Quasi War Quotes

la forme moderne de l'antisémitisme n'est-elle pas très précisément dans le déni de l'évidence ? l'antisémitisme moderne n'a-t-il pas pour article de foi quasi premier cette terrible adresse aux vivants : "la Shoah ne fut pas ce que vous dites ; elle ne fut, en aucune manière, ce crime exorbitant à la longue histoire des crimes (ch. 57 La Shoah au coeur et dans la tête)

The framing of women’s abuse narratives as quasi-legal testimony encourages the public, as interpreters, to take the stance of cross-examiners who categorize forgetting as memory failure and insist on completeness and consistency of memory detail through all repeated tellings. The condensed, summarized, or fragmentary nature of abuse memories will rarely withstand this aggressive testing. Few people’s memories can.

A king or despot can maintain his power if he is astute in internal politics and successful externally. If he is quasi-divine, his dynasty may be prolonged indefinitely. But the growth of civilisation puts an end to belief in his divinity; defeat in war is not always avoidable; and political astuteness cannot be an invariable attribute of monarchs. Therefore sooner or later, if there is no external conquest, there is revolution, and the monarchy is either abolished or shorn of its power.

It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to flourish in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories and mines in the 1850s were also the first to employ forced African American labor in the 1870s.

Und so ass ich meine erste koschere Zimtschnecke mit Dina, es war Anfang Sommer, die Sommerferienekstase der Kinder diffundierte in unsere trägen Glieder rüber, wir sassen vor der Bäckerei, und es war irgendwie alles sehr juicy: die Zimtschnecke, das Wetter und wir (ich trug einen neuen Hosenrock, so Kimono-style, und Dina meine alte Breitschulterlederjacke). Die Crème de la Crème der Gen-Y-Hipsterei stürzte sich auf die vom immer nach neuen Plantagen suchenden Kapitalismus noch nicht ganz vereinnahmte Bäckerei, und ich und die aufgepumpten Schwuchteln ignorierten uns auf common ground, weil ich ihrer Mähdrescherart des Daseins ja entsagt habe. Ich sagte Dina, dass ich die koschere Zimtschnecke viel juicyer fände als die nichtkoscheren Zimtschnecken, die ich bisher vernascht hätte. Und fügte noch hinzu, dass ich mir unsicher sei, ob die juicyness nur grösser sei, weil Ausflug in jüdische Bäckerei und quasi Exotisierung. Und ob wir jetzt den Juden ihre Bäckerei weggentrifihipsterten. Und ob das sehr schlimm sei. 'Keine Ahnung', sagte Dina. 'Ist wahrscheinlich so schlimm wie die appropriation deiner pseudo-samuraiigen fashion.' Ich nannte sie eine bitch, und sie nannte mich eine cultural appropri-geisha, und wir fanden uns so masslos geistreich und nervig hyperreflektiert wie Leif-Randt-life-Clowns, und dann waren wir uns auch schon wieder langweilig in unserem Selbsthass über unser wohlstandsverwahrlostes Weisssein, in dem es nur um Distinktion geht, in dem es nur darum geht, uns durch Konsum von den Ärmeren, Reicheren, Cooleren, Schwuleren, Wokeren, Differenz-Feministinnen, Weisseren, weniger Gebildeten, zu Rationalistischen, Artsyeren, Gen-Z-ieren, Weniger-um-Abgrenzung-Bemühteren abzugrenzen.

The conduct of war will always challenge a nation founded on a commitment to justice. It will call back the nation’s history, its earlier struggles, its triumphs and failures. There were shades, during the war on terror, of the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798 during the Quasi-War with France, of the Espionage Act of the First World War, and of FDR’s Japanese internment order during the Second World War. But with Bush’s November 2001 military order, the war on terror became, itself, like another airplane, attacking the edifice of American law, down to its very footings, the ancient, medieval foundations of trial by jury and the battle for truth.

The Reagan formula featured a president with little comprehension of, indeed little interest in, most of the major issues of the day but with an actor’s skill in assuming a symbolic role, that of quasi-monarch. That same formula also aimed at replacing the idea of an engaged and informed citizenry with that of an audience which, fearful of nuclear war and Soviet aggression, welcomed a leader who could be trusted to protect and reassure them of their virtue by retelling familiar myths about national greatness, piety, and generosity. It was demagoguery adapted to the cinematic age: he played the leader while “we the people” relapsed into a predemotic state.

In 1832, Andrew Jackson, today a folk hero to American free-marketeers, refused to renew the license for the quasi-central bank, the second bank of the USA - the successor to Hamilton's Bank of the USA (see chapter 2). This was done on the grounds that the foreign ownership share of the bank was too high -30% (the pre-EU Finns would have heartily approved!). Declaring his decision, Jackson said: 'should the stock of the bank principally pass into the hands of the subjects of a foreign country, and we should unfortunately become involved in a war with that country, what would be our condition?........Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence, it would be far more formidable and dangerous than the naval and military power of the enemy. If we must have a bank...it should be purely American.' If the president of a developing country said something like this today, he would be branded a xenophobic dinosaur and blackballed in the international community.

The report is more persuasive in describing the department’s shoddy record-keeping and the lax oversight of beat cops. The failure to supervise officers’ use of force results in excessive resort to Tasers. Equally problematic is Ferguson’s practice of issuing a quasi-warrant known as a “wanted” without the requisite probable cause to believe that the target has committed a crime. (Many other departments abuse “wanteds,” too.) The municipal court, like the police department, is error-prone in its records and notice systems. Had the Justice Department blasted Ferguson’s management and training failures and left it at that, it would have been on solid footing. But the imperative to racialize the problems was overwhelming, especially given Holder’s previous statements against Ferguson and the subsequent discrediting of the Brown story. So the department trots out the usual statistical analyses with which to bootstrap a charge of “intentional discrimination” against blacks. And these statistical analyses are irredeemably deficient.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield.

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored. There are some very obvious objections to be made to this. In the first place, several such disclosures have been claimed to occur, at different times and places, to hugely discrepant prophets or mediums. In some cases - most notably the Christian - one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seem dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one. A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to the unlettered dan quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.

You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power….This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders….What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest….What’s the primary purpose of a political leader?…To build a majority.

Selling-oriented retailers can be tough to deal with because they are determined to secure better terms than their quasi-identical competitors. Their biggest fear during negotiations is that they did not squeeze manufacturers hard enough and left some margin on the table that may be given up to a more determined competitor, who will use it to undercut them on price.

I believe this quasi-religious attitude explains the repeated misunderstandings and deficiencies of revolutionary Marxism in the face of all the major events that have accompanied decolonization—such as the secessions of Katanga and Rhodesia, the Biafra war, and even the Algerian war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Marxists seem to circle round and round these problems without knowing from which angle to tackle them. Innumerable ‘mini-theories’ are produced that contradict one another; words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group, even within the great ‘left-wing’ parties themselves on those occasions when reflection is encouraged, allowed or simply tolerated. This confusion becomes unbearable when the inadequacy of the old concepts is recognized and people try to save them with a multitude of deductive developments instead of firmly replacing them by new ones.

To the present time, Western civilization has had at least five different sources of cultural authority: Rome, the pope, the Bible, human reason, and the current individualistic nihilism whose future will be determined by quasi-democratic culture wars.

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the "capitalist" system and "progressive forces." This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world. The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It's the result of an approach we've already seen in waves of terrorist attacks — the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we fail to understand his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational and effective solutions to the problem. The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin's speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on the immediate moment X and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see right now. The idea that "from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it" is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-language journalist even pulled out the "duck test" for me: "if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck." In other words, all they need is an image that matches their prejudices to assess a situation.

Over time, land companies established by the school purchased a total of more than four thousand acres of cotton land, encouraged local blacks to operate the farms on a quasi-communal basis, and ultimately resold smaller tracts of land to African Americans.2

Even before 'absolute' weapons were invented, automatism and absolutism were firmly coupled together in the constitution of every military organization. Hence war is the ideal condition for promoting the assemblage of the megamachine, and to keep the threat of war constantly in existence is the surest way of holding the otherwise autonomous or quasi-autonomous components together as a functioning working unit. Once a megamachine has been brought into existence, any criticism of its program, any departure from its principles, any detachment from its routines, any modifications of its structure through demands from below constitute a threat to the whole system.

Kennedy’s influence was cut short by the assassination, but he weighed in with a memo to LBJ. The problem, Kennedy explained on January 16, was that “most federal programs are directed at only a single aspect of the problem. They are sometimes competitive and frequently aimed at only a temporary solution or provide for only a minimum level of subsistence. These programs are always planned for the poor—not with the poor.” Kennedy’s solution was a new cabinet-level committee to coordinate comprehensive, local programs that “[involve] the cooperation of the poor” Kennedy listed six cities where local “coordinating mechanisms” were strong enough that pilot programs might be operational by fall. “In my judgment,” he added prophetically, “the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems, unless we use the basic approach outlined above.” If there was such a thing as a “classical” vision of community action, Kennedy’s memo was its epitaph. On February 1, while Kennedy was in East Asia, Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver to head the war on poverty. It was an important signal that the president would be running the program his way, not Bobby’s. It was also a canny personal slap at RFK—who, according to Ted Sorensen, had “seriously consider[ed] heading” the antipoverty effort. Viewed in this light, Johnson’s choice of Shriver was particularly shrewd. Not only was Shriver hardworking and dynamic—a great salesman—but he was a Kennedy in-law, married to Bobby’s sister Eunice. In Kennedy family photos Shriver stood barrel-chested and beaming, a member of the inner circle, every bit as vigorous, handsome, Catholic, and aristocratic as the rest. By placing Shriver at the helm of the war on poverty, Johnson demonstrated his fealty to the dead president. But LBJ and Bobby both understood that Shriver was very much his own man. After the assassination Shriver signaled his independence from the Kennedys by slipping the new president a note card delineating “What Bobby Thinks.” In 1964, Shriver’s status as a quasi-Kennedy made him Bobby’s rival for the vice presidency, but even before then their relationship was hardly fraternal. Within the Kennedy family Shriver was gently mocked. His liberalism on civil rights earned him the monikers “Boy Scout,” “house Communist,” and “too-liberal in-law.” Bobby’s unease was returned in kind. “Believe me,” RFK’s Senate aide Adam Walinsky observed, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” If Shriver’s loyalty was divided, it was split between Johnson and himself, not Johnson and Kennedy.

We are witnessing the total collapse of a bad idea. Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world, is being exposed as a historic calamity. It is fueling domestic fear and global disorder and may well lead to a world war.

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

During the period between the wars, the term ‘alien’ became attached more and more to extraterrestrial beings, but we should remember that it had earlier roots in 19th-century race theory and politics. Hostility to aliens was institutionalized in the USA by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and Anarchist Exclusion Act (1901). In this same period, quasi-humans on Mars – the favourite possibility at the turn of the 19th century – tended to be described in terms consistent with the racial hierarchy of the period. In Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880), short humans are discovered on Mars who have an Aryan appearance like Swedes or Germans. And Gustavus W. Pope, in his Journey to Mars (1894), conveniently colour-codes his own Martians into red, yellow, and blue races.

Only influence there—prior to any actual decision to intervene—could prevent feckless civilians from committing the nation to wars or quasi-wars not to the military’s own liking. In

Francis schüttelte den Kopf. Man hätte diesen denkwürdigen Moment einfrieren sollen. Grover Chedwick hatte tatsächlich gefragt, wieso das Leben scheiße war. Der wandelnde Beweis für diese These hatte quasi sich selbst in Frage gestellt.

Labri non è felice. Il soldato a cui è assegnato lo stratta male: spesso lo picchia, ma perlopiù non lo degna nemmeno di uno sguardo. Sta quasi tutto il giorno alla catena. Ha freddo, è malato, ed è abbandonato a se stesso. Non vive, si limita ad esistere. Ogni tanto, quando c’è del movimento intorno a lui, spera di uscire: si alza, si stiracchia e scodinzola per far vedere che è pronto. Ma è un’illusione, e si riaccuccia con lo sguardo fisso oltre la sua scodella piena di cibo. È stufo, disgustato da questa vitaccia. Anche se riuscirà a scampare ai proiettili e alle bombe ai quali è esposto quanto noi, finirà per morire qui. Fouillade stende la sua mano asciutta sulla testa del cane, e quello lo fissa di nuovo. I loro sguardi sono uguali. L’unica differenza è che uno viene dall’alto e uno dal basso.

Quindi vado. Viaggio più lontano e più veloce e più tenace di quasi tutti, e leggo, e scrivo, e amo le città. Essere sola in mezzo a una folla, sentire la solitudine e l'appartenenza, mettere una distanza tra ciò che vedo e ciò che sono.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield. Facing the colossus that is the Israeli state is a colonized people denied equal rights and the ability to exercise their right of national self-determination, a continuous condition since the idea of self-determination took hold globally after World War I.

he questioned the book’s basic premise: that the women who survive (or don’t survive) a war are equally heroic as their menfolk. The men go and fight, the women don’t, was his essential argument. Except that women do fight (not least Penthesilea and her Amazons), even if the poems heralding their great deeds have been lost. And men don’t always: Achilles doesn’t fight until book eighteen of the twenty-four-book Iliad. He spends the first seventeen books arguing, sulking, asking his mother for help, sulking some more, letting his friend fight in his stead, offering advice and refusing apologies. But not fighting. In other words, he spends almost three-quarters of the poem in a quasi-domestic setting, away from the battlefield. Yet we never question that he is a hero.

As culture war, the backlash was born to lose. Its goal is not to win cultural battles but to take offense, conspicuously, vocally, even flamboyantly. Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of backlash culture; voicing the fury of the imposed-upon is to the backlash what the guitar solo is to heavy metal. Indignation is the privileged emotion, the magic moment that brings a consciousness of rightness and a determination to persist. Conservatives often speak of their first bout of indignation as a sort of conversion experience, a quasi-religious revelation.

With very rare exceptions, there were none in 1850 who claimed the right of the Federal Government to apply coercion to a State. In 1860 men had grown to be familiar with threats of driving the South into submission to any act that the Government, in the hands of a Northern majority, might see fit to perform. During the canvass of that year, demonstrations had been made by quasi-military organizations in various parts of the North, which looked unmistakably to purposes widely different from those enunciated in the preamble to the Constitution, and to the employment of means not authorized by the powers which the States had delegated to the Federal Government. Well-informed men still remembered that, in the Convention which framed the Constitution, a proposition was made to authorize the employment of force against a delinquent State, on which Mr. Madison remarked that "the use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might have been bound.

We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability—on some unconscious level—scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence—our conceptual self—will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist. Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived, if not more so. And that’s the whole point. Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die. Religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation are the result of people’s immortality projects. Becker argues that wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people’s immortality projects rub up against another group’s. Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group’s immortality project against another’s. But, when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror—that horrible, depressing anxiety—creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as Becker points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single fuck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence.

In 1935, in the pit of the Depression, when milk was being sold below cost, Merritt’s father had helped write the “milk control” laws, which partly govern California’s milk business (they have since been updated several times), especially the relations between the milk companies and grocery stores. After World War II, these laws increasingly were honored in the breach, as the big creameries and the big supermarket chains cut deals for illegal rebates or illegal financing or both. This is the normal result of quasi-fascist laws that try to regulate the marketplace. But in 1935, Benito Mussolini’s concept of binding state and industry together (the fasces is a Roman symbol, an ax with a bundle of sticks tied around its handle; the sticks represent the industries and the church, the ax represents the state, a one-for-all-and-all-for-one construct) was so popular around the world that Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to copy it with the Blue Eagle National Recovery Administration, until the Supreme Court threw it out in 1937. Relics of Mussolini, however, linger in all the states of the union, sometimes in milk control laws (and always in alcoholic beverage laws).

Erniedrigte Frauen funktionierten wie die Monsterkurve. Man knickte sie, knickte sie wieder, und sofort vervielfacht sich ihre Monstrosität, raumfüllend, selbstausweichend. Verlassene Frauen nahmen monströse Züge an. Verstoßene Frauen wurden zu Furien, zu Drachen, ein quasi natürlicher Prozess, der allerdings beinhaltete, dass diese Frauen auch schon zuvor als Drache respektive als Furie galten. Jeder wusste, dass es solchen Frauen nur recht geschah, man wunderte sich meist, dass es nicht früher dazu gekommen war, dass der Mann es überhaupt so lange ausgehalten hatte, kein Wunder, dass er nur noch wegwollte, volles Verständnis, zum Glück keine Kinder. Spürte sie denn etwas, das Wachsen von Hauern, von Hörnern, den triefenden Geifer, das schlangengleich kriechende, kringelnde Haar?

There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.

This was especially relevant in Korea, a new kind of limited war, which demanded all sorts of political decisions and a certain pragmatism that was alien to MacArthur’s sense of duty. Eisenhower thought a younger commander would have been far more appropriate than, as he phrased it, “an untouchable.” There was also the danger with MacArthur that he had begun to see his mission in Asia in a quasi-religious light, as the leader of a holy crusade against a godless enemy.

Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi-War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace, Jefferson benefited from exceptional good fortune as America settled down for the first time since the Revolution.

Writing in 1453 Portuguese royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara called upon the “Curse of Ham” story in Genesis to justify his countrymen’s enslavement of Africans, the race cursed “to be subject to all the other races of the world.” Slavery had been going on since the ancient civilizations, but Zurara’s explanation marked the first time that enslavement was seen as a matter of biological inheritance rather than a conditional state brought about by war or an economic transaction. The notion that servitude was passed down through blood became particularly expedient as the plantation societies in the New World required more and more labor. Not only could the workforce continually regenerate itself through reproduction, but a seemingly infinite supply of new slaves were available for purchase on the Dark Continent. While African states had long been selling war prisoners to their Muslim neighbors, the Europeans, armed with their quasi-religious, then quasi-scientific rationale, elevated the practice into an international institution.

It is my argument that reversing the meaning of “populist” tells us something important about the people who reversed it: denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that pessimism—that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn—that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly.

Während die Radialstation vollgestopft war mit Auslagen, Kiosken, haufenweise Trödel und Gebrauchsartikeln und überhaupt aussah wie ein Penner, der sich auf einer Müllhalde neu eingedeckt hatte, so hatte sich die Ringstation, obwohl durch den Übergang quasi mit ihrem Nachbarn verwachsen, bei ihm trotzdem keine Läuse geholt.

Nachdem die Fabrik geschlossen worden war, hatte mein Vater einige Jobs gehabt, zuletzt als Fliesenleger. Doch seit Monaten herrschte Flaute. Früher hatte er mögliche Stellen in den Zeitungen noch mit einem Kreis umkringelt, als gehörten sie quasi schon ihm. Inzwischen unterstrich er sie nur noch vorsichtig.

This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Senator McCarthy, with his heavily documented tracts and his show of information, Mr. Welch with his accumulations of irresistible evidence, John Robison with his laborious study of documents in a language he but poorly used, the anti-Masons with their endlessly painstaking discussions of Masonic ritual—all these offer a kind of implicit compliment to their opponents. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various Christian anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.

It is possible, then, that the countries of Eastern Europe will pass on to us this model of viral collapse, of a virulence deconstructive of power. In exchange, we might pass on to them our liberal virus, our compulsion for objects and images, media and communication, a virus, in our case, which devastates civil society. One virus for another. At bottom, this could be seen as the last episode in the Cold War, a kind of reciprocal contamination between the two blocs formerly shielded from one another by the existence of the Wall. Behind the apparent victory of the West, it is clear, on the contrary, that the strategic initiative came from the East, not by aggression this time, but by disintegration, by a kind of offensive self-liquidation, catching the whole of the West unawares. In the eternal state of deterrence between the two blocs, a situation from which there was no apparent issue, the advantage could be gained only by the side which, one way or another, ended up disarmed. By force of circumstance, which may have equated with a perception of his own weakness, Gorbachev was able to take this strategic tack of disarmament, the real deconstruction of his own bloc, and thereby of the entire world order. This was, in a way, dying communism's witty parting shot, since the quasi-voluntary destabilization of the Eastern bloc, with the complicity of its peoples, is also a destabilization of the West.

Throughout the Cold War, for example, America had paid the security bill so that European societies could afford generous social welfare states. America also protected Europe from the Soviet Union, whose internal chaos for a decade after its demise did not much affect Europe either. But now, along with the millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, quasi-Asiatic Russia threatens to slowly undermine Europe, just as some of the early modern philosophers feared.

One of the main accusations and “proof” of the need for a boycott is that Zabludowicz has invested in Palantir. Its “main offense”: cooperation with the NSA and other secret services of exclusively democratic nations. Instead of describing Palantir, which is currently also playing a role in supporting Ukraine in its defense against the Russian war of aggression and in Israel in its defense against Hamas terror, as an important instrument in the international fight against terrorism, i.e. as a quasi-protective power of democracy, it is depicted as the epitome of evil in the woke milieu. Supporting Palantir is a welcome reason to cancel an art collection.

One of the main accusations and “proof” of the need for a boycott is that Zabludowicz has invested in Palantir. Its “main offense”: cooperation with the NSA and other secret services of exclusively democratic nations. Instead of describing Palantir, which is currently also playing a role in supporting Ukraine in its defense against the Russian war of aggression and in Israel in its defense against Hamas terror, as an important instrument in the international fight against terrorism, i.e. as a quasi-protective power of democracy, it is depicted as the epitome of evil in the woke milieu. Supporting Palantir is a welcome reason to cancel an art collection. Increasingly long lists of artists who have withdrawn their work from the Zabludowicz Collection are appearing on the Internet. The demands are coming thick and fast. It is not about weakening, it is about “the end,” the destruction of the collection. The anti-Israeli and antisemitic BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), which among other things propagates the boycott of Israeli products all over the world (in sad continuity with the Nazi call “Don’t buy from Jews”), is largely behind the activities. The climax of the hate campaign was a conversation that Anita and Poju Zabludowicz had to have with the board of the Tate Gallery in spring 2022. In a friendly and understanding manner, Anita Zabludowicz was advised to resign from the Tate Council in order to prevent damage to the museum. Anita Zabludowicz politely asked what exactly they were accusing her of, what she had done wrong. The answer was a shrug of the shoulders. They feared the damage that some outraged artists and curators committed to the woke movement might do to the Tate. In short, the Tate, one of the most powerful cultural institutions in the world, bowed to the Zeitgeist. Following instead of leading.