counter revolution

A piece in the NY Times — (8/28/18, "‘The Whole World Is Watching’: The 1968 Democratic Convention, 50 Years Later") — consisting of recollections by participants in the protests at the '68 Democratic National Convention, begins with this:

MARILYN KATZ, then 21, S.D.S. security chief: I was pretty exuberant. We were having a good time. We had Allen Ginsberg and all these adults who were our idols coming to say how wonderful we were. It wasn’t just in Chicago — it was Paris, Mexico City, Prague. We were part of a worldwide youth movement, and we really thought we were the future.

It concludes with this less enthusiastic assessment by Todd Gitlin, (former S.D.S. president, then 25):

I think once you step back, what really happened here was not the beginning of the revolution but the beginning of the counterrevolution.

. . .

Back then, I was in the demographic fully swept up into the exhilaration Katz expresses. We were irresistible and contagious — we were viral avant la lettre: Chicago, Berkeley Columbia, Paris, Mexico City, Prague and beyond.

Or as Kesey put it on his Magic Bus: "Further!"

Gitlin was noting and/or foretelling a different future, one involving the Southern strategy, Nixon, racism, xenophobia, escalation in Vietnam. And to continue beyond that time frame to today, Orban, Erdogan, Putin, and not least of all, Trump.

The question I'd ask Gitlin if I were talking to him now is: given your accurate reading of the future, how have you managed to maintain your activism,  to the high degree which you have done?

Uighurs

Palestinians in Israel's Occupied Territories, and, to a lesser degree, within Israel proper, have it rough, for sure, with few prospects of improvement. The cameras are on them. Still, it's worth contemplating the even more abysmal fate of China's Muslim population, the Uighurs, where few cameras penetrate.

As per a recent report in the Atlantic:

"One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates—most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority—have told reporters that over the course of an indoctrination process lasting several months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day. There are media reports of inmates being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which are forbidden to Muslims, as well as reports of torture and death."

Chinese Muslims are treated to the old fashioned clenched fist approach of communism, still available when modernization isn't enough. As per a broadcast in China, explaining the mass detention of the Uighurs: "The religious extremist ideology [aka Islam] is a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the people."

Such religiosity is treated as a form of mental illness, to which detention by the thousands will provide the cure.

How very Soviet, how echt-Stalin.

There are many solid reasons why Americans, and others, are preoccupied with the fate of Palestinians, and become obsessed, even vicious, about conflicting approaches to remediation. But it would be nice if we could suspend such presumably well-intentioned intramural hostilities and spare a thought for the fate of the Uighurs.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/china-pathologizing-uighur-muslims-mental-illness/568525/

Turn this plane around!

I love this: federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan, ordered a plane to turn around and bring back "several Central American women requesting asylum [when] he learned that a woman and her daughter had been ushered from a Texas shelter, driven to an airport and put on a plane to El Salvador." **

The judge, "criticized the government for deporting the pair just as they were seeking justice in court."

Maybe I love this most of all: "In ordering the government to undo the deportation, he threatened to hold government officials, from Attorney General Jeff Sessions on down, in contempt, said a lawyer for the plaintiffs."

At least some of the judiciary is holding firm against the wholesale assault on democratic institutions by Trump.

The plane did not turn around in mid-air, which seemed to be the import of the judge's order, and would have been cinematically ideal. Instead, it landed in El Salvador, but took off again immediately, whisking the "deportees" back to the United States.

**Vivian Yee "Judge Threatens Sessions With Contempt Over Deported Asylum Seekers" (NY Times, 8/9/18)

Dear Nation Readers

Dear Nation Readers

Dear Nation Readers, here I go again: I too like reading Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman (when he posts), Calvin Trillin, etc. — I like it when The Nation is at its best, leftish but non doctrinaire —but the magazine owes readers an accounting.

Or does anybody still care enough about The Nation to notice and demand it? Perhaps not.

In any case, publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her husband, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, have repeatedly used the magazine as a platform for their views that any difficulty between the United States and Russia is all the responsibility of the United States.

Putin harbors no grand anti-democratic, anti-Western designs.

There is no Russian  cyber-strategy aimed at the West.

Russia did nothing to encourage Brexit.

Nothing to encourage anti-democratic regimes in Hungary and Poland.

Nothing to help Trump win in 2016.

One could go on.

Perhaps this is a throwback to the Cold War, when some lefties attributed the whole contretemps to the West, the United States in particular.

Perhaps it is a testament to the fact that, whether you are left or right — true I am addressing the left —  learning is hard, when historical circumstances shift strangely and radically.

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen evince no propensity for learning. They are still defending and foolishly upgrading  an ideology that may have made some sense once upon a time, or not.

The Nation owes readers an accounting.

On the other hand, given lack of demand for it, maybe nobody  cares.