The agony of Afghanistan, part two: the myth of control

Source: Facebook memes, 2015  

(Part one, last week.)

Of all the explanations and excuses I've heard in the last few hours concerning the Kabul airport tragedy, two comments ring out to me with special clarity.

Veteran Democratic Party strategist James Carville (video): "... There's no elegant way to lose a war. We lost this war fifteen years ago; all Joe Biden was doing was telling us what time it is. ... When you lose a war you don't look good."

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (Twitter): "It took me a few years in Washington to understand how much of this town runs on war. Some of this is driven by raw profit motive, but much of it is simply due to the laudable but fatally faulty belief that there is no problem in the world that American intervention can’t solve."

There is a particular form of pseudo-patriotic American self-deception that seems to dominate commentary about the situation, including today's terrorist bombings near the airport.

To sum up: We must be in control.

And here's today's Republican corollary: if we, the USA, are not in control, it's the president's fault!

Politicians and pundits continue to trumpet the myth of American dominance, despite evidence that very little has gone the USA's way militarily on the international stage in the last three decades. Our military and intelligence budgets amount to roughly 50% of the whole world's military spending, so you'd think that (by the world's logic) we could actually get something done somewhere.

When it turns out that we cannot control the situation, according to this myth, it must be a failure at the top. It's all the fault of weak politicians. None of these rhetorical Rambos can seem to understand that actual control (that is, any control that is sustainable and worth having) can never be obtained by the well-financed and technologically impressive capacity to blow people up at any point on the globe. "The illusion of control," said therapist Mary Grunte, "is the carrot from hell."

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been blamed for what is supposedly a basic strategic error: announcing our Afghan end date in advance. But how is it even possible to end a war and withdraw one's army, contractors, and local allies by surprise, at a moment's notice? For example, critics point to the overnight withdrawal of soldiers and contractors from Bagram air base without advance notice; does anyone really think that those soldiers and contractors would have been safer if their enemies around that indefensible perimeter knew what their plans were ahead of time -- or that some kind of magical secrecy was ever possible?

But what might be possible for just one location -- an overnight departure, with practically no advance notice -- would be impossible on a larger scale. In any case, critics will criticize: instant departure, wrong! Advance notice, wrong!

Maybe the argument against an agreement with the Taliban on a departure date is actually an argument that the USA should stay there until Afghanistan could be perfectly tamed to our specifications -- in other words, more or less forever. But was that ever really true? Did the USA's voters, whose early enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan waned just a few years in, ever show any sign that they would tolerate this war indefinitely? In any case, both Trump and Biden were determined not to stay.

The anti-date argument says that the USA lost its bargaining leverage when it agreed to a date. No! The U.S. lost its leverage when its mission morphed into an unwise and unsustainable nation-building project! At that point, or soon after, the Taliban had all the chips: they could either wait for the USA to recognize that unsustainability, as Biden did ten years ago, or they could continue bleeding the USA indefinitely while chipping away at a corrupt and unpopular Afghan central government.

So then, if a permanent occupation or garrison is not an option, the argument against the departure date basically depends on bluffing the Taliban, pretending that the USA might stay after all, when we know (and any Taliban commander who can read also knows) that it will not. How many soldiers and civilians would the U.S. be willing to sacrifice for the sake of a bluff? 

As soon as the USA decided not to pretend to stay, then a departure was inevitable, and setting the date ahead of time was the only practical way of organizing the complex logistics. Now, before our very eyes, we see the logistical and security issues that are involved with relocating a hundred thousand people -- some of whom are not sure until the very end that they even want to depart.

The last gasp of the control myth, as the scene shrinks to Kabul airport and its surrounding area, is expressed in the Republican talking point that the relocation of USA citizens and allies has been hopelessly mismanaged. "Biden is letting the Taliban dictate U.S. foreign policy." Not exactly. The Taliban is simply asserting the authority that it gained by being the victorious side, and the USA is in the uncomfortable but unavoidable position of needing to negotiate the zones of safety it requires for the delicate operation of keeping evacuation paths open. To bully and shoot our way out would guarantee the loss of innocent lives, so the USA authorities prudently ignore the control freaks while carrying out their mission. Lives will most likely be saved by diplomacy -- including offers of future recognition, aid, financial ties, if the withdrawal goes well -- not by swagger.

And: the more the USA chooses diplomacy over swagger at various other trouble spots on the world stage, the more likely the USA will continue to be able to dictate a viable foreign policy rather than being backed into Kabul-like corners.

None of this is to say that the actions of the Pentagon and the U.S. administration in this current operation are above examination and reproach. Failures in intelligence and execution should be identified, with consequences imposed regardless of political interests. But total control of the situation was never an option.

Acknowledging the end of this godforsaken project may be far from a total loss for the USA. In the best case, we might kill the imperial myth of control.

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Now would be a good time to read (or re-read) Tom Engelhardt's book The End of Victory Culture. Engelhardt describes and illustrates how citizens of the USA have tended to see any national enemy as subhuman, victory as inevitable, and defeat (when it comes, as in Viet Nam) as an occasion for vindictive retaliation.

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Heather Cox Richardson sums up this difficult day.

Shadi Hamid on what we in the USA did not understand about Afghanistan -- and the Taliban did.

Afghanistan and the "digital Dunkirk."

Now John Fea finally understands what happened to Jim Bakker: he got canceled.

Talking about COVID-19 and vaccines theologically: Roger E. Olson. Ron Selleck. And ... looking forward to the end, eventually, of the pandemic.

Empathy in Minnesota: a case study in Christian community breakdown.

What in the world (or not) is an Einstein ring?

Philip Jenkins guesses that the late Andrew Walls is the most important scholar you didn't know. (Judy and I had the good fortune to meet Andrew Walls and hear him lecture at the International Baptist Theological Seminary back in 2009.) 

Jack Wallen's reflections on the Linux desktop, on the occasion of Linux's thirtieth birthday. (In case you're wondering, I've been a Linux fan for thirteen of those thirty years, now using a version named Pop!_OS on a System 76 laptop.)

Nancy Thomas on Sheena and Sheera, the anomalous women. (Which of them is in the Bible?)

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Steve Guyger and the Excellos, "School Is Over." (Part of a streamed concert.)

The agony of Afghanistan, part one

Craig Whitlock: "Well over 100,00 Afghans also died in the war." Video screenshot. Source.

Stephen Zunes, coordinator of Middle East studies at the University of San Francisco, speaks for many of us in the peace community:

Once again, I'm being criticized for not having good enough answers about what the United States should do in regard to an international crisis that wouldn't have happened if policy makers had listened to people like me in the first place.

Today's heartbreaking scenes in and near Kabul's airport rightly cause us to demand answers. However, the scandalous wastage of human and financial resources over nearly twenty years, the imperial arrogance of the Afghanistan war's initiators (those who claimed the power to "make reality"), the USA public's lack of attention or care, should be even more heartbreaking. Might it be possible for you and me to link those airport scenes, and the flood of fresh news stories about Taliban repressions, with that whole sorry history?

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Guns and money, as we know (or should have known) cannot force a happy reality into being, neither in Afghanistan, nor in Iraq, nor anywhere else. Even a competently executed campaign, which Afghanistan was not, cannot guarantee a perfect outcome.

However, maybe you've read some of the same Afghanistan coverage that I have, basically asking, "Was it all in vain?" Paradoxically, while I never really want to be caught arguing for nation-building campaigns, I also feel that it is only fair to count up some of the gains. Much of our nearly trillion-dollar investment was misdirected or misspent, and many of the USA and allied personnel were inadequately prepared for Afghanistan's unfamiliar realities -- but life became better for thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghan people. Life expectancy improved, infrastructure was built, girls and women gained educations and other opportunities. In addition to the refugees fleeing the constant realities of civil war, thousands of other Afghans were able to emigrate to pursue careers or build families in other places, according to their own desires.

The tragedy was that the foreign inputs, in concert with courageous and visionary local activists, that made these lives better were simply unsustainable. For all but the successful emigres, there's now the prospect of very limited choices: slide back into the conditions of Taliban repression, or join the armed opposition that promises to prolong Afghanistan's decades-old civil war, and that is begging the international community for weapons, ammunition, supplies.

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Without context, the awful stories and videos from Afghanistan become instant grist for the political-spinners' mill. From my own circle of Facebook friends, I read posts along these lines: "Calls from everywhere for Biden to 'resign in disgrace' over crisis in Afghanistan" and "Biden's Afghanistan catastrophe proves he does not deserve title of 'commander in chief'." Meanwhile, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake reports that former members of the Donald Trump administration are "...seeking not just to bash Biden, but to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s own actions on this front."

Supporters of Joe Biden, of course, have their own biases. They may resort to blaming Trump, or the original neocons, or the inevitability of the current debacle. I guess what's least likely to happen is a dispassionate examination of whether and how the USA's military and intelligence apparatus, whose budget is roughly equal to the rest of the planet's military budgets put together, failed to plan and execute their withdrawal. How, for example, did they actually intend to fulfill their promises of resettlement to all Afghans who stuck their necks out to help this ill-fated effort in remodeling a nation?

A more basic inquiry is just as important, if even less likely: how was the USA public persuaded to approve (by 90% in public polling!) the war in the first place? Specifically, by what rhetorical tricks and faulty logic did the USA's desperate need to respond to the September 11 attacks, and the anger and grief generated by those attacks, become exploited and harnessed to initiate a twenty-year war? After our previous generational disaster in Viet Nam, and after the Soviet Union's own miserable experience in Afghanistan, how did we go that route yet again?

One of the most insidious aspects of the corruption that flowed from the Afghanistan project -- stuffing hundreds of billions of dollars into a small, impoverished country -- is that, whatever happens now, that money has enriched contractors and Pentagon vendors, along with their lobbyists. Nobody can claw those dollars back. Worse than that: we can almost be certain that the next time they come up with an irresistible outrage and a suitable villain, the cycle will start again.

Or will it?

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(part two)

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"Reality" bites: Michael Tallon puts the whole case a little less politely.

Josh Marshall: Is the mess in Afghanistan really a terminal PR disaster for Biden, or is this the only way the DC-based press knows how to think?

Patterson Deppen looks at the infrastructure of our permanent war footing.

... American military bases overseas are now scattered across 81 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. And while their total numbers may be down, their reach has only continued to expand. Between 1989 and today, in fact, the military has more than doubled the number of places in which it has bases from 40 to 81.

Rafael Behr looks at Russia thirty years after the Moscow coup.

The only doctrinal contagion from post-Soviet Russia is caustic anti-idealism – a nihilistic, trolling statecraft that treats arguments about universal rights and the moral superiority of democratic systems as pitiably naive or obscenely hypocritical. That case is easily assembled with reference to unsavoury regimes propped up by the Pentagon, corruption scandals and Washington’s hubristic military interventions.

Timothy Snyder translates Paul Celan. (Poetry after Auschwitz.)

Oslo's Deichman Library is a world champion.

Craig Thompson tried to leave the Center of the Earth... (and urges cross-cultural workers to "keep an eye out for each other").

Martin Kelley's latest recommended Quaker links.

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Junior Wells pays tribute to Junior Parker.

Book shorts

Three books have recently lit up my life, each in its own way. You've probably already heard of them, but if my recommendations make the difference for you, I'd be very pleased! The three books:

• Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible
• Gish Jen, The Resisters
• Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual

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Source.  

The first Lydia Millet novel I ever read, How the Dead Dream (which I wrote about here), astounded me with her ability to peel away the insulation provided by affluence, technology, and force of habit, that separates us from raw nature with all its implacable, unsentimental, often hazardous (to us) realities. It is possible that Millet is one of the writers who can finally penetrate our collective complacency about global warming.

If this is true, it's not because she's writing propagandistic "cause" literature. The hurricane that sets up the unfolding catastrophes in her recent novel A Children's Bible is just one of the factors in the novel's drama, although it is the factor that links her characters' objective situation with ours. In an entirely plausible but only gently implied chain of events, the novel's hurricane might be the straw that breaks the camel's back, triggering what looks like a far wider collapse of political and social structures.

In her story, the hurricane interrupts a group of families who've rented a beach house for their summer vacation. The parents occupy the mansion's bedrooms, and the children are consigned to the attic. It's those children who drive the narrative; they have to take the initiative for their own activities, and not only that, but their own well-being, because the adults are too clueless and too busy boozing to take much notice of their kids. In a remarkable commentary on generational relationships, most of the teenagers take part in a game that requires not revealing one's own parents' identity to the other kids, while seeking to unmask the other kids' parents. Just about everyone, it turns out, finds their parents too embarrassing to acknowledge.

The hurricane disrupts everything. The attic becomes uninhabitable, so the young people, already accustomed to problem-solving in the total absence of adult leadership, take shelter in a farm, only to be threatened by armed survivalists. They do get some unexpected adult allies ... but to say more would be to give too much away. The narrator, Evie, is one of the teenagers; her voice is alternately kind and mildly sardonic, but she has no special knowledge -- just an honest eye. 

A sample of the ways Jack interprets
Bible stories.

Concerning the novel's title: the narrator's younger brother loves the children's Bible he has received as a gift, interpreting its stories, parables, and miracles with a naive receptiveness and personal insights that have no connection whatever with conventional religiosity. The connections he makes between the Bible stories and science seem reasonable to me, especially given the lack of healthy intergenerational sharing. As Millet said in an interview,

My generation of adult — and those older than us who are still around — has failed, as a collective, to see ourselves as parents, even when we are parents. Real parents aren’t just producers of younger, newer beings. Producers of new life are simply breeders. Real parents are ancestors, who act out of a duty to the future of those under their care. Real parents are those who understand that the future has to be guarded, not only for their own children but for all who come after them. If we’re derelict in that duty — which we should take to be a sacred one — we may as well abandon the idea that we’re parents and admit we’re nothing more than breeders.

Millet says that she finished her novel before Greta Thunberg became famous, but I hear Thunberg in the voice of Jack, the younger brother who owns the children's Bible.

"Hey, Jack," said my father, trying to catch his eye in the rearview mirror. Summoned a smile that looked fake. And a jocular tone. "Chin up, kid. Everything's going to be OK!"

Jack switched his tablet off and flipped it over. Rested his hands on it, neatly folded together.

"That's what you always said," he said. His voice was still soft. "You're my father. But you're a liar."

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Gish Jen's novel, The Resisters, takes place in the future world that Lydia Millet's novel might be foreshadowing. Not only has global warming raised the sea level to an extent that much of the world's population must live on boats and rafts, but a combination of artificial intelligence, rising authoritarianism, and geopolitical power shifts has all but eliminated equal rights and due process.

The USA has become AutoAmerica, whose global competitor is ChinRussia. The heroes of Jen's novel are among AutoAmerica's more or less permanently marginalized Surplus population -- forced to be swamp- and sea-dwellers, and not allowed to work. They subsist instead on a form of welfare, and are constantly monitored to be sure they are making the right choices. ("You always have a choice," says the ever-present voice of authority.)

The privileged class, the Netters, live on dry land, as you've no doubt anticipated. Surplus and Netters alike are overseen by Aunt Nettie, an (almost) all-knowing combination of AI and the Internet. Aunt Nettie is not so rigid that it doesn't sometimes allow exceptional Surplus inhabitants to become Netters when it's to AutoAmerica's advantage -- and this is the situation when Gwen, the daughter of a Surplus couple (a former professor and a still active lawyer), turns out to have a phenomenal pitching arm. The family surreptitiously organizes a baseball league, and Gwen's success in that supposedly secret league comes to the notice of Aunt Nettie. AutoAmerica is desperate to win the baseball Olympics competition against ChinRussia, and the authorities are perfectly willing to make a deal to recruit a star player.

Much of the human drama of The Resisters concerns the dilemmas of knowing when to resist and when to compromise. For example, issues of betrayal and reconciliation become central when the Surplus realize that the existence of the secret baseball league has been betrayed by one of Gwen's own friends. Jen has sharpened these dilemmas by making Aunt Nettie and its functionaries not totally evil, even capable of flashes of humanity and humor. Is co-optation by the authorities always a betrayal? When are bargains permissible, and when do they undermine resistance to pervasive authoritarianism?

All of these are live questions for us as we face our own dilemmas of resistance in the cause of due process and equal rights. And all too soon, we may also have to decide: who gets to live on dry land?

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A successful fiction writer brings a set of characters to life. Lydia Millet's Evie and Gish Jen's Gwen were very real to me, and I'm grateful for allowing me to see the world through their eyes.

Francis Spufford created the five central characters of Light Perpetual, but also acknowledged that, because they were at the Woolworths in New Cross Road, Deptford, on November 25, 1944, when a German V2 missile made a direct hit on that store, their lives must necessarily have come to an end with all the other customers and staff killed in that tiny moment of time. 

(And for what? By the time Hitler's V2 vengeance weapons were being assembled, fueled, and crudely targeted at Allied cities such as London, his Thousand Year Reich had only six months left to live.)

At Woolworths on November 25, 168 very real people perished. Spufford gives his characters -- the schoolchildren Val, Jo, Alec, Vern, and Ben -- an alternate timeline, set in a fictional counterpart to New Cross Road. They stand for all the human possibilities abruptly cut off by that V2, whose metal nosecone must have made an appearance (as Spufford describes) for just a millisecond on its way down through the housewares department to its final impact point. But these five children were soon back at school, trying to answer a querulous headmaster's questions about the song they're singing.

Source.  

I admit I was skeptical at first that the novel's central device -- accompanying five supposed victims of November 25 through the lives that the missile should have taken from them -- would feel artificial. Spufford's creativity and humane purpose soon lifted that doubt from me, as he brought each one of them to life. We revisit each of them at five-year intervals, tracing a course through the social history of postwar England. (Alec, for example, becomes a newspaper typesetter, a profession gradually eliminated by technology. Val marries a white supremacist.) Spufford succeeds in making each of them believably ordinary but also very specific, very individual, at the same time. At the end, I was sorry to say goodbye to them. Their lives were by no means equally beautiful in any sense I'd recognize, but together they shine a defiant light on the preciousness of life and the cruel randomness of war.

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Why bombing unarmed civilians is always wrong.

The brutally clear Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Washington Post's summary: "alarming and unsurprising."

What astronomers are learning from the huge rings around a black hole in the V404 Cygni system. Also, Einstein gets another boost from a black-hole observation.

... Then maybe you'll be in the mood for these seven Russian (and Soviet) sci-fi films. I was delighted to see Kin-dza-dza! on the list.

Is English a suitable language for poetry?

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Joanne Shaw Taylor, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" ... 

An immigrant/patriot revisits January 6 (partly a repost)

Screenshot.

I've finally had a chance to view a video of the first hearing, held July 27, of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. At this hearing, two U.S. Capitol police officers and two D.C. Metropolitan police officers gave testimony and answered questions on their experiences of that day. One of them, Harry Dunn, directly addressed his colleagues who might still be suffering from the trauma of their day; his words were made more poignant and pointed as we've learned more about January 6 veterans who have committed suicide.

Over and over I was struck by a common theme in their testimony: astonishment at the violence and venom aimed at them by their own fellow U.S. citizens. Mixed in with the specific instances they retold, they also recounted examples of being urged to change sides and join the rioters. 

On the day after the January 6 attack, I wrote the post that I've republished below -- it was then entitled "A country deliberately founded on a good idea." When I went back today to see what I'd written that day, I assumed that I must have been writing in the heat of the moment. But there's nothing there that I'd take back. Instead, I'm shocked by the size of the constituency in today's USA who seems willing to put that "good idea" at risk to press Donald Trump's Big Lie (that the election of November 2020 was stolen from him).

John Fea's diagnosis (the toxic combination of fear and false nostalgia) seems as valid as ever. In the face of those demons' continuing power, I am republishing my January comments as my tribute to the "good idea" whose survival we should never ever take for granted.

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[January 7, 2021]

Those who violently broke into the United States Capitol yesterday may have actually felt that they were Patriots. That's how they they were addressed by their idol, the president, and his accomplices. (That's how I was addressed in the 1,929 e-mails I received over these past months from donaldtrump.com.)

What is this patriotism? As a grateful immigrant, I have some views on this question, but they're certainly not original to me. Once again I turn to the journalist John Gunther, whose introduction to his book Inside U.S.A. (1946) calls the USA "a country deliberately founded on a good idea." Our founding documents make that good idea clear: we were all created equal; and our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are derived NOT from a ruler's indulgence or from social rank, but irrevocably granted by our Creator! Abraham Lincoln expressed in the simplest terms how such a free people are to be governed: through a "government of the people, by the people, for the people...."

Every aspect of this "good idea" has vulnerabilities, and our nation has tested them all. Do we really believe that we're all created equal, or can we cut some corners to the advantage of those we identify with most? Can we really govern ourselves, or are there some tacit standards of wealth, education, good connections, or other badges of entitlement that represent shortcuts to power? When our inevitable conflicts arise, do we have trustworthy mechanisms to discern justice, or do the loudest or most resourceful communicators prevail? Do we prioritize the fair distribution of opportunities to pursue happiness, or do we (as John Fea suggests) rely on the manipulative power of a mythical nostalgia? 

The conflict that came to a head yesterday -- and certainly threatens to return -- is a story of broken faith. These patriots do not appear to recognize either the "good idea" of equality, or our nation's judicial system. In November 2020, "we the people" elected a new president through the tested mechanisms of state-based elections; and irregularities were investigated and adjudicated through the courts. Against these routine and regular processes of self-government, the president and his co-conspirators flooded the public arena with falsehoods and slanders that were so far-fetched that they often could not even be submitted in good order to an actual court. Trump's attempts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power (the glory of any democracy) were presented to us as grievances, often with obvious links to white people's fear, nostalgia, and blood mythology. Apparently, anyone who shares these grievances was entitled to bash their way into "our house," the Capitol, and sabotage the regular order of our self-government as it attempted to implement the people's choice.

Why did I preface these thoughts by calling myself a "grateful immigrant"? I'm simply referring to the incredible magnetic power of Gunther's "good idea." Acknowledging the incongruity of all settlements from across the oceans having been imposed on this continent's first nations, this new country organized around our founding ideals was substantially built and populated by wave after wave of immigrants. Most of them, in the early years of the colonies and the new USA, were from places where wealth, aristocracy, or monarchy ruled. In Thomas Paine's words,

Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her--Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

Paine's portrait of the rest of the world is severely out of date, but the USA -- at least until recently -- continued to attract people like my own parents, who brought me here from war-scarred Europe and then had two more children born here. I still hear from former students in Russia who want my advice on resettling here. And, sadly, there are still places in the world where the USA represents, not just an opportunity for improvement, but a chance for survival.

The forces of fear and nostalgia, some daring to call themselves Christian, threaten to neutralize our "good idea," declaring that our country should no longer receive the fugitive nor prepare an asylum -- and they even call this new fear-based isolationism "patriotic." The resulting confusion weakens our own country, and gives great comfort to the leaders of countries that prefer to rule the old-fashioned way, reserving power and wealth to those who already have it, and assuring their populations that that is the way things work everywhere. As Anne Applebaum said, concerning yesterday's events,

Schadenfreude will be the dominant emotion in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, Riyadh, and Minsk. The leaders of those cities—men sitting in well-appointed palaces, surrounded by security guards—will enjoy the scenes from Washington, relishing the sight of the U.S. brought so low.

Americans are not the ones who will suffer most from the terrible damage that Trump and his enablers have done to the power of America’s example, to America’s reputation, and, more important, to the reputation of democracy itself. The callow insurrectionists who thought it would be amusing to break into the debating chambers might go to jail, but they will not pay any real price; neither will the conspiracy theorists who believed the president’s lies and flocked to Washington to act on them. Instead, the true cost will be borne by those other residents of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, Riyadh, and Minsk—the dissidents and the opponents, the would-be democrats who plan, organize, protest, and suffer, sacrificing their time and in some cases their life just because they want the right to vote, to live in a state governed by the rule of law, and to enjoy the things that Americans take for granted, and that Trump doesn’t value at all.

After yesterday, they will have one less source of hope, one less ally they can rely upon. The power of America’s example will be dimmer than it once was; American arguments will be harder to hear. American calls for democracy can be thrown back with scorn: You don’t believe in it anymore, so why should we?

During yesterday's melee, I saw a little alert on my computer screen, telling me that Russia's Dozhd' independent television network was covering events live at the Capitol. When I opened their coverage, the presenter in the Moscow studio was interviewing a Russian-speaking academic in the USA. He pointed out the similarities between the assault on the Capitol with the October 1993 crisis in Russia, featuring the confrontation between Yeltsin and the legislature. The presenter objected: "But that was Russia. This is the USA!!" These things don't happen here!

Here's another twist: On Twitter, Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, commented on the Capitol attack: "Today was the worst day in American democracy in my lifetime. So angry. So sad." Among the responses he got was this comment in Russian:

People have an opinion. They express that opinion. It seems to me that it's better to rejoice that those people are not as passive as they are here. They are citizens, and not bumps on a log. Just think about it: there is a certain country, namely Russia, where the authorities tried to kill off their most outstanding political opponent, and NOBODY came out to protest. Your people are able to stand up for their positions. That's not a bad thing.

If actual massive perversions of the USA's electoral process had happened, I would cheer this comment, because in principle the writer is correct. So here is a case study of what happens when two countries are both trying to cope with public spaces flooded by lies ... in both cases from the leadership! I cannot answer for Russia, but in the USA, we citizens, not being bumps on a log, have another choice: get rid of the lying leadership.

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Heather Cox Richardson with more commentary on the House Select Committee hearing.

Update: Meanwhile, Republican leaders work hard to shield Trump from Capitol attack fallout.

The Quaker who "changed astronomy forever."

This month: Quaker Religious Education Collaborative's 2021 conference: Hearing God's Call.

And next month: Christian Peacemaker Teams Congress.

"Can I get an amen?" Nikki Mosgrove addresses Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on acting justly and loving mercy -- and the difference between community partnerships and "toxic philanthropy." She reworks Micah 6:8 to ask, "What do we as Friends require of each other...?", describes how Trenton Friends are responding, and answers questions from other Yearly Meeting participants.

Noah Litu Kellum on seeing people differently.

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Another in my series of James Harman tribute posts. Somehow I always assumed that sooner or later I'd get to see him play his harp live.