Happy Holidays! December 25th, 2016

Facts and Politics

Masha Gessen suggests that facts are not the field on which politics is played, and starting from them is a mistake:

"Simple explanations, especially ones that assign blame to conspiracies and foreigners, threaten clear thinking. So does arguing about facts. Democrats, pundits and reporters put forth the evidence that Russia was behind the hack; Mr. Trump and his allies, even after using the hacked emails to smear Mrs. Clinton, repeat that it is “impossible to know.” The combination creates an extraordinary amount of noise at the expense of understanding. Since the news broke, we have learned a fair amount about the facts on which the intelligence agency may have based its conclusion, while the C.I.A. findings themselves remain classified. This newspaper published a detailed story that synthesized new and previously known information. Readers learned that the bulk of the Democratic National Committee’s emails had been obtained by means of fairly low-tech phishing. Reuters published a story pointing out that the known evidence falls short of proving that Russian hackers intended to benefit Mr. Trump rather than simply cause havoc — and that the office of the director of national intelligence has not endorsed the C.I.A. interpretation. But this report got lost in a barrage of stories striving to prove that the C.I.A. is right and Mr. Trump is wrong. The overwhelming amount of detail some of these stories supplied, and the sheer volume of reports on the Russian election-hack scandal over the past week have created the illusion of rich public discussion. But this discussion has focused on something that should not be a matter of argument at all: The question of whether Mr. Trump is right to disregard C.I.A. conclusions, which are based on information unavailable to the journalists. Editorial and opinion writers have repeatedly condemned Mr. Trump’s denial and called for a full investigation into the hacking. This should go without saying. But when journalists are busy proving the obvious, they ignore the important questions. Arguing about facts is, in fact, the ultimate distraction. If there is one trait that Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia share over all others, it is their understanding of the power of separating facts from truth. By denying known and provable facts — as when Mr. Trump denies making statements he has made — or by rejecting facts that are not publicly known, as with the C.I.A.’s information on Russian hacking, Mr. Trump exercises his ever-growing power over the public sphere. The resulting frenzy of trying to prove either the obvious known facts or the classified and therefore unknowable facts — two fruitless pursuits — creates so much static that we forget what we are really talking about. Let us imagine the conversation we would be having if we were not preoccupied with Mr. Trump’s denial of the C.I.A.’s conclusions. We would now be discussing the appropriate response to the hacking. We would be talking about consequences for the American electoral process in general and for the results of this election in particular. We would be asking why it matters if Russia’s hacking efforts were intended to benefit Mr. Trump. But in the heat of arguing about facts, journalists and pundits have acted as though the answers to these questions are obvious. They are not."

Freedom Is Fragile

""Origins" centers on the rise of totalitarianism, especially its Nazi variant, out of the ashes of World War I and the Great Depression. As Arendt made clear, her interest is in understanding the origins of totalitarianism, not explaining its "causes." The elements that together made its rise possible - anti-Semitism, imperialism, racism, the post-World War I crises of multinational empires, the displacement of peoples by war and by technological change - were important. But their "crystallization" into the horrific outcome that was totalitarianism was neither predictable nor inevitable. While her account of these "elements" is bracing, even more disturbing is the way she links them to the monstrous outcome to which they gave rise. "Origins" charts the "grotesque disparity between cause and effect," which made the horrors of the 1940s so surprising, and shocking, to so many. One reason the book resonates so strongly today is its fixation on the way many "bads" long taken for granted can come together to generate a maelstrom of evil and horror foreseen by no one, perhaps not even the protagonists themselves. The lesson: Freedom is fragile, and when demagogues speak, and others start following them, it is wise to pay attention."

No Reservations

Junko Terao spends a week in North Korea:

"It’s a late June morning in Juche 105 (North Korean for 2016) and Pyongyang welcomes us with a clear blue sky. I shuffle into the minivan along with my two tour guides, the driver, and the photographer, who reinvents himself as a paparazzo, documenting every second of my trip from beginning to end. The road from the airport to the city is a bit rough and the vehicle bounces the entire way over cracks and craters. Not knowing exactly where to push the conversation, I try to feel out the situation: “The roads in Rome are pretty bad, too. We actually just voted for our new mayor, and potholes were a key theme during the campaign.” As would happen many more times on the trip, as I walk blindly right into sensitive issues or downright unwelcome topics, my guides juggle a response and then let it drop. If I ask them something explicitly, however, they are ready to answer, rarely falling into difficulty. Choe is a nice, 41-year-old woman who speaks Spanish, hence her occasional assignment to Italian visitors. Like Kim, she graduated from the University of Foreign Studies. She also lived for four years in Cuba when she was in high school in the early 1990s. After a visit to North Korea, Fidel Castro proposed a “cultural exchange” program to Kim Il-sung, and a group of Pyongyang students was subsequently sent to Cuba. Meeting a North Korean with some foreign travel experience is a rare occurrence, I think, listening to her story. “Did you enjoy it? The sea, Havana — how was it?” I asked curiously. “To be honest,” she replies, “I never left the Isla de la Juventud. I only saw Havana from the bus on the day we left. I don’t really remember.” Contact with locals was forbidden in Cuba, she explains, except with students and instructors (“It was a cook at school that told us about President Kim Il-sung’s passing in July 1994. He’d heard it over the radio. We didn’t believe him, at first. We thought he was joking”)... Kim — sporting a haircut similar to Marshal Kim Jong-un’s, like many young men in the capital — has only been working for KITC, the government’s tourist agency, for three months. Before that, he worked as a singer. He comes from a high-ranking family. His mother is a doctor and his father a university professor, both still working (women, they tell me, retire at 55 and men at 60). They live in downtown Pyongyang. At 28, Kim still lives with his parents. He is single and so has no claim to a personal residence. “We used to marry at an earlier age, women at 24 and men at 28,” Choe shares. “But the average has risen, like in the rest of the world. I think it’s a trend. We’re not allowed to leave this place, but trends still spread here anyway — weird, huh?”"