A friend in the Texas Hill Country notes a seemingly prescient couplet written in 1969 by Philip Larkin:
“When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
Larkin was writing in March 1969, as the so-called Cold War was yet again simmering. Seven months earlier, Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia to squelch the Prague reformers. Nixon was the newly elected president and the war in Vietnam raged on. Here is James Booth’s gloss on what he calls a “snappy trochaic quatrain” in his 2014 biography of Larkin …
Larkin’s longtime friend Robert Conquest published The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties a month after Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. In an interview, Conquest derided the euphemism “Cold War” and suggested why it was adopted by so many in the West:
“’Cold War’ isn’t quite the right way of describing it. It was ‘cold’ in the sense that it didn’t actually blow up, but that wasn’t due to some inherent or natural ‘coldness.’ [The Soviets] weren’t strong enough to attack us. If they had been, they would have done to us what they did to Eastern Europe. See what I mean? The term ‘Cold War’ is a sort of western, academic way to avoid blaming anybody too much.”
“The czars will never be back but, after seventy years, their style of command has yet to pass away, perhaps because tradition is so stubborn in Russia that the techniques of journalism, wondrous as they are, come to appear so inadequate for dealing with her development year by year, let alone day by day.”
Tradition Is So Stubborn in Russia'
Kaplan has already told us he’s no rare book snob, no collector of first editions. “One book means freedom; too many books, though, act as a barrier to further discovery of the world.” His most treasured volumes are decades-old paperbacks. Chief among them is The Governments of Communist East Europe (1966) by H. Gordon Skilling. He recounts buying the 1971 paperback in Jerusalem when he was about to leave the Israeli Defense Forces. It gave him, he writes, “a vocation, a direction: a fate.” In his prologue, Kaplan goes on to tell book stories the way some veterans tell war stories – Buddenbrooks, Fathers and Sons, John Reed’s The War in Eastern Europe (1916).
The Future Lies Inside the Silences'
The ANZAC story is inadequate as the basis for of a national identity
Anzac Day is upon us and there’ll be the usual effort to promote the notion that participa…
Remembering the dead – even the anonymous dead we never knew – is a human obligation.
'Now Is for Living, Not Remembering'
Hackers claim to have broken into dozens of Russian institutions over the past two months, including the Kremlin’s internet censor and one of its primary intelligence services, leaking emails and internal documents to the public in an apparent hack-and-leak campaign that is remarkable in its scope
Hacking Chemical Factories and Tractors π
“Gizmodo has reviewed, redacted, and published more than two dozen leaked Facebook documents, the first of hundreds to come. In the hours following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, employees at Facebook tasked with preventing “potential offline harm” found themselves under siege by a mob of a different sort. Reports of abusive content from users were flooding in. As one employee put it in an internal forum, many of the flagged posts “called for violence, suggested the overthrow of the government would be desirable, or otherwise voiced support for the protests.” The same day, Instagram employees reported that there were “no existing” protections against an onslaught of inciting content in places like the app’s list of most widely used hashtags….Screenshots of Meta employees’ reactions to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were part of the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that offer an unprecedented look inside the most powerful social media company in the world. The records were first provided to Congress last year by Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower, and later obtained by hundreds of journalists, including those at Gizmodo. Haugen testified before Congress about Facebook’s harms in October 2021.
As part of an ongoing project to make these once-confidential records accessible to the general public, Gizmodo is today—for the first time—publishing 28 of the documents previously exclusively shared with Congress and the media. Meta declined to comment on the release.
KREMLINOLOGY REMAINS AN INEXACT SCIENCE AT BEST: Kremlin Insiders Alarmed Over Growing Toll of Putin’s War in Ukraine.
The ranks of the critics at the pinnacle of power remain limited, spread across high-level posts in government and state-run business. They believe the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that will set the country back for years, according to ten people with direct knowledge of the situation. All spoke on condition of anonymity, too fearful of retribution to comment publicly.
So far, these people see no chance the Russian president will change course and no prospect of any challenge to him at home. More and more reliant on a narrowing circle of hardline advisers, Putin has dismissed attempts by other officials to warn him of the crippling economic and political cost, they said.
Some said they increasingly share the fear voiced by U.S. intelligence officials that Putin could turn to a limited use of nuclear weapons if faced with failure in a campaign he views as his historic mission.
- We have undertaken this project to help better inform the public about Facebook’s role in a wide range of controversies, as well as to provide researchers with access to materials that we hope will advance general knowledge of social media’s role in modern history’s most troubling crises. Less than two weeks after Donald Trump’s mob attacked the Capitol, the results of a poll commissioned by Facebook itself showed what already felt anecdotally true to many: That a majority of Americans believed Facebook at least partly responsible for the events of Jan. 6…
- Future releases will be added to this page, a directory, that will eventually offer our readers links all of the leaked internal documents we have published…”
The Pork Henchmen: Morrison’s ministerial spies give Australian National Audit Office the cold shoulder
The faceless Coalition aides conscripted to do the leg-work for the government’s billion-dollar pork bork barrelling program have spurned requests to comply with the ANAO audit, leaving ministers unaccountable for their spending before the Election.
