PEN America:

One theme that runs through virtually every educational gag order is patriotism. On its own, that’s unremarkable. Every state in the country has education-related laws on the books designed to produce patriotic, civic-minded students.

But what legislators are doing now is different. Instead of simply requiring students to learn about, say, the Mayflower Compact or the importance of democracy, lawmakers are attempting to censor what they consider to be “anti-American” ideas, regulate instruction on slavery and racism, and prohibit conversations about contemporary injustice.

In other words, the purpose of these bills is not simply to cultivate patriotism. Rather, it is to make patriotism–or more specifically, a knee jerk and uncritical form of patriotism–compulsory.

There is a long history of such legally mandated patriotism in the United States. The Sedition Act of 1918 was used to imprison antiwar protestors during World War I. Until the 1940s, laws required students and teachers to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. During the Cold War, teachers were compelled by law to swear loyalty oaths to the country. This all testifies to a strain of American censoriousness centered on patriotic sentiment, one that in recent decades schools had successfully kept at bay.

No longer. The current wave of educational gag orders has renewed this threat to America’s educational institutions.

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Instead of targeting specific historical topics for censorship, they propose simply to ban criticism of the United States.

For example, Kentucky HB 706 would prohibit any “revisionist history of America’s founding.” So does Kentucky HB 487, which also bans use of any material deemed to “disparage the fundamental American value of equality.” Iowa SB 2043 bars K-12 teachers from discussing the Pledge of Allegiance “in any manner” that one might reasonably understand to constitute “unpatriotic commentary on the United States.” And under Oklahoma SB 588, public school teachers would be unable to endorse, favor or promote socialism, communism, Marxism, or any form of “anti-American bias.” What constitutes “anti-American bias”? The bill does not specify, but violations are punishable by the loss of state financial support, state accreditation, or both. Another Oklahoma bill, SB 614, would extend that last set of prohibitions to public universities, too.

Indeed, many of these compulsory patriotism bills apply to higher education, including Kentucky HB 487 and Missouri HB 2129 and SB 645. These last two would require high school and university-level courses on American history to “promote an overall positive…understanding of the United States.”

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The history of compulsory patriotism in the United States is not an attractive one. Most Americans look back on the Sedition Act, the Red Scare, the Smith Act, and McCarthyism as stains on the American character, not as something to emulate today. Unfortunately, in a misguided attempt to regulate what teachers can and cannot say about this country, state legislators now appear intent on repeating their predecessors’ mistakes. In doing so, supporters of these bills are in fact proposing a vision of patriotism that is not only unquestioning, but fragile. Each month, as more educational gag orders become law, we come closer to replicating the anti-democratic mistakes of our past.

Maroon beret => Airborne

How did Galloway get this classy Russia state-affiliated media tag? I want one! Decades ago I was used to being told I was in the pay of the Soviet Union, then during the 1990s that disappeared (leaving me with a stack of unpaid invoices of course), and I went without a nasty evil overlord until 9/11, when I could become knowingly or unknowingly complicit with The Terrorists™. In 2022, thankfully, I have again received a „Russian troll“ accolade on Twitter, however now that I know this official tag exists I feel somewhat naked without it.

Guardian:

Truss told a Nato foreign ministers’ dinner that the Nato-Russian Founding Act, the basis of cooperation between Moscow and Nato, was at an end. She said: “The age of engagement is over. We need a new approach to security in Europe based on resilience, defence and deterrence.

“There is no time for false comfort. Russia is not retreating but regrouping and repositioning to push harder for the east and south of Ukraine.”

Truss added that this would require a new approach to those countries that might be at risk of being ensnared in Russia’s web – Moldova, Georgia, Finland and Sweden.

BBC:

Vladimir Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova works in academia and business

The US has imposed sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, including his daughters.The list also includes the family of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and major banks.

…

The US said that Mr Putin’s daughters, Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova and Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, were being put under sanctions „for being the adult children of Putin, a person whose property and interests in property are blocked“.

Guardian:

The president was tearful as he took the stage at North America’s Building trades union legislative conference, talking of the “horrifying atrocities” coming to light in Ukraine.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures from Bucha and outside of Kyiv, bodies left in streets as Russian troops withdrew, some shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs, civilians executed in cold blood, bodies dumped into mass graves, a sense of brutality and humanity left for all the world to see unapologetically,” Biden said.

“There’s nothing less happening than major war crimes. Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable. And together with our allies and our partners, we’re going to keep raising the economic cost and ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia’s economic isolation.”

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic:

But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

This fight is not theoretical. It requires armies, strategies, weapons, and long-term plans.

I, for one, have begun strategizing and making my long-term plans to combat the fierce Hungarian foe. I have already made several careful reconnaissance expeditions into the Hungarian heartland, the most recent just last October, and I plan further missions in the near future. I will be increasing my knowledge of Hungarian politics, history, language, culture, geography. There is much to learn if we wish to prevent the tragic loss of American🇺🇸 democracy™ to the nefarious cunning of alien subversion.

Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967:

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

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And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 — in 1945 rather — after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China — for whom the Vietnamese have no great love — but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States‘ influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was over­thrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing — in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon, the only solid — solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call „fortified hamlets.“ The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call „VC“ or „communists“? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of „aggression from the North“ as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred — rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called „enemy,“ I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the — for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

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The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing „clergy and laymen concerned“ committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

Daniil Dubov playing chess: „I could miss the end of the world while analyzing the Italian opening.“ Foto: Jacek Prondzynski / Newspix / IMAGO

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Dubov, you are one of the 44 Russian chess players who, in an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the beginning of March, called for an end to the war of aggression on Ukraine. Why did you decide to do this?

Dubov: You probably think that Russia is a bad country and we are bad people. But there is a large number of people who share the same values as you do in Europe. When the military actions started, it felt crazy, it was hard to believe. We were just shocked. When we published the letter, it felt good, like we could make a difference. Now it looks like it didn’t make a difference. By now you can’t even use the word „war” in Russia. Our letter was published before this new law, so at least we are not criminals.

DER SPIEGEL: Would you still say the word war now?

Dubov: No. Russian media wouldn’t be able to quote me then. It’s strange that a single word can get you into trouble.

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DER SPIEGEL: Do you personally also feel the West’s sanctions against Russia?

Dubov: I do feel them, but I can live with them. For example, I haven’t yet received my prize money for the first Grand Prix tournament in February because of the problems with banking transactions. Netflix and Instagram are blocked. Some of the medications became unavailable. But compared to the people who are really in trouble, these are of course no problems.

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DER SPIEGEL: Russian players are still allowed to play in tournaments, but not with your country’s flag. They now play with the flag of the world federation FIDE. What do you think of that?

Dubov: I find it strange. Everyone knows where I come from, where I live, which country I played for. To ban the flag for every Russian is like equating the whole country with the current government. I feel great when I play for Russia, but I don’t represent the Kremlin. I represent Dostoevsky and Chekhov – I represent the culture, the people.

DER SPIEGEL: FIDE has decided that the Olympiad, the most important team competition, will not take place in Moscow but in Chennai, India. Russian teams are excluded. How do you view this decision?

Dubov: In the current situation, FIDE had to make this decision. Because when we talk about FIDE, we are talking about business. In terms of finding sponsors, this is clearly a good move. But it is possible that there will be a team under a neutral flag, so Russians will be allowed to compete, just not under the Russian flag.

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DER SPIEGEL: You protested for the freedom of Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny after he was arrested in early 2021.

Dubov: Yes, Alexander Grischuk and I were there. You probably think it took a lot of courage, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything either. Basically, you wait for the police to take action and attack people. Then you go home. If you don’t leave in time, the police catch you. Then it becomes uncomfortable.

DER SPIEGEL: Has that happened to you too?

Dubov: That doesn’t matter now. Anyway, I didn’t go to the protests this time. I think it doesn’t achieve anything. With Navalny, I had the feeling that there was a chance that a very, very large group of people would send a message that would be heard. What is the goal now? Do people really think that the government will call off the troops because a few thousand people take to the streets? That may sound cynical, but quite honestly, I don’t want to be beaten for a goal for which I see no chance.

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DER SPIEGEL: Do you already have personal plans for the coming months?

Dubov: No. There’s not much to look forward to. I find it hard to think about my future in chess. Nuclear war could break out. I could miss the end of the world while analyzing the Italian opening.

Die Zeit:

Annalena Baerbock kündigt schärfere Sanktionen gegen Russland an

It’s April 3.