This is by Corita Kent, 1967. I grew up with a framed print over the sofa in my family’s living room. The War, by which anybody and everybody meant The Vietnam War, was ever a constant. It was there, a fact of life, in the background perhaps half forgotten, brought to the fore when the family car passed a troop convoy on the highway. The War was the peace sign on my jacket, the peace sign graffiti on overpasses, the symbol carved into the desks at school, on silver pendants, earrings. The War was always there.

It occurred to me this morning that the Forever Wars of the US in the 21st Century are similarly always there, background or not. Missing, however, are the peace signs.

During the next few days he realised how isolated he was. It was no one’s fault, he thought. He had simply got what he had asked for.

His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past.

—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, (London: Vintage, 2002), 160.

France 24:

France has ordered Russian journalist Xenia Fedorova to leave the country, the interior ministry said on Wednesday, amid accusations that she has spread Kremlin propaganda through French television and radio ahead of next year’s presidential election.

France has ordered controversial Russian journalist Xenia Fedorova to leave the country, the interior ministry said Wednesday, after accusations that she was churning out Kremlin propaganda on French television and radio.

Disinformation experts have raised the alarm about the influence of the former journalist for Russia’s state-run channel RT, as France heads for a presidential election next year.

French newspaper Liberation cited the expulsion order as accusing her of acting “as a conduit for disinformation campaigns orchestrated by the Russian authorities” with the aim of “destabilising public order” in France.

…

She regularly appears on the CNews television channel, Europe 1 radio and writes a column for Le Journal du Dimanche, spreading Kremlin talking points about Ukraine and the West.

There is no clarification here as to what it means, exactly, to “destabilise public order”, or how “spreading talking points” is in any way illegal.

I have never read before that I may expect a response within 60 business days. This is from a unit of the United States Government which “is committed to responding to your message in a timely manner”.

In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argues that for all the incontestable novelty of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, its essential message lies in what it tells us about modernity and its peculiar mindset, rationality and institutions, thus about something general, to be found in other places and nations, within other political movements and therefore facilitating that something like it will happen again.

—Arne Johan Vetlesen, “Reassessing Modernity and the Holocaust in the light of genocide in Bosnia”,  in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust, eds. Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński, (London: Routledge, 2022), 111.

Wolfgang Streeck, Jacobin:

Noch grundsätzlicher ließe sich fragen, was ein Staat seinen Bürgern, die auf seinen Befehl hin ihr Leben lassen sollen, an Bemühungen schuldet, den Krieg, dem sie zum Opfer fallen könnten, gar nicht erst stattfinden zu lassen. Hier könnten gegenseitige Pflichten von Staaten aus dem Völkerrecht ins Spiel kommen, die man auch, zumal in Demokratien, als Pflichten gegenüber ihren Bürgern lesen könnte. Kann ein Staat einen moralischen Anspruch darauf erheben, dass von ihm ausgewählte Bürger auf seinen Befehl hin bereit sind zu sterben oder sich lebenslang verstümmeln zu lassen, wenn er nicht vorher alles getan hat, um ihnen dies zu ersparen? Zu denken wäre hier beispielsweise an Artikel 33 (1) der Charta der Vereinten Nationen:

Ω Ω Ω

In Deutschland könnte für die Frage der Legitimität einer Wehrpflicht des Weiteren auch der Umstand ins Gewicht fallen, dass es wohl kaum ein anderes Land gibt, in dem so wenig an strategischer Diskussion über nationale Interessen und nationale Sicherheit stattfindet wie hier. Seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs ist das deutsche Militär und sind die deutschen »Verteidigungspolitiker« nicht deutsch, sondern atlantisch orientiert, mit gelegentlichen gaullistischen Ausbruchsversuchen, die aber immer frühzeitig beendet wurden.

This morning I felt like I was reading something in a sort of a fantasyland. The idea that this German state, busily producing weapons for the Israelis to use in massacring Palestinian civilians, is going to consider its duty to German citizens because of some obligation under international law, because of the Charter of the United Nations? It just reads as unreal, a voice from a previous era.

Streeck rings true, of course. I look for, and fail to find, public debate of German national interests, just as I used to try to engage German coworkers in any sort of discussion. Topics such as Israel and Ukraine are quite clearly beyond question. I’ve been impressed several times when I simply tried to raise the idea of talking about the background to the Russian invasion, or the causes for the Palestinian break-out from Gaza, and gotten the very explicit response that these points were not up for discussion.

Peter Hitchens, The Spectator:

the era’s greatest reporter of US government secrets, from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib prison disgrace, Seymour Hersh, has lengthily and credibly explained how the US did indeed plant and detonate the enormous bombs needed. But it’s no use. It’s too tedious and ordinary.

I, for one, am certainly exercising increased caution today, as the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation. Foreseen escalation I’m o.k. with, but it’s this potential for unforeseen escalation which concerns me. 😬