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and other places. It’s essentially an American notion, and it’s still not used as much in other cultural situations. To apply it to various places like Israel in the 1950s, France, Europe, the Soviet Union, Serbia in your case—culturally it doesn’t work. It’s doubly problematic when we talk about Japan and other non-Western contexts. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it has to be done very carefully, and you have to be careful about confusing individual experiences with social experience. The mechanism is different. [...]

Generally speaking, most people cannot discern, both the survivors themselves and doctors, what is somatic, for example, the physical impacts of radiation or starvation, versus the impact of mental shock, or what we now call mental trauma. For survivors, fatigue is the biggest category of symptoms: muscle issues, headaches, nightmares. They talk about their lack of ability to get up in the morning and continue with life. Sometimes people mention wounds of the heart. A lot of times and this is more from work about veterans, they try to rationalize what happened. They don’t really make the connection between their alcoholism and the war. They focus more on the connection between their alcoholism and their inability to find a job. Further, if you don’t believe your trauma is real, this has a mitigating effect. You think: “I shouldn’t be traumatized.” I mean, they did not even think in those terms because no one thought in those terms. If you don’t have the concept, you don’t interpret your experience that way. [...]

It almost went from something people were ashamed of to something people are proud of. Even though some people still don’t want to talk about it, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are highly regarded in Japan overall as a peace symbol. This is related to the way that the government is pushing the idea of Japan’s unique position as a non-nuclear country. At the same time, if you look at what happened to survivors of Fukushima, they are treated very similarly to how Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors were treated [i.e. discriminated against]. My good friend who works on nuclear production and accidents all over the world has said that radiation makes people invisible. It’s true—once people are contaminated, people don’t care about them. It’s amazing how immediate it is.

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The Bridge: Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight with China

There are several durable reasons why China is the principal U.S. competitor least likely to employ insurgency—“the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify or challenge political control of a region”—either directly or by proxy, in the future.[6] First, despite its global ambition and revisionist aims, China turned its back on supporting revolutionary insurgents decades ago. Second, China's approach to great-power competition focuses on economic competition, nonviolent subversion, and, if that fails, high-intensity warfare. Third, the international situation has rendered classic Maoist people's war anachronistic, as Chinese military thinkers recognize. Finally, China's leaders are acutely afraid of internal rebellion, and thus have strong normative reasons to not support insurgents. [...]

America's relationship with China is now transforming again. China is more powerful and aggressive than it has been at any time since Mao died in 1976. Xi Jinping, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party of China in 2012, is pursuing an ambitious plan to achieve China's “National Rejuvenation” which ultimately seeks to make China the world's preeminent political, military and economic power by 2049.[11] But despite his pretensions, he is no Mao.[12] As Xi himself said in 2009, “China is not exporting revolution.”[13] Whatever the failings of U.S. engagement, since Nixon, China has transitioned from a rogue state that actively armed Maoist groups around the world into a reluctant stakeholder in the international order that shows no inclination to support insurgencies abroad.[14] [...]

If “Hong Kongization” fails in Taiwan, China does not expect to deploy guerrillas to undermine Taipei as a last resort. Instead, the People's Liberation Army is planning to employ armed force in a conventional “local war” to compel Taiwanese submission.[25] The People's Liberation Army's role is to take advantage of a “Revolution in Military Affairs with Chinese characteristics” and prepare for these “local wars.”[26] This focus on “local war” explains why China is spending a lot of money to buy tanks, planes, ships, and even militarized islands, and why rather than training to support insurgencies, People's Liberation Army ground forces train to fight U.S. Army-style brigade combat teams in their major exercises.[27] Chinese leaders simply do not think that “high-intensity conventional maneuver war is out,” as Vrolyk argues. They are developing capabilities that will let them avoid and, if necessary, win a modern war, but they have not prioritized support to insurgent proxies. [...]

Given China’s existing strategy, military thought, and fears of rebellion, renewed state support for insurgents is far from certain. Instead, China is more likely to employ economic and informational tools to achieve its aims, while focusing on partnerships with state actors and striving to remain below the threshold of armed conflict. While this does not mean we can afford to disregard counterinsurgency entirely, as China is not our only competitor and could always adopt new stratagems, it does suggest a different set of defense priorities for countering China. To compete with China, what the United States armed forces need most are ways and means for integrated campaigning to further U.S. interests, which would allow them to counter Chinese actions below the threshold of armed conflict. We also certainly need capabilities for high-intensity combat, in case all else fails.

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National Review: 82-Day Dictatorship

At the time of this great panic for Hungarian democracy, Hungarian opponents of Orbán spread ludicrous and easily-checkable claims about the legislation, saying that the parliament itself had been suspended and elections cancelled, a claim spread by people as eminent as Anne Applebaum. Other experts told us confidently that these powers were gathered by Orbán for the purpose of suppressing the inevitably disastrous performance of his nation’s health-care institutions. American political strategists predicted extravagant things, such as: “He’s going to wind up putting Gypsies in permanent detention…” [...]

Orbán is not immune from criticism for his use of the powers. He used the power to rule by fiat to pass a planned redevelopment of City Park, which his party desired to do but which has been blocked by the opposition in Parliament and by the mayor of Budapest. This is an abuse of emergency powers, and a bit of political hardball, though not one that touches on the fundaments of democracy. End runs like this are commonly done in the Western world. New York governor Andrew Cuomo used sweeping emergency powers to amend or rewrite hundreds of New York laws, including many unrelated to the response to COVID-19 that he couldn’t pass through the legislature. Among these was suspending the requirement that cities and towns publish certain legal notices, a serious source of income for local media that could lead to newspaper closures and will make it harder for citizens to know how their tax monies are being spent. This too is an abuse, but nobody outside of the letters to the editor section of newspapers seems to notice it. [...]

In my book, the police were too zealous and the law too broad. Neither of those two men should have been questioned even if they weren’t charged. But overzealous and lunkheaded investigations are launched by the police frequently in free countries. And Hungarian speech restrictions, even in the emergency, are put into relief when contrasted with European peers with great liberal reputations. Hundreds of people in the U.K. face lengthy and expensive trials or even prison sentences for charges under the Communications Act, and police there regularly threaten the public to watch what they say on social media. Germany’s Network Enforcement Act defines dangerous speech so broadly it would give supporters of opposition parties a second thought about expressing themselves on the Internet. Non-liberal states such as Russia, the Philippines, and Singapore have all cited it as an example to be emulated. German politicians have demanded that the law be made more repressive and loopholes in it be closed.

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The Stage: On Days of Disorder

Yet you and all those like you have a problem. The man inclined towards a riot cannot simply wake up one day and begin one. The lone rioter is not a rioter at all. He is simply a common vandal. The system can handle that problem with ease. This is the sorrow of the would-be rioter: he cannot begin his riot until he is sure all the other would-be rioters will pound the streets besides him. [...]

All of these explanations have some truth in them, but are evidently incomplete. First, they explain too much. The predisposing social conditions are with us all the time, yet riots are episodic. Second, they explain too little. Many mob actions, like European soccer riots or the increasingly predictable civil meltdowns in the home cities of National Basketball Association champions, are triggered by good news, and not obviously related to social injustice or existential anomie. Indeed, during the Los Angeles riots, anyone with a TV set could see that jubilation rather than fury best characterized the mood of the people in the streets. It is hard to credit that these exhilarated looters with their new VCR’s and cameras were protesting the jury system, the state of race relations in Southern California, or anything else. They were, in fact, having a party. Moreover, many of those who risked life and limb opposing the more outrageous excesses of the rioters were themselves poor, unemployed, and victims of racism.[1] [...]

Once a crowd has gathered in response to an incident, there are still two hurdles that would-be rioters must overcome to transform a mere crowd into a destructive mob. The first is that the crowd must have massed in sufficient concentration and speed at "one place [where] police cannot mass at a correspondingly rapid rate... [so that] that offenses occur rapidly enough to overwhelm the police."[5] The second is that the would-be rioters must find a way to judge the composition of the crowd.

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UnHerd: Why we remember wars but forget plagues

Let’s begin with the most fearful pestilence of all: the Black Death. In the 1340s and 50s this bacterial pandemic slaughtered 30-50% of Europe’s population and similar numbers across most of Asia. It was the greatest calamity endured by homo sapiens since the end of the Ice Age. [...]

The same curious pattern can be seen elsewhere. From classical times we have Thucydides’ brutal description of the Plague of Athens: “it settled in the privy parts, the fingers and the toes, and many escaped with the loss of these, some too with that of their eyes. Others again were seized with an entire loss of memory.” It’s a brilliantly harrowing account, yet also unusual. There is almost no literature, for instance, on the terrible Antonine Plague (AD165-180), which killed 5 million, or the Plague of Cyprian (250), which culled 5,000 a day in Rome alone. [...]

In other words, it is worse than war. Deaths in plague are unglamorous, or revolting: you drown in your own body fluids (corona), you bleed out through your eyes (Ebola). There is no hero storming the Reichstag. Likewise, plague-time deaths are solitary, dismal and sequestered. There is none of the black humour and camaraderie of war, no crowded pubs as in the Blitz, no sing-songs about bluebirds. Instead there is just a lot of lonely, locked-away people, waiting to get ill. Nor can there be any grand or compelling narrative, culminating in victory: the end is just the cessation of suffering. [...]

However, if this is what happens to plagues in literature, it comes at a hefty price. Because, if there is so little to read, and to remind us of the past, it means that every time a new plague comes along, humanity has to learn the same painful lessons, about quarantines, masks, infection and isolation. All over again.

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EURACTIV: In political U-turn, Czechs back EU’s green recovery plan

If confirmed, the move would mark a U-turn from previous government positions. In March, as the coronavirus pandemic started spreading across the continent, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš urged Europe to “forget about the Green Deal now and focus on the coronavirus instead”. [...]

The European Commission has promised to raise the EU’s emissions reduction target to 50-55% by 2030, up from 40% currently. The proposal is due to be released later this year, after the EU executive completes a detailed cost-benefit analysis.[...]

In addition, Czechs seem broadly supportive of climate action. According to a survey published in March, 84% of Czech people think that climate change caused by human activities threatens their future. And 79% believe the Czech Republic should aim to achieve net-zero emissions, the survey found.

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