David Brooks in the NYTIMES informs the readers that “Arab nation-states have withered.” The point is unassailable because they obviously have. But the statement deceives by what it excludes: all nation-states have been eroded. It looks differently from one region to another but the phenomenon is global.

When people first showed me this recent Charlie Hebdo cartoon, I didn’t understand it. And not because of the text, I get the text. It’s the picture that I don’t get unless somebody explains it to me.

When people finally told me that the holes the champagne is gushing from are supposed to stand for bullet holes, sending the message that you can’t kill the French joie de vivre, I could appreciate this great cartoon.

This is why I don’t enjoy, let alone analyze, movies. I don’t process images at all. I watch a lot of television, especially when I work, but the process of watching involves very little actual watching. I barely look at the screen because it rarely communicates useful information to me.

What I like about Snyder’s analysis is that he rejects the tired old canard that the mass murder perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler was a result of their regimes’ supposed embrace of modernity.

Stalinism and Nazism initially fed off revolutionary modernizing impulses to consolidate their power. But as soon as they were securely ensconced in power, Stalin and Hitler began the work of destroying modernity and all its manifestations. In all his personal preferences, Stalin was a deeply conservative man who brought back all the trappings of tsarism and Russian Orthodox religious formulae the moment he could do that.

You can’t address post-nation state challenges with nation-state means. The nation-state’s bag of tricks is impotent in the face of new realities. Passports, borders, immigration quotas – these are vestiges of the world that’s in retreat. No amount of shrieking will change this simple fact.

Two presidents ago, there were already people in the White House who knew this very well. Which leads me to conclude that the current refugee – related maneuver in the Congress and in Trump’s interviews is just a distraction tactic for the plebs. People have a vague feeling that something is amiss and are hiding behind fantasies in which the nation-state is as strong as ever. In this, those who say “bring in the Syrians” are no different from those who say “don’t bring in the Syrians” because the authority they are trying to invoke no longer exists.

The best thing we can all collectively do is quit the Outrage Olympics right now and demand that the hired managers of our polity stop buggering around and come up with new ways of responding to new challenges.

Silly little parrot who’s been writing me from the email bronsonmp@hotmail.com: you have been blocked. Your emails will be automatically deleted. I’m vaguely flattered with your worship of me but it’s getting boring.

Is this the laziest Congress known to humanity, or what? When will this traveling circus finally stop wasting everybody’s time and legislate something that can actually be relevant to voters?

First, there was the insanely boring brouhaha about defunding Planned Parenthood. Now there is a bill about the 20,000 refugees who, by virtue of their tiny number, can make zero impact on the lives of voters. It’s all just so ridiculous, so boring, that I’m about to fall asleep. Any terrorist who wants to get to the US will simply drive over from Canada. We all know this, so why are we making idjits out of ourselves by getting bogged down in a debate about this tiny handful of refugees?

I wasn’t going to read Snyder’s Black Earth because I did not expect it to tell me anything new about the Holocaust. But then I read a pissy review of the book and realized that only something very good could provoke such a fit of poutiness in a reviewer. So I bought the book and can now tell you that this is probably the best thing I read this year. I hate wasting my time on books that tell me what I already know. Black Earth told me something new on every page and surprised me more than I could have expected.

This book on the Holocaust is in reality a passionate ode to the state. It is common to equate the destruction of the state with freedom, Snyder says. History teaches us, however, that the exact opposite is true. In order to be able to murder 6 million Jews, Hitler had to destroy the nation-states in half of Europe.

In the places where the state was preserved in 1939-45, few Jews were killed. Where the state was compromised, more Jews were killed. In the areas where the state was destroyed, most Jews were killed. And in the region where the state was destroyed twice, all Jews were killed.

There is no reason to believe, Snyder points out, that we are all that different from the 1941 Germans. We are as enamored of apocalyptic visions, as distrustful of science, as prone to blame the state, and as incapable of feeling content with our standard of living as they were. And the state today is weakened. As in Hitler’s times, the regions where the state is weakest (Africa or the Middle East) are the ones where human life is most at risk.

This is, of course, a briefest summary of a volume that brims with insights, analysis, ideas, and knowledge. Climate change, war in Iraq, Putin’s alternative to Hitler’s concept of “the Jewish lobby”, the analysis of what characteristic European Christians had to possess to be more likely to help Jews during the Holocaust – all these subjects and many more are brought together in an elegant, meaningful, and absorbing narrative.

In terms of the writing style, the book is structured around numerous repetitions that seem to strive to anchor the ideas Snyder introduces to prevent them from being swept away by the flow that is eroding and battering the very nation-state model that Hitler was so eager to destroy.

The favorite phrase of Putinoid patriots is the following:

“Russia is and always has been a force for good in the world.”

Remind you of anything?

Everybody probably knows this but I had no idea, and I’m really taken by the story. Throughout WWII, the British prohibited Jews from coming to Palestine. Still, a group of Zionist Jews managed to get there and start fighting for a Jewish state.

These Jews had been kept by Stalin in concentration camps in Siberia. When Stalin allowed Polish prisoners in the GULAG to form an army to fight against Germans, these Polish Jews joined.

For obvious reasons, Stalin couldn’t let Poles fight on the Eastern front, so he sent this small Polish army to the Western front. The Jews who were part of this Polish military force marched all the way from Siberia, through India and Iran, and to Palestine. Menachem Begin was actually one of them. These Jews entered Palestine because they were wearing the Allied forces uniform, and the British could do nothing.

This is such a powerful, beautiful story that I can’t get over it.

Wow, globalization helps spread idiocy extremely fast. Not two days ago, self-righteous American twitterers and facebookers started hectoring people who expressed support for France for not expressing the same support for the victims of the terror attack in Lebanon. [I discussed what I think about these finger-waggers here.]

Today, this same form of didactic and self-satisfied lecturing made its way onto the only remaining somewhat dissident TV channel in Russia. The Russians haven’t caught on to Lebanon yet, so people were chided for caring more about Paris than the victims of the Boko Haram acts of terror in Nigeria. Of course, Russian-speakers tend to be a lot more blunt and honest about this sort of thing, so the response to the Russian finger-waggers was much stronger than anything we ever hear in the West. 

I only wish it were as easy to spread intelligent ideas as it is these stupid exercises in moral superiority.