Last week’s opera was the last one from the Metropolitan Opera until December. But WFMT will carry on through the summer with recordings of live performances from all over the world. Yesterday, the opera was “Fidelio,” the only opera ever composed by Beethoven, from the Vienna State Opera. The announcer today said it was based on a true story from the French Revolution; that was the first I’d heard of it, so I won’t swear to it. But it’s about the wife of a man who was politically fighting a fascistic governor, who has kidnapped him and thrown him into the (unfinished) basement of his private prison. It’s been two years, and everyone thinks him dead except his wife, who dresses as a man to get a job at the prison. She doesn’t find him until the evil governor’s boss send him a message that he’s coming to inspect the prison. The governor panics and orders the jailer to dig a grave in the basement, the wife offers to help, and there he is. The line that’s often quoted occurs when the governor is about to kill him and the wife comes between them and says “First kill his wife.” (She is armed and the governor falls apart and leaves, as does the jailer, from kinder motives.) But the line that gets me every time is when they are left alone and he, still in shock, says “Leonora! What have you done for me!” to which she replies, “Nothing, my Florestan. It was nothing.” Then they go up and out, and the governor’s boss and the chorus sing in praise of marriage. And with all that in my head, I’m off to see Virgil. As always, I’ll post a comment when I get back
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Robert Reich – The Five Elements of Fascism
Quote – How do we describe what Trump wants for America? “Authoritarianism” isn’t adequate. It is “fascism.” Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from — and more dangerous than — authoritarianism. To fight those ideas, it’s necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together. Borrowing from cultural theorist Umberto Eco, historians Emilio Gentile and Ian Kershaw, political scientist Roger Griffin, and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, I offer five elements that distinguish fascism from authoritarianism. Click through for all five. Many lists have more than five – but all of the lists nail Trump** and his MAGAts as pure fascists.
HuffPost – Biden Is Having A Very Productive Presidency, And This Win On Drug Prices Shows Why
Quote – If you want to understand why the Biden administration gets so little credit for its accomplishments ― and why, perhaps, it deserves to get a little more ― pay attention to a little-noticed policy announcement from last Friday. The announcement was a list of 43 prescription drugs that are covered by Medicare and whose prices have risen faster than the rate of inflation. The list included relatively well-known drugs like Humira, which treats a variety of inflammatory conditions, plus some more obscure medications like Leukine, which helps cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy stave off infection. Click through for details. And pass it on
Yesterday, I ended up having to go in to my doctor’s office after all to get his signature, and that of one of his staff to certify that she had seen my driver’s license and that I am really me. Unfortunately, she forgot to sign it. I tried one more email with just that page, but I didn’t get home and see it until after the office closed, so I won’t know until today whether I’ll need to go back.
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Letters from an American – May 29, 2023
Quote – Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.” On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”…. “The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said. Click through for more quotes, many highly prescient, and not a lot of take from Heather because the material speaks for itself.
Slate – The Urgent Warning That Got Cut From a Supreme Court Opinion 20 Years Ago
Quote – More than 20 years ago, then–Supreme Court Justice David Souter tried to warn that big money in politics risked turning United States officials into tools of an emerging “plutocracy.” We now know from recently released case files that Souter had to strike the language in his draft Supreme Court opinion in a 2000 campaign finance case, Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, as the price to secure Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s vote. It’s too bad, because Souter’s warning is one that American political leaders, including justices on the Supreme Court itself, needed to hear. That warning was never made and thus never heeded. Today, American plutocracy—from Congress to inside the walls of the court itself—is alive and well. Click through for sad story. And here we are.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Last week was Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and I was planning to use this article, but the fact that is was also income tax deadline weekend caused me to save it a week so that there would be less distraction and people would be able to think about it – about what we can do every day, to survive fascism and to help others survive fascism.
Some of us, of course, are living under fascism more than others. California and Florida may both have Disney theme parks, but living in one is a very different experience from living in the other – and that is particularly true for marginalized groups, but there is some effect on everyone. No one survives fascism alone.
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Defying the Holocaust didn’t just mean uprising and revolt: Remembering Jews’ everyday resistance on Yom HaShoah and year-round
Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of the Treblinka uprising, poses for a picture at his art studio in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2010. AP Photo/Oded Balilty
Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and Theresienstadt, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners,” but he nevertheless believed that they “survived because they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves.”
Carrying someone else took many forms. For fellow Treblinka prisoner Samuel Goldberg, a Polish Jew born in a small town called Bagatelle, it was the moment the women of his work detail stood up to a guard to save Goldberg’s life. For those around Glazar, it was the times he brought them more to eat because his position as a fence builder gave him chances to buy food outside the camp. Still more prisoners benefited from a friend willing to literally hold them up during roll call so no guard would notice they were sick – a near-certain death sentence.
In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life, the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.
On Aug. 2, 1943, the Treblinka II extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was the site of one of the most dramatic acts of armed rebellion throughout the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called in Hebrew. Several hundred prisoners managed to escape, though most were recaptured and killed. Nonetheless, at least 70 people survived to recount what happened there. Without their actions, the camp might have continued to operate, and we would likely know next to nothing of its history.
In years of research on this extermination camp, I’ve come to place as much importance on the long trail of smaller acts as on the famous day itself. Long before the revolt, resistance was commonplace at Treblinka. It had to be. Here and elsewhere, prisoner revolt would have been impossible without those everyday acts of support that laid foundations for more.
A clandestine photograph of the burning death camp Treblinka II, taken by eyewitness Franciszek Ząbecki during the uprising on Aug. 2, 1943. Franciszek Ząbecki/Wikimedia Commons
Defiance and dignity
Between July 1942 and November 1943, Nazi Germany killed as many as 925,000 people at Treblinka II. The vast majority of these victims were Jews, though the regime also murdered several thousand Romani people there.
This terrible place was unlike most other Nazi camps in that its sole purpose was the destruction of life. There were no slave labor industries or construction projects. The Jews responsible for the revolt were among the several hundred men and women kept alive to maintain facilities, sort the belongings of the dead, and dispose of the bodies. As the historian Michael Berenbaum put it, Treblinka was “a factory whose end product was dead Jews.”
In such a hell, life itself is resistance, but those held at Treblinka pushed back against Nazi designs for their destruction in every way possible. Early organized efforts took the form of escapes to warn other Jews. Abraham Krzepicki, for example, escaped Treblinka and went back to the Warsaw Ghetto to tell of what the camp really was – and later died there, fighting in the ghetto’s 1943 uprising.
Deportation to Treblinka from the Jewish ghetto in Siedlce, Poland, in 1942. Wikimedia Commons
These messengers of truth helped expose Nazi lies and give others the chance to try to go into hiding, fight or jump from trains.
Still, most people targeted by the Third Reich could not avoid transport to Treblinka or other camps even if they knew what awaited them there. For some, resistance was the way they carried themselves on the way to a certain death, such as saying prayers like the Shema Yisrael. Condemned for being Jewish, they steadfastly remained so to the end.
Samuel Willenberg, who was the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt when he died in 2016, remembered how a young woman named Ruth Dorfmann asked only if the gas would hurt, and calmly acted with such unshakable dignity that he felt compelled many years later to sculpt her final moments.
‘Choiceless choices’
Court testimonies, oral histories, survivors’ memoirs and other sources show that over months of concerted planning, Treblinka prisoners’ “Organizing Committee” laid the groundwork for the August rebellion by building a network of trusted men and women. Organizers found ways to place them in jobs that gave prisoner planners complete access to the camp.
That process was a winding and perilous road. Three earlier plans failed, and Nazi guards killed many Jews they suspected of resistance. It took at least eight months of concerted effort to finally pull off the revolt.
Though resistance at Treblinka eventually meant armed revolt, it could not have achieved that end without the countless little rebellions that came before. The same was true in Warsaw and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. At its core, resistance is the way a person or a people chooses to stand against the challenges thrown at them. That holds true even if those options are what Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer called “choiceless choices” between one terrible outcome and another.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed into inhumane conditions, residents held each other up by establishing soup kitchens and clandestine schools, organizing the removal of waste to prevent disease, and setting up everyday events to help people feel normal, even for one moment.
A piece of bread, equivalent of a daily food ration in the Warsaw Ghetto, displayed during a commemoration of residents’ suffering in the ghetto. Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via GettyImages
Warsaw Jews worked to archive what they endured and documented the medical effects of the starvation they faced. Both acts demonstrated hope for a future that would remember their suffering and use its lessons to ease the pain of others.
Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for the Holocaust established by the Israeli government, occurs on the 27th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar: the start of major fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Thousands died in the Germans’ brutal retaliation.
A more complete picture
The full name of Yom HaShoah is “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – which, along with its tie to the Warsaw Ghetto, links remembrance with resistance in no uncertain terms. This pairing held great importance for Israel’s identity as a new state and for a people so deeply wounded by years of terror.
Whenever we remember the Holocaust, we should remember the small rebellions, the individual stands, and the little acts of caring that Glazar found so important. Only in seeing that wider picture of everyday struggles can we understand the true variety and scope of resistance.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, if we haven’t already begun thinking about what we can do, not just to survive but to help as many to survive as possible, the time is now. Before the camps open. Because we don’t want it to get to that point.
Yesterday, I was kind of in a contemplative mood. Part of that was brought on by anticipating today’s opera (and I’ll explain that when I talk about the opera in tomorrow’s thread.) Part of it was brought on by the second short take – even just the headline gave crystal clarity to that particular form of selective ignorance, as if a light switched on, and I keep thinking of new examples (such as “inscrutable oriental” – which would today be recognized as racist, but maybe not for the right reasons.) I did receive one alert (from Axios) worth noting – “Federal judge [in Texas] rules to freeze use of abortion pill nationwide.”
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The Warning (Steve Schmidt) – America’s Cancer
Quote – There is no place to compromise or meet in the middle with an extremist movement made up of fascist paramilitaries, Nazis, conspiracy loons and religious zealots. There is no avoiding their demand, which is patently ridiculous and deeply dangerous. They want power, and they want Donald Trump. They want a twice-impeached serial liar and credibly accused rapist to be the president of the United States — again. The book bans, abortion bans, birth control bans, criminalized curriculum, punitive legislation and investigations against dissenters aren’t an end. They are a gateway to abuse and ultimately terror. Click through for article. The issue with cancer is metastasis. If it is not dealt with in time it becomes unstoppable.
Daily Beast – Prince William ‘Baffled’ by Prince Harry’s ‘Difficult’ Coronation Behavior
Quote: Harry and wife Meghan Markle have said that they have been invited to the coronation but have not yet said if they will come. In January, Harry told interviewer Tom Bradby that he needed to have a face to face meeting with his family of origin before attending, and told another interviewer, Bryony Gordon, that he wanted “an apology for my wife,” although without specifically linking it to their attendance at the coronation. Royal sources have insisted that the family will make no such gestures towards Harry and Meghan, firmly believing they have nothing to apologize for. Click through if you like. This is very small in the overall scheme of things, but sometimes very small things can be a source of large insignt. William is baffled because he is privileged. The person who has privilege is always baffled by the person without it (or on this case, with less of it.) Men claim it’s impossible to understand women. I have heard white people assert that black people are incomprehensible. And on and on it goes. In fact, no one is incomprehensible. But privilege certainly gets in the way of comprehension.
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