Today marks the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called “the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history.” A shooter motivated by what he called a “Hispanic invasion” and the racist concept of “replacement” killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Terror & Humanism
A Photographic Album
Review of The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, by Peter Hellman (Random House, 1981). First published in Aperture 89 (Winter 1982). Reprinted in Danny Lyon: American Blood: Selected Writings 1961-2020, (Karma Books, New York).
Human Comedy
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece on black stand-up comedy, “Unlikely Heirs: The Comedic Children of Cosby,” that places contemporary comics in relation to Bill Cosby, including ones who are not easily seen as being in his tradition. In the course of limning the Cosby aesthetic, McInnis highlights two little miracles performed by Ali Siddiq.
I discovered Siddiq after he was already a sixteen-year vet of comedy on two episodes of Comedy Central’s This Is not Happening, “Mitchell” and “Prison Riot.”
In both episodes, Siddiq tells horrifying stories about prison life, but I was unable to stop listening or laughing. Y’all know that I don’t do blood or gore. I don’t like violence in reality or art. Thus, I don’t watch horror films or films with graphic killings. Yet, I was captivated by Siddiq and couldn’t figure out why.
Russian Shadows, Ukrainian Light (Arendt’s Lens, Babel’s Visions, “Come and See” & “The Brest Fortress”)
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est–‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.” Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s up ender to Origins nails what autocrats fear most about humankind. It speaks to why Putin went wilding in Crimea and the Donbas after stand-up Slavs made Ukraine new in 2014.
Putin’s Not So Willing Executioners
Two anonymous “Russians with Attitude,” proud of “manoeuvring the globe-spanning American monoculture,” have been tweeting pro-Putin agit-prop about what they insist on calling the “special operation” in Ukraine. Their glorying in the power of Russian arms has been undercut by Ukrainians’ stalwart resistance. Not that RWA cop to the fact Russians have suffered thousands of casualties. Their triumphalism seems a paltry thing when they post odd snippets of video meant to wow their followers with wonders of Russian weaponry.
Putin’s Dark Prophet: Aleksandr Dugin’s Theory of a Fascist International
Should Vladimir Putin’s barbarous war of Russian expansion move beyond the borders of Ukraine into Moldova, Finland, or even Sweden, then expect to hear the name “Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin” far more frequently. A former philosophy professor at Moscow State University, Dugin has combined his obsessions with occultism and the neo-pagan philosophies of European fascists like Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist to derive his fervently nationalistic ideology of “Eurasianism,” promulgated in books with torpid titles such as Foundations of Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Theory.
Unsentimental Internationalism
I
One faction of neoconservatives were wittily defined as people for whom it is always 1938. Whoever so defined them may not have considered the possibility that there are also people for whom it is never 1938, and that for some of that latter group even 1938 is no longer 1938 (a very partial version of that last view can be seen in a recently released film in which Chamberlain is credited with having bought the time for Britain to rearm).
Lenin’s Oriental Despotism (Excerpt from Vasily Grossman’s “Everything Flows”)
The evolution of the West was fertilized by the growth of freedom; Russia’s evolution was fertilized by the growth of slavery. This is the abyss that divides Russia and the West.
The “Forever War”
President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan has provoked a flood of commentaries on our “forever war.” This obviously isn’t the war in Afghanistan, which lasted a long time but not forever. Indeed, Fred Smoler has made a strong case that Biden ended it too soon, given the consequences of defeat for Afghan women. I would be inclined to agree; my political sympathies lie that way. But I suspect that the war failed disastrously long ago, and Trump’s agreement with the Taliban, a virtual surrender, effectively ended it.
Did Afghanistan Have a Chance?
In the main I agree with Michael Walzer—this is almost invariably the case—but since broad agreement is rarely the stuff of mesmerizing political discussion I’ll declare a few reservations.
Nothing New Under the Sun
First published this essay—a transcript of a talk on 9/11 and American intellectuals that Marcus gave at a synagogue in California—in the spring of 2002. Marcus wasn’t in First’s corner in the magazine’s early years. (He was put off by the harsh review in our second issue of his book on The Basement Tapes.) But Charles O’Brien’s rage at the “Vichy Left” in his post-9/11 essay “The War” spoke to Marcus. He bows to O’Brien’s polemic in “Nothing New Under the Sun” (and takes in a post-9/11 point made by First‘s Fredric Smoler as well), yet his own piece isn’t delimited by 9/11’s aftermath. It’s a kind of case statement for anyone who wants to know what distinguishes intellectuals from typical academics, hacks or other purveyors of the given. There’s been a link to “Nothing New Under the Sun” on the right column of First‘s homepage for years. It won’t be coming down any time soon. B.D.
After the Fall
First’s original editors, longtime New Yorkers, were fully alive to experiences of love and death on 9/11. We printed a set of responses to the attacks that implicitly contradicted those who assumed “anti-Americanism is a necessity” (without imposing a patriotic litmus test). Our post-9/11 issue featured red, white and blue colors above the fold, though that wasn’t a simple flag-waving gesture. The exemplary citizens (and New Yorkers) invoked on our cover were Latin Americans and an Afro-American: La Lupe, Eddie Palmieri and Jay-Z.
I’m reminded of how our colors seemed out of time to the all-knowing Left when I listen to commentary by pundits like Mehdi Hasan who link the post-9/11 “War on Terror” with l/6. That tendentious timeline all but erases the threat once posed by radical Islamists. It assumes American Islamophobia/xenophobia was always a scarier thing than Islamofascism. (I wonder if Mehdi Hasan noticed what happened to Samuel Paty—the French middle school teacher who was decapitated last October after he dared to teach his students about the Charlie Hebdo murders.) While it’s probably true the threat to Americans and Europeans from Islamist terrorists has diminished in recent years, that’s due largely to those Kurdish fighters who turned the tide against ISIS at the battle of Kobani. Future historians may come to see the Kurds’ victory there in January 2015 as the true culmination of the war that blew up in America on 9/11. The Kurds certainly grasped the meaning of their victory: “The battle for Kobani was not only a fight between the YPG and Daesh [ISIS], it was a battle between humanity and barbarity, a battle between freedom and tyranny, it was a battle between all human values and the enemies of humanity.” The clarity of these (mainly Muslim) soldiers who beat an international army of Islamists underscores the not-knowingness of Mehdi Hasan et al.
The following set of posts—by Donna Gaines, George Held, Hans Koning, Wendy Oxenhorn, Fredric Smoler, Laurie Stone, Kurt Vonnegut, and Peter Lamborn Wilson—mixes pieces from First‘s back pages with writing by authors who published their first thoughts on 9/11 in other places. B.D.
Putting Women First
The first photograph I remembered showing the Taliban at work actually dated to the Soviet occupation. It showed a victim of the mujahedin, a woman in a burqa lying on the ground with a caption explaining that she had been shot to death for teaching girls to read. I think my mistake came from later reading about such killings by the Taliban. One of the more horrific newspaper anecdotes I can remember about the Taliban was very recently repeated, probably in either the Times or the Washington Post, by a reporter apparently once as startled by it as I was—it related Taliban amputating the finger tip of a woman who’d applied nail polish. The most memorable internet-viewable home video showed a middle-aged man identified as a member of the Taliban morals police repeatedly beating a woman in a burqa with a leather paddle, the woman screaming, and her screams translated in the subtitles as something like “Just kill me”. The relatively frequent news stories about the forced marriage of quite young girls to Taliban fighters were much more common, also arguably worse, so it is presumably the rarity of the video, perhaps surreptitiously recorded on an early smart phone, that made it stick in my mind.
Bridges to Misogynists
A graph in a recent Times op-ed by an apologist for China’s rulers summed up their party-line takeaway from an American defeat:
Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.
Bob Moses in Mississippi, 1962
More from Danny Lyon at bleak beauty blog and dannylyonphotos@instagram.
Click “Read more” to see a bigger image.
The Riderless Horse (Letter from Port au Prince)
The year was 1963. The name of the horse was Black Jack.
Even for a 10 year old, it was both moving and troubling to see the horse with no rider following the coffin of President John Kennedy–with a spirited strut, yet not easily controlled.
The horse with the empty saddle is an ancient symbol of poignant absence.
The horse without a master, the nation without a leader, the body without a soul.
We are living the painful and dangerous days after the brutal killing of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. The horse has no rider, and does not know where to turn.
Notes from the Underground
The author–a columnist at Inside Higher Ed–thought this piece belonged in First in the Month. Your editor was glad to take him up on his proposal to reprint it…
In the sort of coincidence that makes a columnist’s work much easier, the Library of America published Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel on April 20 — the same day, as it turned out, that a jury in Minneapolis convicted a police officer of murdering George Floyd last year.
It’s Tricky: Thinking Through “Dear Comrades”
When Putin was re-elected in 2018, Andrei Konchalovsky, director of Dear Comrades—the acclaimed historical drama about an atrocity erased from history during the Soviet era—spoke on RT of his “extraordinary joy” (though he sounded dutiful rather than giddy). Putin’s win, per Konchalovsky, was proof Russia was “going the right way.” I didn’t see his election spin on RT until after I’d watched Dear Comrades so it was a shock to hear him express disdain for the “fuss” made by Putin’s “paranoiac” critics since his film about the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre limns what happens in a country where no-one’s allowed to disturb powers-that-be.