In the wake of such things as the grifter’s even more erratic than usual behavior and Mitch McConnell’s carefully managed return to the Senate, my social media produced another deluge of demands for putting upper age limits on public office. I just flew home through the San Francisco Airport, noticed they’d named the international terminal after Dianne Feinstein, and couldn’t help thinking how embarrassing and disastrous her last years were.
It is certainly true that some people who should have retired from their jobs much earlier keep hanging on. But I’m still opposed to age limits on most jobs, for one very basic reason: Human beings don’t age uniformly.
Nancy Pelosi was the most effective Speaker of the House the US has seen in decades. She pulled back from leadership posts and is now retiring from Congress, but she was very effective throughout her years in office. I don’t always agree with her, but I cannot deny her ability.
Nancy Pelosi is 86, two years older than Mitch McConnell.
The NY Times had a piece this week about the composer Thea Musgrave, whose opera Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel, will premiere next year. The article starts with her working with a bassoonist on another piece and commenting that she is still learning.
Musgrave is 98.
I’ve just been at a writers retreat where the members ranged in age from 50s to 80s, with most of us in our 70s. All of us are still writing, all of us still smart. With the exception of the youngest of us, all have a few health issues that we pay close attention to, but none of them keep us from writing.
Of course, again with the exception of our youngest member, none of us have day jobs anymore. None of us want day jobs, but all of us want to write and publish our work.
In general, we are now producing the best work of our lives, because we are smart and have a lot of experience and both understand how to write and why we want to do it. What we do now is valuable whether it ever wins a prize or makes the best seller list.
I know people in their 50s who are old and stuck in their ways, people in their 60s with enough health issues to prevent them from doing a full time job. I know people in their 80s and 90s whose judgment is impeccable and who have fresh ideas. We don’t all age at the same pace.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the biggest problem in politics isn’t that we have lot of old people in Congress; it’s that we have a lot of bad people there. Age limits won’t solve that problem.
As the 2026 midterm elections enter the final stretch, it’s important to know your rights in case your vote is challenged.
The best way to ensure that your vote is counted is to advocate for yourself. I’m a an attorney and lecturer for the University of Southern California’s undergraduate civil rights advocacy initiative, Agents of Change. Here are several straightforward ways to ensure your vote is counted and two practical remedies for you to consider if your vote remains challenged.
A major part of ensuring that you are able to vote is doing the necessary preparation before you even get to the polling place. Read on to find out how and where to register, where and when you can cast your ballot, and what numbers to call for any information you can’t find online.
Are you registered to vote? Check it out
Before you vote, you need to ensure that you’re registered to vote. You can verify your registration status using this tool. If you can’t use an online tool, then call your local election office or a voter help line like the ones listed in the hotline section below.
If you find you’re not registered, you can use this tool from the National Conference of State Legislatures to find your state’s online registration application. If you need to do this in person, then call your local election office for instructions.
At this point, you may have missed your state’s deadline for voter registration. But it may not be too late to register.
Many states allow same-day registration at the polling site. You can find your state’s same-day voter laws detailed here. Ask the poll worker, at the correct polling location, for a same-day registration form; complete the form and then ask for a “conditional ballot.” A conditional ballot allows election officials to count your vote after verifying your voter eligibility. If you can’t research online, you can call your local election office to find out if you can register on Election Day.
Marchellos Scott, right, helps Morehouse College students fill out a voter registration form at a college registration booth on Aug. 19, 2024, in Atlanta. Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
Gather documents to verify your identity
If you live in a state that requires identity verification to vote in person, gather the required documents – which may range from a driver’s license to bank statements with identifying information – before traveling to the correct polling place. You can find your county election office’s contact information here. This webpage includes a table listing each state’s acceptable ID documents and possible exceptions for some people. You may also call your local election office to find out what’s required.
Absentee voters: Locate your state’s identity verification rules here.
Find the correct polling location
You can ensure that you’re headed to the right polling place with this tool. Or call your county election office to find your polling place and its hours of operation; you can look up your county’s election office contact information here.
Once you know your polling place and its hours, you can go there and check in. In most cases, you’ll be handed a ballot, shown where to vote and asked to put your ballot in a machine or a box, and then you can go merrily along your way.
But the moment of check-in is where things might go wrong.
Problems at your polling place
Here are potential vote challenges and ways to overcome them.
Possibility No. 1: Out-of-order polling machines.
If you’re asked to leave because of malfunctioning machines, don’t. Instead, ask for a paper ballot.
Possibility No. 2: You’re in line and officials announce the polls have closed.
If you’re in line at the polling location before it closes, don’t let them turn you away at closing time if you haven’t voted. You have the legal right to vote under those circumstances, so stay in line and wait to cast your ballot.
Possibility No. 3: You’re not on the registered voters list.
If you’re told you can’t vote because your name is not on the voter roster, ask the poll site worker to check again and to check what’s called the list of supplemental voters. If they still can’t find your name, ask the poll worker to verify that you’re at the right location.
Possibility No. 4: Someone claims you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
If your voting eligibility remains challenged after ensuring you’re at the right polling location, ask to cast a provisional ballot, which is available in every state except Idaho and Minnesota. You can find details about your particular state’s provisional ballot rules here.
If you are not given a provisional ballot, call an election hotline for help. Here are four hotlines, run by members of the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition, that can help you:
If someone tries to scare you into voting or not voting for a candidate, stand your ground and demand a ballot from the poll site, call one of the hotlines above to report the intimidation, and file a claim with the FBI later by phone at 800-CALL-FBI – 800-225-5324 – or online at tips.fbi.gov.
File a lawsuit
If you are still blocked from voting, consider legal action – but get advice on your exact situation from one of the hotlines, which have free lawyers on hand. It’s a good idea to write down the names of people who prevented you from voting and to ask people who witnessed the incident for their contact information.
This is a quick note because my week is just a tad busier than usual. First, there’s always catching up on paperwork to do after Yom Kippur, because people always send me things, assuming it’s a normal day. I’ve made a little list of some of the things that must be done by Wednesday afternoon. It’s 14 tasks long and some of them are quite hefty tasks.
The question is, why Wednesday?
I’ve talked about the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion at great length, but I didn’t mention the other one. I’m giving my testimony as part of a group testimony on Wednesday afternoon. It’s into disability. I tick all the “Who has been left out in our current system” box.
I’m not doing a written submission for this. My right eye is problematic and my vision is even more impaired than usual, so it would be a lot harder than the earlier submissions. But the RC into disabilities is allowing for such things and a group of us is being brought together online to work through the framework and explain the things the Commission needs to know about our lives.
I’ve never done things for two Royal Commissions within six months before. I had a whole submission published and cited in the report for one, many years ago. They’re not an ordinary part of our lives, but they’re one of the places and times when we can interface with government on issues that are beyond the ordinary. They are terrifyingly expensive, but they’re also exceptionally valuable. Even when the government in power pretends to accept the outcomes of a Commission and never does anything, the process shifts Australia and makes us choose our paths more carefully. Initially, the RC into Antisemitism caused a tsunami of hate, but as people saw that tsunami and thought it through, I think the hate is diminishing a little. I won’t know, however, until the studies of it are in.
If I remember and if it’s not classified, next week I’ll let you know what happened on Wednesday. The government methods of other countries always entertain me, so maybe they will also entertain some of you.
If any of you would like a 101 on our parliamentary system and an explanation of how we vote, I’m happy to explain. We are so different from the US and Canada! And all this stuff used to be my meat and drink. Being Jewish excludes me from those circles right now, but I had 20 years of working to help people within the system and I loved it.
The New York Timeshas an interview with Morgan Freeman, who is 89 – he in fact says “pushing 90” – and still working. At the moment he’s got a regular role on a streaming series.
I am a sucker for all reports about people who are older than I am and still pursuing their art or their career or doing something else that we’re all told is “unusual” for old people. I want to be reminded that getting old doesn’t mean you have to stop doing stuff and just wait around to die.
But there’s a hell of a lot of ageism out there right now and it’s really starting to get on my nerves. The other day I saw a social media post excoriating James Carville’s ideas about what Democrats should do and then saying something that I read as “oh, well, he’s 81 and gonna die soon anyway.”
I got the impression that the person who wrote just thought 81 was horribly old, not that they knew anything about Carville’s health.
Now I despise Carville. His ideas about what Democrats should do are awful; he’s the original “compromise with the Republicans no matter how extreme they get” person. I actually go to the trouble of cancelling political solicitations that mention his name, instead of just ignoring them. The Democrats made a major mistake by listening to him in the first place.
But he’s been wrong for at least 30 years, and probably longer. He thinks politics is a fucking game. After all, he’s married to a Republican consultant. Obviously he doesn’t think any of this is really vital – he just wants to win a game.
The problem isn’t that he’s old. It’s that he’s wrong. He’s always been wrong.
I am in a paperwork week and nearly wrote you an analysis of the Australian Census. Not the use of the census material, but how the form is structured. In vast detail and terrifying depth. By this, you know I am in the middle of a great deal of paperwork. When the end of the paperwork is in sight, then I’ll feel less tendency to analyse data and explain archival methods. I say this very firmly, because I was once that person and haven’t been for a while and while I totally enjoyed that work, everyone around me missed the Middle Ages and bad jokes and passing comments about historical foodstuffs.
Our census is, technically, tomorrow week. This is our first mostly-online one and a vast number of people are not waiting for census night. We’ve been told we don’t have to wait so we race and fill everything in and then walk around with an air of conscious virtue. I sometimes suspect that Australians like filling in forms and being counted. We certainly like our compulsory vote, which is another way of filling in forms and being counted. Politics is so different in countries where voting is optional.
We won’t have decent answers to census questions until June next year. Questions people are asking in my vicinity include how many people will write their religion down as “Jedi” and their second language as “Klingon.” Other folks want to know what answers will be given to the question of gender, which is not a simply binary this time around. We will find out how people describe themselves in gender terms and have a better understanding of how much of Australia sees themselves.
One of the most concerning questions the census folk are asking is how many Jews will feel safe enough this year to write our religion down. The Jewish community was given a special briefing on Sunday evening where we could ask some very senior bods how the data is handled. This is how I know it’s a burning question.
In ten months’ time (if I remember) I will share some answers. Until then, I myself will live in unsatiated curiosity. Australia has changed significantly since the last census. Watch this space?
I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.
My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.
There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”
An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?
Trying to kill algae with chemicals is a common response when community ponds or other water features go green. But as a scientist who studies freshwater ecology, I can tell you there are better solutions that cost far less, last longer and carry less risk of harm to pets and wildlife.
Rather than battling against nature, these alternatives work with nature for long-term solutions.
The pool is big, more than a third of a mile long and around 165 feet wide. But it’s shallow, meaning it warms up quickly in the sun. When it was repainted “American flag blue” during the renovations in spring 2026, the new color darkened the pool, and darker colors absorb more heat.
On top of those conditions, the pool was refilled with water from the nutrient-rich tidal basin of the Potomac River. The combination of warm water and nutrients created prime conditions for algae to bloom, turning the water pea soup green.
In addition to hydrogen peroxide and vacuums, the government ordered nanobubble ozone technology to break up the algae. The nanobubbler contract was for $1.7 million. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
As the national conversation over the Reflecting Pool shifts to political finger-pointing, an important environmental question deserves careful scrutiny: What is the best approach to maintain water quality in a case like this, whether for a national monument or a community water feature or pond?
Trying to chemically or mechanically remove algae can damage the structure of a water feature and may harm species in the water that could actually help solve the problem.
Importantly, chemical and mechanical solutions are only temporary fixes. When the Reflecting Pool is drained and filled again, there’s a good chance that algae will bloom again.
Natural algae control
Limnologists – scientists like me who study inland water bodies – have spent many decades learning why lakes and ponds turn green and how to clear them up.
Often, nutrient-rich waters fueled by fertilizer runoff from farm fields or sewage from cities are the sources that stimulate algal growth.
However, natural ponds also host grazing zooplankton, which eat algae. For example, a type of zooplankton called Daphnia, known as water fleas because of the way these tiny crustaceans swim, can control algae by consuming it before it becomes a pea soup nuisance. Thus, a thriving Daphnia population can help maintain good water quality in a lake, pond or community water feature, even when nutrient levels spike.
Daphnia are a genus of hundreds of species of tiny, see-through crustaceans that happen to be voracious algae eaters. A female Daphnia magna’s eggs are visible in this magnified image. Hajime Watanabe, PLoS Genetics, March 2011, CC BY
In addition to being highly effective grazers, Daphnia have another superpower – they can evolve rapidly. Urban waterbodies are often harsh environments with a variety of challenges, including high temperatures, low levels of dissolved oxygen, and pollutants. Daphniacan adapt to tough conditions, making these creatures an ideal source of algae control in many urban ponds.
Rooted aquatic plants are also useful for algae control in ponds because they absorb nutrients. Thus, shallow ponds with thick beds of aquatic plants can often resist algal blooms when nutrient levels rise.
Why draining might not be the best solution
One downside to draining and refilling a pond or urban water feature to try to clean it is that doing so resets the aquatic ecosystem, erasing the signature of any past evolution that has taken place.
Imagine Daphnia in a shallow pond that experiences periodic heat waves throughout the summer. Through repeated exposure to high temperatures, natural selection favors heat-resistant genotypes that can thrive in an urban pond.
If a Daphnia population that evolved to tolerate warm temperatures, low oxygen levels or cyanotoxins is removed, the new population likely won’t be ready to handle those local challenges. This evolutionarily naive population will perform poorly in its new environment, reducing its effectiveness at controlling algal blooms.
As a result, traditional mechanical and chemical approaches may actually work against the goal of minimizing algae in ponds and other water features.
Nature-based solutions
The use of Daphnia to control algal blooms is just one example of solving environmental challenges with nature-based solutions.
From national landmarks to city parks and backyard ponds, projects of all sizes can take advantage of nature-based solutions. While each specific project is unique, some general principles apply.
Urban climates are changing rapidly, so it helps to use species and genotypes that will thrive under future conditions, including rising temperatures.
Not every solution has to be engineered
The hubbub over the Reflecting Pool holds a mirror up to assumptions about how to solve pressing environmental challenges. The idea of just engineering one’s way out of any environmental crisis has limits.
Understanding ecology and nature’s mechanisms of ecosystem resilience can achieve sustainable solutions that benefit both nature and people.
I am late! I am late and want to talk about Jewish matters.
The Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has just released the total number of submissions and it’s a lot higher than anyone expected. I predicted 10,000 submissions and everyone around me said that 5,000 would be a lot and would reflect what was happening in our country a lot more. Even 10,000 was considered an overprediction because of the way most people saw antisemitism in Australia, in other words. So what does 20,000 mean? That things matter. That people have things to say.
What the submissions give us is something amazing, especially given that this is a census year and that we can fit those submissions into a snapshot of Australia in 2026 (the last census was in 2021, and you can see what it shows about jewish Australia here: The-Jewish-Population-of-Australia-Report_2021-Census-1.pdf . There are issues with the way data was collected and how unsafe the collection made Jews, and that Judaism was not listed as a religious or cultural option ie people had to write it in manually, but it still gives some indication of who we are in Jewish Australia. We have a surprising number of old people, for instance, and an unsurprisingly high average level of education.
Put these 20,000 submissions into analysis the way that Mass Obersvation Project has done for the UK, and it becomes an enormous data base for research into one aspect of Australian life: how people see Jewish Australia and how Jewish Australia sees itself. What we are. Who we are. How we deal with hate. This will lead to insights into how Australia sees other cultural and religious groups in the country. It has the capacity to change Australia’s self-knowledge.
What’s really interesting is how silent the far left is about the number of submissions. We don’t yet know if those submissions reflect their views as leading or typical. I strongly suspect that their views are bigoted and hateful, but I’m willing to wait and see how the data presents itself. And I want to know what Australia does with all this information about how we think and feel.
Given that the trigger was the Bondi murders and there is a very strong likelihood that those murders were caused by links to certain terrorist groups, we can’t exclude the outside world. But we can take a close look at ourselves and find out who we are and what we want to be.
Australia is in a strange place politically. Everything’s changing. I suspect those 20,000 submissions are part of that change. Who we are and how safe we are and the paths we take are all up for grabs in this very interesting year.
I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.
Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.
What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”
But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.
Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.
A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.
Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena watch a parade held in Hitler’s honor in 1938. Behind them, from left: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. Bettmann/Getty Images
Before becoming Hitler’s foreign minister, he was a wine salesman whose years in Canada became his qualification for understanding America. He attached himself to Hitler and was rewarded with a top seat in his government, where Ribbentrop’s signature contribution was overruling the diplomats who warned that Americans would fight if pushed too far by the Axis.
The Nazi view prevailed: Americans were too racially mixed, too soft, too consumed by money to be dangerous. When Germany declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, it did so partly on that disdain for what Hitler called a “mongrel nation.” Ribbentrop was among the most consequentially wrong foreign ministers in modern history – he’d also misjudged Britain’s willingness to join the war over the invasion of Poland – still, he kept his job.
Attempting to match Hitler’s conquests and assert dominance over the Mediterranean, Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 with shorthanded divisions, in mountain terrain and at the start of winter, because he believed Italian spirit would overwhelm Greek resistance in two weeks. His generals had doubts, but many did not express them. The Greeks counterattacked, but Mussolini blamed his generals’ “insufficient will,” the only kind of failure his theory allowed. Germany had to intervene.
What the leader said happened
Connected to the fascist superiority complex is a contempt for feedback, creating a closed information system that can’t register failure, tolerate disagreement or revise a plan. Strategy requires accurate reporting, even when the news is bad, and the willingness to be wrong. Fascist regimes punish the first and refuse the second.
German high command was still reporting a controlled advance in November 1942 when its 6th Army, some 330,000 soldiers, was being encircled at Stalingrad. Hitler had declared the city practically taken; the press never reported the Soviet counteroffensive that surrounded it. When the remnants finally surrendered on Feb. 2, 1943, it was a turning point in the war – Germany’s first catastrophic defeat on the Eastern Front, from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.
Mussolini bragged about his mighty army of 8 million soldiers while 3.5 million – the real number – were being routed on three fronts in as many years.
In that environment, officers had every incentive to lie up the chain of command when reality on the ground did not match what leaders wanted to hear. For example, after the Battle of Midway, a catastrophic defeat for Japan in June 1942, naval headquarters filed reports that bore little resemblance to what happened. Later that year, the Imperial Navy told Tokyo they had sunk twelve American ships near today’s Taiwan when they had merely damaged two.
Two years of retreat later, the kamikaze program – which sent some 3,900 pilots to their deaths in suicidal crashes against Allied ships – was the logical conclusion: Let pilots prove their loyalty by dying.
I’ve seen some news lately about people who are deciding to leave the United States. Apparently there is a long waiting list of people living in Europe who want to renounce their U.S. citizenship.
There are always articles on how to move to other countries, assuming you have enough money, focusing on which countries will welcome you and what the bureaucracy is, but while these used to be aimed at people looking to retire someplace where their money goes farther, it now seems more politically based.
After the Supreme Court’s horrible ruling this week gutting the Voting Rights Act, I saw some discussion by Black people on social media suggesting it was time for African Americans to go elsewhere. I can sympathize with that, though I doubt it’s a practical option for most.
As for me, though, I’m not going anywhere.
For one thing, the horrible things being done by the grifter and his minions to the United States are, unfortunately, not confined to the United States. I doubt there’s much of any place in the world you can be truly safe from the ravages of these people.
Also, I don’t want to live somewhere where I don’t have the right to participate in public life — to vote, to advocate, to march in the streets – and ties to other people as neighbors and friends. I’d want to be able to speak the language well enough to fit in and complain to local officials.
I don’t have any right to citizenship in another country except what they might allow through immigration, and I doubt I have enough years left to get that done, get really comfortable in the language, and actually become a full citizen before I’m too old for it to matter.
As I have written before, I am not a person with a deep connection to place. Whenever I visit somewhere else, I always think about what it would be like to live there. I’ve visited some lovely places.
Which is to say, I could probably live somewhere else. It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable course of action at this point in my life. And I don’t think running away would solve anything.
Recently it has been pointed out that anyone with a Canadian great-great grandparent can acquire Canadian citizenship. I don’t fall into that category, but I know others who do. And I know of people whose parents and grandparents came here from other countries who have recently acquired passports for those places.
If I did have the right to citizenship in another country, I would go after it, not for escaping the current regime but for the value of having ties to more than one place. Continue reading “Leaving and Staying”…
