I may be in the shoal waters of Godwin’s Law, but bear with me. The thing about World War II, aside from being the Big Event of the 20th century (or maybe because it was the Big Event of the 20th century), was the drama. A world clawing itself out of years of economic mayhem, ethnic hatred belching everywhere, little tin dictators, comic if not for the wholesale slaughter, politics of fear and division and suspicion, even on the “good guys” side. There was the run-up, the war and then 70 years of telling its stories. We’re still not done.
You see where I’m going with this, generally, but the specific thing jumping out at me lately is fear and how it drives everything. The government fears the terrorist, so it creates a police state and the citizens fear the government, there’s a general diminution of civil rights around the world, because we’re all afraid of something.
So, just like in the run up to WWII (we’re still in the run-up stage, right?) we have subplots. We’ve Julian Assange living on a tiny plot of Ecuador in the middle of London, hiding out from sex crime charges in Sweden which may or may not be bogus but what’s sure is the US government would like to imprison him for life, because he enabled the telling of embarrassing secrets. (Although it’s a dramatic set-up the movie stunk, I hear. Came and went before I could see it.) Edward Snowden, who did Mr. Assange one better, doesn’t seem much more comfortable in Moscow, advising the Brazilian government from afar.
On cue, out struts Vlad Putin, shirtless, riding or wrestling some animal. During his workweek, he periodically threatens to cut off gas supplies, plays with Ukraine like it’s the Sudetenland (which is sort of is). You could plot it is as Gays/Jews, summer/winter, Olympics/Olympics. (So, in Godwin’s game does that make this 1936?) With the torch sputtering its way across Russia
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, Putin grants amnesty to some (some) of his political prisoners, people he should have never jailed in the first place.
Like I said, fear. The releases don’t matter; new arrests can be made later if needed. The message is there. The corporations sponsoring the upcoming Sochi Games are afraid for their investment. I’m sure they made this clear to the Russian Olympic Committee, which is caught between fear of PR rerun of the Jimmy Carter-boycotted 1980 Moscow summer games and their fear of who might fill those recently-emptied cells.
Barack Obama snubs, rather than boycotts the 2014 games (he has enough saucepans boiling over on the stove of foreign affairs) and certainly fears it won’t take all that much more friction to send the global economy sliding back down stairs so laboriously climbed. And if he’s not, he should be afraid of all this human rights talk, because President Nobel-Peace-Prize-I-Kill-You-With-Flying-Robots ain’t so popular the world over, either. When the US swims for the bottom, it gives cover for every other deep diver.
Japan’s re-arming, China’s building a navy, North Korea’s got the bomb and a dictator killing off his own family. The Mediterranean is ringed by six flavors of crisis.
The passing of Nelson Mandela would seem a too-obvious plot device if it were mere fiction, the end of a brief era of hope that repression could be overcome by conviction.
All very theatrical, will provide Hollywood fodder for decades. Woo hoo.
Stuck in Godwin’s time machine, I see clearly why Franklin Roosevelt included “Freedom from Fear” in his “Four Freedoms” speech. It seems to seep around every corner, influence every decision, touch every life. Fear seems the currency of these times as it was then. We’re back on the fear standard.
I wonder, in the years before the second war, did people keep thinking, “Any day, we’ll get back to normal…” There’s still a part of me waiting to take up the life I had before 9-11, before the recession, something that still doesn’t quite believe that things have changed and won’t change back.
© Mark Floegel, 2013
Back on the Fear Standard
I may be in the shoal waters of Godwin’s Law, but bear with me. The thing about World War II, aside from being the Big Event of the 20th century (or maybe because it was the Big Event of the 20th century), was the drama. A world clawing itself out of years of economic mayhem, ethnic hatred belching everywhere, little tin dictators, comic if not for the wholesale slaughter, politics of fear and division and suspicion, even on the “good guys” side. There was the run-up, the war and then 70 years of telling its stories. We’re still not done.
You see where I’m going with this, generally, but the specific thing jumping out at me lately is fear and how it drives everything. The government fears the terrorist, so it creates a police state and the citizens fear the government, there’s a general diminution of civil rights around the world, because we’re all afraid of something.
So, just like in the run up to WWII (we’re still in the run-up stage, right?) we have subplots. We’ve Julian Assange living on a tiny plot of Ecuador in the middle of London, hiding out from sex crime charges in Sweden which may or may not be bogus but what’s sure is the US government would like to imprison him for life, because he enabled the telling of embarrassing secrets. (Although it’s a dramatic set-up the movie stunk, I hear. Came and went before I could see it.) Edward Snowden, who did Mr. Assange one better, doesn’t seem much more comfortable in Moscow, advising the Brazilian government from afar.
On cue, out struts Vlad Putin, shirtless, riding or wrestling some animal. During his workweek, he periodically threatens to cut off gas supplies, plays with Ukraine like it’s the Sudetenland (which is sort of is). You could plot it is as Gays/Jews, summer/winter, Olympics/Olympics. (So, in Godwin’s game does that make this 1936?) With the torch sputtering its way across Russia
, Putin grants amnesty to some (some) of his political prisoners, people he should have never jailed in the first place.
Like I said, fear. The releases don’t matter; new arrests can be made later if needed. The message is there. The corporations sponsoring the upcoming Sochi Games are afraid for their investment. I’m sure they made this clear to the Russian Olympic Committee, which is caught between fear of PR rerun of the Jimmy Carter-boycotted 1980 Moscow summer games and their fear of who might fill those recently-emptied cells.
Barack Obama snubs, rather than boycotts the 2014 games (he has enough saucepans boiling over on the stove of foreign affairs) and certainly fears it won’t take all that much more friction to send the global economy sliding back down stairs so laboriously climbed. And if he’s not, he should be afraid of all this human rights talk, because President Nobel-Peace-Prize-I-Kill-You-With-Flying-Robots ain’t so popular the world over, either. When the US swims for the bottom, it gives cover for every other deep diver.
Japan’s re-arming, China’s building a navy, North Korea’s got the bomb and a dictator killing off his own family. The Mediterranean is ringed by six flavors of crisis.
The passing of Nelson Mandela would seem a too-obvious plot device if it were mere fiction, the end of a brief era of hope that repression could be overcome by conviction.
All very theatrical, will provide Hollywood fodder for decades. Woo hoo.
Stuck in Godwin’s time machine, I see clearly why Franklin Roosevelt included “Freedom from Fear” in his “Four Freedoms” speech. It seems to seep around every corner, influence every decision, touch every life. Fear seems the currency of these times as it was then. We’re back on the fear standard.
I wonder, in the years before the second war, did people keep thinking, “Any day, we’ll get back to normal…” There’s still a part of me waiting to take up the life I had before 9-11, before the recession, something that still doesn’t quite believe that things have changed and won’t change back.
© Mark Floegel, 2013