I have been sanctioned at least twice by Russia. Same evil incompetence vibe. Authoritarianism is not actually efficient.
Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Millions of you, around the world, have put these lessons to good use; it has been humbling to learn how from courageous and creative dissenters, protestors, and oppositionists.
I am delighted to have this special chance now to share the lessons again. I was honored when John, a wise advocate for civil discourse and civic engagement, volunteered to read them aloud.
For the full video, see my substack.
At the base, in the far north of the island, the American visitors had pictures taken of themselves and ate lunch with servicemen and servicewomen. They treated the base as the backdrop to a press conference where they could say things they already thought; nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said. Vance, who never left the base, and has never before visited Greenland, was quite sure how Greenlanders should live. He made a political appeal to Greenlanders, none of whom was present, or anywhere near him. He claimed that Denmark was not protecting the security of Greenlanders in the Arctic, and that the United States would. Greenland should therefore join the United States.
When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the NATO alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of NATO, and it is already American’s job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend the United States. Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked Article 5, the mutual defense obligation of the NATO treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita more Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war than were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?
In Greenland what we saw was American imperialism with no clothes. Naked and vain.
Important to realize that Trump’s approach to Canada and Greenland is like his approach to Ukraine. It’s not even simply American imperialism. It is America enabling Russian imperialism.
It’s America destroying its own best alliances, cutting itself off from its own crucial bases, making a Russian nuclear first strike on the US easier, opening Arctic territories that were once safe to Russian expansion.
That’s the one logic that makes it all make sense. There is no conception of US interests, including an imperial one, in which this makes sense.
In case you haven’t been following, here is a short summary of the misnamed Russian-American "peace process" regarding Ukraine.
The US demands that Ukraine accept an immediate unconditional ceasefire. Ukraine agrees.
Russia rejects any talk of such a ceasefire, and instead asks for a halt on strikes on energy targets, an area where Ukraine is hurting Russia. The US agrees and Ukraine agrees.
Russia within one day violates the terms of its own proposal, attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure along with other civilian targets. There is no US response.
Meanwhile Russia insists that the United States enforce on Ukraine Russia’s war aims, even though they are outrageous and even though Russia is not winning the war. The US agrees.
The United States also insists that Ukraine concede its mineral wealth in exchange for nothing at all.
This has not been a peace process. It has not even been appeasement. It has been the US throwing its power on Russia’s side in a war of aggression.
In a constitutional republic, such as our own, freedom and security alike are grounded in the rule of law. In a rule-of-law state, we can count on the government not apprehending us and deporting us without due process of law and without providing some justification. This practical dignity of our bodies is called habeas corpus, which means that authorities must provide a justification to a court for taking control of your physical body. Logically and historically this is at the foundation of our entire tradition of rights. The individual body comes first; the government must have a good legal reason to confine it. From this logic, as strengthened from the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago, to the first English writs of habeas corpus four hundred years ago, to the American Constitution, emerges a usefully liberating skepticism about government purposes. Authorities will always find reasons not to take the individual seriously, and, if permitted, will conspire among themselves to confine our bodies and make us unfree. For this very reason, we have a number of laws, such as the Federal Records Act, whose purpose is to make sure that we know what our government is doing. It is not just that we want them to have a reason for seizing our bodies. It is that we want to be able to head off the kind of government that would plot to do such a thing for tyrannical reasons. This logic of freedom and tyranny is why government officials, such as those on the Signal chat, are required to record their interactions. Michael Waltz, who initiated the conversation, had the Signal messages set to self-delete. This is a violation of the Federal Records Act and other applicable laws, whose underlying purpose is to protect people from a conspiring government. And so Waltz's action is suggestion of a troubling pattern. Signalgate is shocking on its own. But it is perhaps even more troubling when we begin to understand why the people on the chat were using Signal to make and implement policy. They were risking national security by doing so. But this was worth it to them, apparently, because Signal allows them to deny the rights of Americans.
[I]t was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity the violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe.
Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.
