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t the small elementary school in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, in northeastern France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents, and her real mother must have been a whore. It was the late 1940s, just after the war, a time when whispered stories like this one passed from parents to children. Women who were said to have slept with occupying soldiers—“horizontal collaborators”—had their heads shaved and were publicly shamed by angry crowds. In the schoolyard, children jeered at those who were said to be born of “unknown fathers.”

The idea that Gisèle might have been abandoned by someone of ill repute made her terribly ashamed. At the age of 10, she gathered her courage and confronted her mother, who told her the truth: We adopted you when you were 4 years old; you spoke German, but now you are French. Gisèle and her mother hardly ever talked about it again.

Gisèle found her adoption file, hidden in a drawer in her parents’ room, and from time to time she snuck a look at it. It contained little information. When she was 18, she burned it on the stove. “I said to myself, If I want to live, I have to get rid of all this,” she told me.

Gisèle is 79 now, and she does not regret burning the papers. For a time, she was able to put aside questions about her origins. At 17, she took a job in a children’s home and hospital and realized she had found her calling. She spent her career working mainly in day-care centers, and eventually founded her own. In 1972, she married Justin Niango, a chemistry student from the Ivory Coast. They bought an old hotel just behind Stanislas Square in Nancy and turned it into a house.

I visited Gisèle there in June. It was easy to imagine the vibrant family life that once took place inside: her children—Virginie, Gabriel, Grégoire, and Matthieu—running up and down the stairs and playing instruments in their rooms. At school, they were sometimes the only Black kids in their class. Gisèle has a lot of stories about the cruel comments made through the years; all the stories end with her confronting the culprit.

Gisèle at home in Nancy, France; a young Gisèle in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, France (Nolwenn Brod for The Atlantic; courtesy of Gisèle Niango)

Gisèle held off on telling her children that she had been adopted, because she was worried that the revelation might weaken their bonds with her parents. Sometimes, though, the secret “burned a bit.” She knew she would share it eventually.

When her mother died, in 2004, she gathered her children and told them. They were shocked, and asked questions whose answers she did not know.

After years of denial, Gisèle longed to find those answers. She remembered the name and place of birth that had been listed in her burned adoption file: Gisela Magula, born in Bar-le-Duc, in northeastern France. She started her research there, and went on to write to the Arolsen Archives, the international center on Nazi persecution, in Germany, to ask if there was any mention of her in the organization’s extensive records.

In March 2005, Gisèle received a reply: She had not been born in Bar-le-Duc after all, but near Liège, Belgium, in a Nazi maternity home at the Château de Wégimont. That home and others like it had been set up by the SS, an elite corps of Nazi soldiers, under the umbrella of the Lebensborn association, through which the regime sought to encourage the birth of babies of “good blood” in order to hasten its ultimate goal of Aryan racial purity.

Everything Gisèle believed about herself wavered. The family she’d spent her adult life defending against racism, she realized, descended from one of history’s darkest racial projects.

azism was an ideology of destruction, one that held as its primary aim the elimination of “inferior races.” But another, equally fervent aspect of the Nazi credo was focused on an imagined form of restoration: As soon as they came to power, the Nazis set out to produce a new generation of pure-blooded Germans. The Lebensborn association was a key part of this plan. Established in 1935 under the auspices of the SS, it was intended to encourage procreation among members of the Aryan race by providing birthing mothers with comfort, financial support, and, when necessary, secrecy. The association’s headquarters were in Munich, in the former villa of the writer Thomas Mann, who had left Germany in 1933. In 1936, it opened its first maternity home, in nearby Steinhöring.

The SS was overseen by Heinrich Himmler, who hoped that its elite soldiers would serve as a racial vanguard for a revitalized Germanity. “As far as the value of our blood and the numbers of our population are concerned, we are dying out,” he said in a 1931 address to the SS. “We are called upon to establish foundations so that the next generation can make history.” An agronomist by training, Himmler supervised this undertaking with a level of attention that bordered on voyeurism; initially, all SS leaders’ marriage applications had to be referred to him. All were expected to reproduce: Four children was considered “the minimum amount … for a good sound marriage.” Himmler had no problem with childbearing outside marriage, and criticized the Catholic Church’s hostility toward illegitimate births. Raising “illegitimate or orphaned children of good blood” should be an “accepted custom,” Himmler wrote. In 1939, he issued an order that called on members of the SS to procreate wherever they could, including with women to whom they were not married.

According to Himmler, the Lebensborn homes were intended “primarily for the brides and wives of our young SS men, and secondarily for illegitimate mothers of good blood.” But the latter were, in practice, a majority. Far from the eyes of the world, single mothers could give birth in Lebensborn homes and, if they wanted to, abandon their babies, who would receive the best care before being placed in an adoptive family—so long as the biological parents met the racial criteria (photos of both were required). Early applicants had to meet a height requirement, and had to prove their racial and medical fitness going back two generations. The German historian Georg Lilienthal found that initially, fewer than half of the women who applied were accepted.

Lebensborn employees took note of how the mothers behaved during childbirth, and required them to breastfeed their children if they could. “The woman has her own battlefield,” Adolf Hitler said in 1935. “With every child she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation.”

Lebensborn babies in Germany, 1945 (Robert Capa / ICP / Magnum)

The women also received a daily “ideological education,” according to the historian Lisa Pine. Some of the babies were given a non-Christian first name by Lebensborn staff in a ceremony inspired by old Nordic customs. Under a Nazi flag and a portrait of the führer, in front of a congregation, the master of ceremonies would hold an SS dagger over the newborn and recite this creed: “We take you into our community as a limb of our body. You shall grow up in our protection and bring honor to your name, pride to your brotherhood, and inextinguishable glory to your race.” Through this ceremony, they believed, the child became a member of the SS clan, forever linked to the Reich.

By October 11, 1943, when Gisèle was born, there were about 16 Lebensborn facilities throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. She arrived four days too late to have Himmler as her godfather; the Reichsführer personally sponsored the children who shared his birthday, October 7.

One afternoon last spring, I sat with Gisèle in her living room, dozens of documents and photographs spread out before us. A short woman whose white hair is shot through with a streak of brown, Gisèle is at once reserved and straightforward, with a wry sense of humor. “Himmler really bungled with me,” she joked, referencing her marriage to an African man and their mixed-race family.

Gisèle’s wedding to Justin Niango, 1972; a Niango-family Christmas card (Courtesy of Gisèle Niango)

Gisèle rejects the idea that there’s a connection between her career and her early years spent in a very different kind of day care—she chose her path, after all, long before she knew where she had really come from.

Still, she doesn’t minimize the fact that her life story is inextricable from the history of Nazism. She has often wondered how her origins might shape what she calls her “internal memory”: She has always been terribly afraid of military trucks, trains, and leather boots. She cannot bear to hear babies crying; at her day care, she would often leave her office to comfort the little ones. She worries, too, that she somehow passed something evil on to her children through her genes.

A chance encounter helped Gisèle trace her origins. A few months after her mother’s death, just as she began her research, her cousin went to a funeral where a tall man with blond hair gave a eulogy for the departed, a teacher who had believed in him. The man, Walter Beausert, talked about his arrival in France as a child, in a convoy from Germany. Gisèle’s cousin, who was old enough to remember Gisèle’s adoption and knew that she’d come from Germany, struck up a conversation with Beausert after the funeral. Her cousin wondered whether Gisèle might have been in the same convoy.

Beausert was a Lebensborn child. A decade earlier, he had been the first person in France to testify about the Lebensborn, in a 1994 television report on his quest throughout Europe to find where he was born. Gisèle’s cousin put her in touch with Beausert, who soon helped Gisèle recover her own history.

Sisters of Mercy helped care for the displaced children at Kloster Indersdorf, including Gisèle (far left) and Walter (second from right). (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Lilo Plaschkes)

The story that Gisèle has pieced together is still full of holes, but she now knows the identity of her biological mother. Marguerite Magula was a Hungarian woman who immigrated to Brussels with her parents and sister in 1926. Marguerite eventually went to Germany to work, with her mother and sister, in a garment factory in Saarbrücken. When she got pregnant, in 1943, she ran away and returned to Brussels. Dorothee Schmitz-Köster, the author of Lifelong Lebensborn: The Desired Children of the SS and What Became of Them, told me that by then, the Lebensborn program had somewhat loosened its criteria: A fervent belief in National Socialism could make up for being short, as Marguerite was, though an Aryan certificate, a health certificate, and a certificate of hereditary health were still mandatory for both parents.

Gisèle’s feelings toward Marguerite have changed over time. When she learned from the Steinhöring archives that some mothers had searched for their children after the war, trying to get them back, Gisèle came to hate her. “She never sought me out,” Gisèle said. “I have no compassion, nothing; quite the opposite. That’s not a mother.” A postwar document denying Marguerite’s request for Hungarian citizenship (she and her sister were then stateless) mentions her “bad life.” Had Gisèle and Marguerite met, maybe she could have explained. But Marguerite died in 2001, just a few years before Gisèle began her search.

Gisèle has been less curious about the identity of her father; she imagines him as the stereotype of an SS officer—undoubtedly “a bastard.”

In 2009, Gisèle met a half brother, Claude, born after the war, who was raised by Marguerite. They still visit each other from time to time. Claude, she said, describes their mother as having mistreated him. He once told Gisèle she was lucky not to have grown up with their mother.

ike Gisèle, Walter Beausert owed the discovery of his origins to chance. At the birth of his first daughter, Valérie, in 1966, the midwife stared at Beausert, then 22 years old. Behind his helmet of straight blond hair, she noticed his light-blue eyes—one of them was a glass eye that never closed—and remembered the 17 small children who had arrived by train at the hospital in Commercy in 1946. “I think you come from Germany,” she said to him. It confirmed something Walter had always suspected.

Walter was the only child in that convoy to France never to have been adopted. He grew up in children’s homes and became a guarded, tough teenager. Unusually for a Lebensborn child, Beausert was circumcised. He never knew why. “My father was obsessed with the search for his family. He looked for his mother all his life,” Walter’s daughter Valérie, now 56, told me when we met at an old art-nouveau brasserie in Nancy.

Valérie Beausert; her father, Walter Beausert (Nolwenn Brod for The Atlantic; courtesy of Valérie Beausert)

In 1994, while filming the television report about the Lebensborn, Walter traveled to the site of the former Lebensborn home at the Château de Wégimont, where he heard from locals about a woman named Rita, a Lebensborn cook, who had had a baby boy named Walter. As German soldiers tried to take Walter away from Rita, the story went, he was dropped and his left eye was injured. This was the lead the grown-up Walter had been waiting for—Rita, he came to believe, was his mother.

“Except that’s not true,” Valérie said. “We met this Rita; we know who this Walter is. He’s not my father. But he didn’t want to hear anything about it. He said Rita had a second child who was also named Walter. I told him, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’ His denial was pathological.”

Valérie, who has the same light-blue eyes and straight blond hair as her father, was called a “sale boche”—“dirty Kraut”—at school during her childhood, just as her father had been called a “white rat.” In 1986, Valérie fell in love with a man who was a refugee from Vietnam. “My son’s father was the first person of color in our village,” she said. “But for me it was a nonissue. I felt like an outsider myself.”

A young Walter; Walter and his grandson Lâm (Courtesy of Valérie Beausert)

Their son, Lâm, was born with one brown eye and one blue eye. One eye—the blue one—presented with a deficiency. The doctor identified a congenital abnormality that could cause blindness, which Valérie also carried and had passed on to him. Her father’s glass eye, she realized, was not the result of an injury at all. “When my son had to undergo an operation, I told my father, ‘You see, it is congenital.’” Her father was outraged, Valérie recalled: “Nonsense! You can’t say that!”

It wasn’t just that Walter wanted to believe that his glass eye was the result of his biological mother’s struggle to protect him from German soldiers; he was also terrified of disease, of being “a carrier of defects,” Valérie said, and went to great lengths to prove his superior strength and stoicism. One day, while he was chopping wood, his friend’s chainsaw ripped through a trunk, cutting both of Walter’s calves to the bone. Walter made himself two tourniquets and drove home. Valérie remembers him walking up the stairs as if nothing had happened, both legs bloody, and calmly asking her to call an ambulance.

Walter found others’ fragility unbearable. When his wife, Valérie’s mother, was diagnosed with cancer, Valérie sometimes kept him out of her room. “He would tell her, ‘You have to fight; you must eat; that’s how you get better.’ It was a form of psychological abuse.”

To Valérie, this trait in her father was a troubling echo of the Nazi emphasis on physical superiority. “A young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp steel,” Hitler proclaimed in 1935. Lebensborn children born with conditions such as Down syndrome, cleft lip, or clubfoot were thrown out of the homes, or killed.

Sometimes Valérie worries about what she, and her son, might have inherited from her father. “When I see some of my son’s character traits—a little tough, a little authoritarian—which could belong to my father but also to me, I always have this fleeting anxiety: Did we pass along something of the Lebensborn?”

n the summer of 1945, Life magazine published a report, with pictures by the photographer Robert Capa, on the “super babies” of a Lebensborn home. “The Hohenhorst bastards of Himmler’s men are blue-eyed, flaxen-haired and pig fat,” one caption read. “Too much porridge, plenty of sunlight have made this Nazi baby in hand-knitted suit and bootees so fat and healthy that he completely fills his over-sized carriage,” read another. “Grown pig fat under care and overstuffing Nazi nurses, they now pose to the Allies a problem yet to be solved.” The tone gives an idea of the level of resentment that Americans and Europeans felt in 1945 toward those who were spared the war’s horrors—even toddlers.

But not all Lebensborn babies were blue-eyed, flaxen haired, or even, for that matter, “pig fat.” Likely because of the lack of bonding with a single caregiver, some children were developmentally delayed. Medical exams performed after the war indicate that Walter was underweight. A document from French social workers describes Gisèle as having had tantrums upon her arrival in France.

For Gisèle and her fellow Lebensborn children, the Allies’ liberation of Belgium marked the beginning of a journey—in wicker cradles wedged in the back of military trucks—through a devastated Europe. In The Factory of Perfect Children, the French journalist Boris Thiolay recounts that German soldiers in retreat left the Lebensborn home near Liège on September 1, 1944, with about 20 toddlers. After several stops in Germany and Poland, the children found themselves at the very first Lebensborn, in Steinhöring. Walter Beausert had ended up there too.

In Steinhöring, SS officials were crammed together with children and pregnant women from other institutions that were now closed. Boxes of documents cluttered the corridors of the maternity ward, where women continued to give birth.

When the news of Hitler’s death broke, officials burned as many documents as they could. Thiolay describes the goals of this purge: “The birth registers, the identity of the children, the fathers, the organization chart, the names of the people in charge: everything must disappear. The evidence of the Lebensborn’s very existence must be removed.” But the Nazis’ obsession with documents made fully expunging the records an impossible task—there were too many.

A few days after Hitler’s death, a small detachment of U.S. soldiers arrived in Steinhöring, and the children changed hands: The Americans were responsible for them now.

Later in 1945, Gisèle and Walter were transferred to Kloster Indersdorf, nine miles from Dachau, where they were housed in a 12th-century monastery that had been requisitioned by the U.S. Army for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to use as a reception center for displaced children. There, the Lebensborn children lived together with survivors: Jewish children who had made it out of the concentration camps, as well as Eastern and Central European gentile teenagers who had been forced laborers during the war.

Lillian Robbins, the American social worker who directed the displaced-children’s center at Kloster Indersdorf, consults with a nun in 1946. Walter Beausert is visible at far left; Gisèle is sitting up at Robbins’s feet. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Lilo Plaschkes)

The older children were encouraged to help the younger ones. A picture shows three small blond girls gently combing babies’ hair and spoon-feeding them as if they were playing with dolls. Another photo shows a group of babies on a checkered comforter under the watch of the American social worker Lillian Robbins and a Sister of Mercy. In the corner, sitting on the floor away from the other toddlers, is little Walter, one eye closed, smiling at the photographer.

The UNRRA staff tried to find the children’s surviving family members, if there were any, though some children had no recorded identity. Some were given an approximate birth date. This was perhaps what happened with Walter Beausert, whose official date of birth falls on a suspicious, though of course possible, date: January 1, 1944. His birthplace was unknown, but, likely because he was believed to have previously lived at a Lebensborn home in France, UNRRA staff decided to send him there from Indersdorf.

As for young Gisela, her file showed that she was born in “Wégimont” (omitting the château’s full name), which staff believed to be a French town. She joined Walter in the convoy bound for the Meuse region of France, whose population had never recovered from World War I. Gisela became Gisèle, and her life as a French child began.

ere they “survivors,” these toddlers who owed their existence to Nazi birth policy, who ate fresh fruit and porridge while other babies were gassed or starved to death?

On October 10, 1947, in Nuremberg, four Lebensborn leaders appeared before a special American military tribunal as part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted ancillary Nazi leaders. Three charges were brought against them: crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. Three out of the four leaders were found guilty of the third charge. But the tribunal established that the Lebensborn had been only a “welfare institution.” The children, therefore, were not considered victims.

Until the 1970s, Lebensborn homes were treated as a rumor, or described as stud farms where SS men mated with racially selected women. The first book to be published about Lebensborn came out in France in 1975 and contributed to this misunderstanding by suggesting that the “nurses” were in fact selected to be breeding mothers. Georg Lilienthal wrote the first academic work on the program, in 1986.

In the nine years the program lasted, at least 9,200 children were born in the homes. Some 1,200 were born in Norway, which had the most SS maternity homes outside Germany. After the war, these children, along with women who were suspected of having had affairs with German soldiers, were ostracized. Some of these women were even interned in camps. France had only one Lebensborn home, which operated for less than a year, so Lebensborn children there were far less likely to be recognized as such.

In 2011, Gisèle and Walter traveled to Indersdorf to join the annual commemoration held there by former residents of UNRRA’s reception center; Gisèle described the organizers as “Jewish children,” just as she still refers to herself as a “child of the Lebensborn.” “It was extraordinary” to be included in the ceremony, she told me. While she was in Indersdorf, she went to visit Dachau twice. She felt she needed to confront what she might have believed in had she been raised in an SS family.

Together, Gisèle and Walter started the Association for the Memory of Child Victims of the Lebensborn in 2016, an effort to encourage public recognition of Lebensborn children as victims of war.

Walter, for his part, became obsessed with gaining acceptance from the Jewish community. He studied the Torah and identified as a Zionist. “He used to celebrate Jewish holidays,” Valérie remembers. “His Jewish friends were a great help to my father. To tell him, ‘You are also a victim, Walter’ was the greatest gift.”

He died in 2021, wearing a Star of David around his neck. He had been in poor health, and living in a retirement home. A few days earlier, for the first time in his life, he had admitted that maybe Rita was not his mother.

Valérie has kept a comb that still contains her father’s hair. One day, she hopes to find out what secrets his DNA might contain.

isèle’s husband, Justin, died 15 years ago, but she still spends nearly every winter in Africa, in his village, where she is “famous,” she said, in part because residents saw her on TV, in a segment about the Lebensborn.

At home in Nancy, she keeps a photograph of her biological mother on display, though she doesn’t look at it much anymore. “It’s my heritage. I don’t want to forget that I was born from this woman,” she told me. All she wants now is for her story to be told. “I’m modest,” she joked. “I want the whole world to know about it.”

Her son Gabriel married a German woman, and her grandchildren speak German, a language she has completely forgotten. “It shows that history goes on,” she said. Her son Matthieu is working on a book about the Lebensborn, and with his wife, Camille, he wrote a play about the children’s story. Recently, I attended a reading at a small theater in Paris. I watched Gisèle, seated next to her daughter Virginie, as she watched her own story acted out.

“They say history is written by the victors,” one actor said. “But most of all, it’s written by the adults.” Gisèle discreetly dried her tears behind her glasses.

It was only a matter of time before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—a peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, a speaker at white-nationalist rallies, a supporter of political violence, and an all-around unhinged individual—would renew her call for secession.

On Presidents’ Day, Greene tweeted:

We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.

The temptation of many people, eager to move past America’s political freak show, will be to ignore her comments and dismiss her as an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated. The less said about her, the better.

That’s unwise.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Greene is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security; she has become a confidante of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. He has “forged an ironclad bond” with Greene, according to The New York Times. She has “taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to Mr. McCarthy.” He has in turn lavished praise on her.

“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy told the Times. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.” He’ll even stick together with those arguing for secession, apparently.

Greene is not alone in her views. She is giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment in the Republican Party. Among Republicans in the South, for example, support for secession was 66 percent in June 2021, according to a Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll. (The poll found support for secession growing among every partisan group in the months following the January 6 riot at the Capitol.)

Last summer, thousands of Texas Republicans approved a platform that called on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession from the United States. And shortly after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Rush Limbaugh, one of the most dominant figures on the American right, said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’”

Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, added that “a lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant … and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.” (Limbaugh said of secession, “I myself haven’t made up my mind.”)

The Republican Party, forged a century and a half ago in the fight against secession, now finds the move worth contemplating.

Civil War–like secession isn’t going to happen in the United States, at least not anytime soon. But all of the emotions that are attached to a desire for secession—seething resentment, existential fear, an unforgiving spirit, contempt and hatred for those who disagree with you—are stoked by the kind of rhetoric employed by Greene and those who see the world as she does. Such language will further destroy America’s political culture and could easily lead to extensive political violence.

[Seyward Darby: There’s nothing fun or funny about Marjorie Taylor Greene]

Don’t expect a wave of Republican lawmakers and current and potential presidential candidates to get on the secession bandwagon. That is still too extreme for most of them, at least right now. But I doubt that many Republicans, aside from courageous figures such as Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Liz Cheney , the former chair of the House Republican Conference, will call Greene out. (Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan have shown integrity throughout the MAGA years as well.)

But by and large, if Republicans call Greene out, they will offer only gentle rebukes. Mostly, they’ll want to ignore her comments, change the topic, and try to redirect attention to Democrats. During the past half a dozen years, Republicans have perfected whataboutism.

What the rest of us learned during the Trump era is that a party led by craven men and women—some of them cynical, others true believers, almost all afraid to speak out—will end up normalizing the transgressive, unethical, and moronic.

Trump did horrifying things at the end of his presidency, including attempting a coup and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. The majority of Republicans tolerated what he did, to a degree that simply wouldn’t have happened at the beginning of his presidency. It took time for the corruption to fully take hold, for the party—lawmakers and the right-wing media complex—to fall completely into line. But fall in line they did. Trump may be losing his grip on the Republican Party, and that is a good thing, but his nihilistic imprint remains all over it.

MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have added calls for secession to their corrosive lies about the 2020 presidential election. More incendiary and treacherous claims will follow. Greene and McCarthy—one crazed, the other cowardly—embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP. Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous.

You never forget the first time a doctor gives up: when they tell you that they don’t know what to do—they have no further tests to run, no treatments to offer—and that you’re on your own. It happened to me at the age of 27, and it happens to many others with chronic pain.

I don’t remember what film I’d gone to see, but I know I was at The Oaks Theater, an old arts cinema on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, when pain stabbed me in the side. This was followed by an urgent need to urinate; after bolting to the bathroom, I felt better, but a band of tension ran through my groin. As the hours went by, the pain resolved into a need to pee again, which woke me up at 1 or 2 a.m. I went to the bathroom—but, as if I was in some bad dream, urinating made no difference. The band of sensation remained, insusceptible to feedback from my body. I spent a night of hallucinatory sleeplessness sprawled on the bathroom floor, peeing from time to time in a vain attempt to snooze the somatic alarm.

My primary-care doctor guessed that I had a urinary-tract infection. But the test came back negative—as did more elaborate tests, including a cystoscopy in which an apparently teenage urologist inserted an old-fashioned cystoscope through my urethra in agonizing increments, like a telescopic radio antenna. It certainly felt like something was wrong, but the doctor found no visible lesion or infection.

[Read: The enduring mystery of pain measurement]

What followed were years of fruitless consultations, the last of which produced a label, chronic pelvic pain—which means what it sounds like and explains very little—and a discouraging prognosis. The condition is not well understood, and there is no reliable treatment. I live with the hum of pain as background noise, flare-ups decimating sleep from time to time.

That pain is bad for you may seem too obvious to warrant scrutiny. But as a philosopher, I find myself asking why it is so bad—especially in a case like mine, where the pain I feel from day to day is not debilitating. To my relief, I am able to function pretty well; sleep deprivation is the worst of it. What more is there to say about the harm of being in pain?

Virginia Woolf may have invented the commonplace that language struggles to communicate pain. “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,” she wrote, “has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Woolf’s maxim was developed by the literary and cultural critic Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, a book that has become a classic. “Physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content,” she wrote. “It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.”

But as someone who has lived with pain for 19 years, I think Woolf and Scarry are wrong. Physical pain has “referential content”: It represents a part of the body as being damaged or imperiled even when, as in my case, it isn’t really. Pain can be deceptive. And we have many words for it: Pulsing, burning, and contracting are all good words for mine.

That pain represents the body in distress, bringing it into focus, helps us better understand why it is bad. Pain disrupts what the philosopher and physician Drew Leder calls the “transparency” of the healthy body. We don’t normally attend to the body itself; instead, we interact with the world “through” it, as if it were a transparent medium. Being in pain blurs the corporeal glass. That’s why pain is not just bad in itself: It impedes one’s access to anything good.

This accounts for one of pain’s illusions. Sometimes, I think I want nothing more than to be pain free—but as soon as pain is gone, the body recedes into the background, unappreciated. The joy of being free of pain is like a picture that vanishes when you try to look at it, like turning on the lights to see the dark.

Philosophy illuminates another side of pain—in a way that has practical upshots. This has to do with understanding persistent pain as more than just a sequence of atomized sensations. The temporality of pain transforms its character.

Although I am not always in notable pain, I’m never aware of pain’s onset or relief. By the time I realize it has vanished from the radar of attention, it has been quiet for a while. When the pain is unignorable, it seems like it’s been there forever and will never go away. I can’t project into a future free of pain: I will never be physically at ease. Leder, who also suffers from chronic pain, traces its effects on memory and anticipation: “With chronic suffering a painless past is all but forgotten. While knowing intellectually that we were once not in pain we have lost the bodily memory of how this felt. Similarly, a painless future may be unimaginable.”

We can draw two lessons from this. The first is that we have to focus on the present, not on what is coming in the future: If you can treat pain as a series of self-contained episodes, you can diminish its power. I try to live by what I call the “Kimmy Schmidt rule,” after the sitcom heroine who endured 15 years in an underground bunker with the mantra “You can stand anything for 10 seconds.” My units of time are longer, but I do my imperfect best not to project beyond them. You can have a good day while experiencing pelvic pain. And life is just one day after another.

[Read: The long history of discrimination in pain medicine]

The second lesson is that there’s less to what philosophers call “the separateness of persons” than might appear. Moral philosophers have argued that concern for others does not simply aggregate their harms. If you have to choose between agony for one person or mild headaches for many others, you should choose the headaches, no matter the number. The relief of minor pain for many cannot offset the agony of one, because the pains afflict distinct and separate people. They don’t add up.

Do trade-offs like this make sense within a single life? Philosophers often say they do, but I’ve come to believe that’s wrong. If what I was experiencing was just a sequence of atomized pains, without effects on memory or anticipation, I don’t think it would make sense to trade them for short-lived agony—a three-hour surgery performed without anesthetic, say—any more than it would make sense to trade a million mild headaches for the agony of one person. If I would choose to undergo that surgery, it would be because of the temporal effects of chronic pain, the shadow it casts over past and future.

A lot has been made of pain’s unshareability, how it divides us from one another. In fact, pain is no more shareable over time. My mother-in-law once asked, rhetorically, “Why can one man not piss for another man?” But you can’t piss for your past or future self either. And as we bridge the gulf between now and then to sympathize with ourselves at other times, we sympathize, too, with the suffering of others. Self-compassion is not the same as compassion for other people, but they are not as different as they seem. There is solace in solidarity, in sharing the experience of chronic pain, in compassion’s power to breach the boundaries that separate us from other people, and ourselves.

This article has been excerpted from Kieran Setiya’s new book, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Umwelt: The Hidden Sensory World of Animals

Ira

Mon, 10/31/2022 – 02:24

For many years, Achut Deng’s survival required her to focus, not on the multiple tragedies and near-death experiences that she had endured before reaching the age of 10, but on the safety and stability that she was precariously striving toward. So when she had children of her own, eventually building a middle-class life in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she decided to protect their innocence—an innocence she herself was never afforded—and keep her story to herself. Or, at least, she tried.

Mere days after Deng brought her eldest son home from the hospital in 2007, her past began tearing through the facade she had built. Lying in bed with the baby one night, she pulled a blanket over herself and the boy. As if dropped into a slingshot, she flew back to the moment when her grandmother Koko was killed protecting her; Koko had used her own body, wrapped in an embroidered Sudanese sheet called a milaya, to shield Deng from a spray of bullets barraging the hut where they were hiding. Deng told her doctor about the flashback, and he diagnosed her with PTSD and postpartum depression. After that, she stayed silent about the experience, and the flashbacks that followed.

Soon, it was the children themselves—Deng’s family grew to include a second and a third son—who tested the boundaries of what she was willing to share. Until recently, she had only told them that she’d grown up in Sudan and come to the United States as a refugee. One afternoon, after she and her eldest, who was 11 at the time, watched a Minions movie together, he brought up a film he had seen in school that depicted malnourished children in Africa, and asked, “Mom, was that real?”

“I didn’t think they were ready to know,” Deng told me in a recent interview. “I felt like, What good is it going to do to them? I wasn’t thinking of anything positive.”

“The truth is,” she added, “I haven’t seen those videos, but for all I know, I could be one of the children in them. That was literally me.”

Deng is now in the midst of a dramatic about-face in parenting style following yet another near-death experience, this time with the coronavirus—which made her realize she could die before her children knew who she was. She had made sure that their childhoods were comfortable and devoid of hardship. But in concealing her early experiences, she realized, she had been giving her boys the false impression that life—even a stable one—can exist without suffering.

[Read: How parents can help shield kids from a hurricane’s trauma]

Her new memoir for young readers, Don’t Look Back, was written with her boys in mind, but she also wanted to offer other young people the vital lesson that extreme hardship can be the source of great resilience, and something from which it is possible to move on. The book spans her personal history from age 6 to 25, a decade after she arrived in the United States. It begins with Deng’s vivid memories of her youth on a family farm in what is now South Sudan, surrounded by loving, mostly female relatives. Many of the men, including her father, had been required to join the army before she was born and fight in the second Sudanese civil war; most never returned home once they were conscripted.

As Deng grew up and the fighting continued, younger and younger relatives were called to take up arms, including her 7-year-old uncle. Her perspective as a narrator evolves in the book as she ages, but her observations are astute even in her earlier years. In gripping scenes packed with the kind of granular detail to which a child would be especially attuned, she recounts the two largest ethnic groups in South Sudan, Dinka and Nuer—which had previously been allied—turning against each other. Soon, almost everyone Deng knew had left to fight, been killed, or gone missing. “My legs were too small and my strides too short. I tripped over exposed roots and thick clumps of grass,” she recalls of the night when she, her grandmother, and their neighbors first fled their homes following a violent ambush. Racing through a forest full of dangerous predators, she overhears a dog barking to protect its owner from the approaching rebel forces. Deng’s mind wanders to her own dog, Panyliap, who she silently prays is safe at home waiting for her. Then two gunshots ring out, and the stranger’s dog goes silent. Fearing the worst, she pleads to herself, “Please bark … please bark.”

Effectively orphaned at the age of 6, Deng was taken in by Adual, her mother’s best friend, a widow without any children and one of the book’s most memorable characters. Adual often carried Deng during a thousand-mile journey on foot to what was the largest refugee camp in the world, located in the Kenyan town of Kakuma (Swahili for “nowhere”). She made shoes for Deng out of wood and leaves to protect her tiny, blistered feet; she lanced boils on Deng’s body caused by guinea worms, whose larvae she ingested through the puddle water they sometimes had to drink. In Kakuma, where food was scarce, Adual skipped meals so that Deng and other children could have more to eat.

I first heard Deng’s story while reporting on how the coronavirus pandemic was affecting immigrants. When I learned that Smithfield, the South Dakota meat plant where she worked, had the largest single-source outbreak in the country, I asked the head of the union there to connect me with sick workers. He told me about a single mother of three sons who had nearly died from the virus.

True to her mostly private inclinations, during our first interview, Deng walked me through her experience with COVID-19, only occasionally sprinkling in details that piqued my interest in her backstory. She mentioned that her wages at Smithfield helped support nine family members living in three different countries, and that at her sickest point, when she felt like she had a boulder on her chest that allowed in only the shallowest of breaths, she’d planted herself on the living-room couch, refusing to fall asleep because she feared she wouldn’t wake up. She was not going to let her children grow up as orphans the way that she had, she told me. Two engrossing interviews that were each more than three hours long yielded an article and a podcast that combined Deng’s pandemic experience with a truncated version of her immigration story.

During the course of my reporting, Deng confided in me that for some time, she had privately wondered if her story might inspire other people going through difficult times. The answer came when Joy Peskin, the executive editorial editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, reached out about commissioning a memoir from Deng that would expand on her youth even further. Initially, Deng was torn about the offer. She thought that single parents would benefit most from her story, based on the many who had told her, in response to my coverage, that they considered her a role model. But Peskin sold Deng on the idea of, at least in her first book, speaking directly to readers of the same age she was when her life was first upended.

[Read: Separating kids from their families can permanently damage their brains]

The book was co-written by Keely Hutton, the author of Soldier Boy and Secret Soldiers, two books about children and conflict set amid the Ugandan Civil War and in Europe during World War I. When the collaboration began, Deng was working overnight shifts at the meat plant, so she and Hutton mapped out a strict schedule, aiming to draft one chapter a week. Deng would get off work at around three in the morning; go home to nap for a couple of hours; take her youngest son, Mayom, to school (the others were old enough to take themselves); and then sleep a bit more. Then she and Hutton would work on the book until it was time for Deng to return to Smithfield. On Mondays and Tuesdays, Deng would write down what she remembered for that particular chapter—“stream of consciousness, no punctuation,” she told me. On Tuesdays, Deng and Hutton would speak on the phone for hours, filling in missing details and establishing a structure. On Wednesdays, Hutton would write and then send Deng a draft, which she would read to her sons, now 15, 14, and 8, at the dinner table on Sundays. “I knew I had very strong boys on my hands” based on their early reactions, Deng recalled. The boys were shocked, occasionally to the point of tears—but they weren’t shaken in the way she had expected, or to a degree that concerned her.

On a video call during a rare night off from basketball practice, the boys told me that hearing their mother’s story made them admire her more. It also helped them understand some of Deng’s tics, such as her obsessive stocking of the refrigerator, to the point that food was often spoiling. They assured her that they had never gone to bed hungry, as Deng had during childhood, and that she could cut back a bit.

Though Deng’s story sometimes feels impossibly painful to take in, she also recounts how, as a child, she conjured the strength to persevere through malaria, a near-fatal snake bite, and exhaustion that made her want to stop walking even if it meant she would die. The story is also flecked with Deng’s sense of humor—there is her first ride down an escalator, straddling three steps and begging for God’s mercy, and an early trip to an American grocery store, where she and a friend discover, to their bewilderment, a special section for food prepared just for dogs.

The book may also offer young readers an introduction to the mass migrations under way now: the millions of Ukrainians who have fled invading Russian forces this year, the exodus of Venezuelans escaping political turmoil and a severe financial crisis. These incidents will affect the displaced for the rest of their life—even those who, like Deng, hope to build anew. In a scene reminiscent of reunifications between children and parents separated at the southern border during the Trump administration, Deng watches, confused, as a young friend’s body goes rigid and her face remains expressionless when she finds her mother again after years of forced separation. Only later does Deng come to understand that her friend was so traumatized by the separation from her mother that she went into shock and was initially unable to process her emotions when they were finally reunited.

At a time when many parents are debating if and how to share the seemingly ceaseless and overwhelming bad news of the day with their children, Don’t Look Back reminds us why stories about confronting extreme human challenges can have a profoundly positive and even lifesaving impact. This was true even for Deng herself during her hardest moments. “It is my hope that just as I drew strength and faith from Koko, Adual, and every person who helped carry me, my story will help carry you,” Deng writes in the acknowledgments. “I pray it provides you some light when the nights are too long, and the darkness is too heavy. You are strong. Don’t let go. Never forget who you are.”

Imagine, for a moment, the near future Amazon dreams of.

Every morning, you are gently awakened by the Amazon Halo Rise. From its perch on your nightstand, the round device has spent the night monitoring the movements of your body, the light in your room, and the space’s temperature and humidity. At the optimal moment in your sleep cycle, as calculated by a proprietary algorithm, the device’s light gradually brightens to mimic the natural warm hue of sunrise. Your Amazon Echo, plugged in somewhere nearby, automatically starts playing your favorite music as part of your wake-up routine. You ask the device about the day’s weather; it tells you to expect rain. Then it informs you that your next “Subscribe & Save” shipment of Amazon Elements Super Omega-3 softgels is out for delivery. On your way to the bathroom, a notification bubbles up on your phone from Amazon’s Neighbors app, which is populated with video footage from the area’s Amazon Ring cameras: Someone has been overturning garbage cans, leaving the community’s yards a total wreck. (Maybe it’s just raccoons.)

Standing at the sink, you glance at the Amazon Halo app, which is connected to your Amazon Halo fitness tracker. You feel awful, which is probably why the wearable is analyzing your tone of voice as “low energy” and “low positivity.” Your sleep score is dismal. After your morning rinse, you hear the Amazon Astro robot chasing your dog, Fred, down the hallway; you see on the Astro’s video feed that Fred is gnawing on your Amazon Essentials athletic sneaker. Your Ring doorbell sounds. The pills have arrived.

It would be a bit glib—and more than a little clichéd—to call this some kind of technological dystopia. Actually, dystopia wouldn’t be right, exactly: Dystopian fiction is generally speculative, whereas all of these items and services are real. At the end of September, Amazon announced a suite of tech products in its move toward “ambient intelligence,” which Amazon’s hardware chief, Dave Limp, described as technology and devices that slip into the background but are “always there,” collecting information and taking action against it.

This intense devotion to tracking and quantifying all aspects of our waking and non-waking hours is nothing new—see the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, social media writ large, and the smartphone in your pocket—but Amazon has been unusually explicit about its plans. The Everything Store is becoming an Everything Tracker, collecting and leveraging large amounts of personal data related to entertainment, fitness, health, and, it claims, security. It’s surveillance that millions of customers are opting in to.

I won’t be one of them. Growing up in Detroit under the specter of the police unit STRESS—an acronym for “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets”—armed me with a very specific perspective on surveillance and how it is deployed against Black communities. A key tactic of the unit was the deployment of surveillance in the city’s “high crime” areas. In two and a half years of operation during the 1970s, the unit killed 22 people, 21 of whom were Black. Decades later, Detroit—with its Project Greenlight web of cameras and a renewed commitment to ShotSpotter microphones, which purport to detect gunfire and help police respond without a 911 call—continues to be one of the Blackest and most surveilled cities in America. My work concentrates on how surveillance mechanisms are disproportionately deployed against Black folks; think of facial recognition falsely incriminating Black men, or the Los Angeles Police Department requesting Ring-doorbell footage of Black Lives Matter protests.

The conveniences promised by Amazon’s suite of products may seem divorced from this context; I am here to tell you that they’re not. These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior. Stripped of their gloss, these devices are similar to the ankle monitors and surveillance apps such as SmartLINK that are forced on people on parole or immigrants awaiting hearings. As the author and activist James Kilgore writes, “The ankle monitor—which for almost two decades was simply an analog device that informed authorities if the wearer was at home—has now grown into a sophisticated surveillance tool via the use of GPS capacity, biometric measurements, cameras, and audio recording.”

The functions Kilgore describes mirror those offered by wearables and other trackers that many people are happy to spend hundreds of dollars on. Gadgets such as Fitbits, Apple Watches, and the Amazon Halo are pitched more and more for their ability to gather data that help you control and modulate your behavior, whether that’s tracking your steps, looking at your breathing, or analyzing the tone of your voice. The externally imposed control of the formerly incarcerated becomes the self-imposed control of the individual.

[Read: Cancel Amazon Prime]

Amazon and its Ring subsidiary deny allegations that their devices enable harmful surveillance and deepen racial inequities. “Ring’s mission is to make neighborhoods safer, and that means for everyone—not just certain communities,” Emma Daniels, a spokesperson for Amazon Ring, said in response to a request for comment. “We take these topics seriously, which is why Ring has conducted independent audits with credible third-party organizations like the NYU School of Law to ensure that the products and services we build promote equity, transparency, and accountability. With respect to Halo, no one views your personally identifiable Halo health data without your permission, and Halo Band and Halo View do not have GPS and cannot be used to track individuals.”

Here, it’s useful to remember that contexts shift very quickly when technology is involved. Ring approached the NYU School of Law in 2020 to audit its products—specifically, their impacts on privacy and policing. That report came out in December 2021 and promised to produce greater “transparency” where the company’s partnerships with law enforcement are concerned. This past July—just seven months later—Senator Edward Markey released a letter indicating that the company had given doorbell footage to police without the owners’ consent 11 times this year alone. (Amazon did not deny this in a statement to Politico, but it stressed that it does not give “anyone unfettered access to customer data or video.”)

And remember, GPS tracking isn’t the only form of surveillance. Health-monitoring and smart-home devices all play a role. Consumers may believe that they have nothing to fear (or hide) from these luxury-surveillance devices, or that adopting this technology could only benefit them. But these very devices are now leveraged against people by their employers, the government, their neighbors, stalkers, and domestic abusers. To buy into these ecosystems is to tacitly support their associated harms.

[Read: The doorbell company that’s selling fear]

Hidden below all of this is the normalization of surveillance that consistently targets marginalized communities. The difference between a smartwatch and an ankle monitor is, in many ways, a matter of context: Who wears one for purported betterment, and who wears one because they are having state power enacted against them? Looking back to Detroit, surveillance cameras, facial recognition, and microphones are supposedly in place to help residents, although there is scant evidence that these technologies reduce crime. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of surveillance technologies—even ones that offer supposed benefits—creates an environment where even more surveillance is deemed acceptable. After all, there are already cameras and microphones everywhere.

The luxury-surveillance market is huge and diverse—it is not just Amazon, of course. But Amazon is the market leader in key categories, and its language and product announcements paint a clear picture. (Note also that Apple and Google have yet to advertise an airborne security drone that patrols your hallways, as Amazon has.)

At the bottom of its press releases, Amazon reminds us that it is guided by four tenets, the first of which is “customer obsession rather than competitor focus.” It would be wise to remember that this obsession takes the form of rampant data gathering. What does it mean when one’s life becomes completely legible to tech companies? Taken as a whole, Amazon’s suite of consumer products threatens to turn every home into a fun-house-mirror version of a fulfillment center. Ultimately, we may be managed as consumers the way the company currently manages its workers—the only difference being that customers will pay for the privilege.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Late on Saturday, Ye (formerly Kanye West) tweeted to his 31 million followers that he planned to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” “On its surface, this story is both sad and saddening,” Atlantic contributor Yair Rosenberg wrote in his newsletter, Deep Shtetl, the next day, calling the tweet the “the unmoored musings of an unwell man.” But Ye’s story also holds lessons about what anti-Semitism is and why it endures today. I called Yair to discuss what makes anti-Semitism different from other prejudices.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

‘Infinitely Malleable’

Isabel Fattal: In your newsletter post, you wrote that anti-Semitism is not just a personal prejudice—it’s a conspiracy theory. Can you explain this concept?

Yair Rosenberg: When people think about anti-Semitism, they often think about it through the prism of other prejudices they encounter, which typically take the form of people saying, “I don’t like people like that.” “Like that” could be Jewish, Black, Muslim. And that is certainly a component of anti-Semitism, but it’s not the only component. Anti-Semitism shares things with other prejudices, but it also has things that distinguish it from other prejudices. One of these distinctions is that anti-Semitism can take the form of a conspiracy theory about how the world works. It blames society’s problems on some sinister, string-pulling Jewish cabal behind the scenes.

This conspiracy theory is infinitely malleable. Whatever the problems you perceive in the world, you can blame them on the same invisible culprit. So you end up with people who have entirely opposite worldviews who somehow land on the Jews as their enemies. You can have an Islamic extremist who takes a synagogue hostage in Texas, and you can have a white supremacist who [allegedly] shoots up a synagogue in Pittsburgh because he sees the synagogue as facilitating the entry of Muslims into the United States as refugees. [Robert Bowers pleaded not guilty; his trial is set for April 2023.] These are people who have completely disparate ways of seeing the world, but somehow, they’ve ended up in the same place, because they’re both conspiracy theorists.

Isabel: You write that because anti-Jewish bigotry is a conspiracy, it becomes a “self-sustaining cycle.” How does that cycle work?

Yair: In Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, he [implies] that he’s going to attack Jewish people, and his rationale is that they blackball and silence those who act against them. This is a very clever little paradox, because if you, as a Jewish person, then say, “I think this is anti-Semitic,” and as a result of that, Kanye or anyone else who voices anti-Semitic sentiments suffers any consequences at all, then the anti-Semite can turn around and say, “Ha, you see? That proves that the Jews do control the things I said they control. Because when I tried to say anything about it, people tried to shut me up.” It’s a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory that provides its own evidence and can never be falsified in the mind of the anti-Semite.

Isabel: Those are some of the strongest conspiracy theories in general, right? The ones that feed into their own evidence in that way.

Yair: Exactly. A big question about anti-Semitism has always been how it has managed to persist for so long. You would think that at a certain point, a lot of these crazy ideas about Jewish people would be exposed as untrue, and that would lead people to reject them. And of course, many people do. But when you have a conspiracy theory that feeds on itself, it’s a perpetual-motion machine that will continue to sustain itself for quite some time.

Isabel: Twitter locked West’s account over the weekend, a step it hasn’t taken for other prominent anti-Semites on the platform. What do you make of that?

Yair: Twitter is an example of how society relates to anti-Semitism—it’s able to condemn anti-Semitism when it’s extremely obvious, blatant, and embarrassing. But when anti-Semitism becomes more coded, when it gives itself a veneer of plausible deniability—even a very thin veneer—all of a sudden, people start having trouble identifying it and condemning it.

When you have West saying he’s going to go after Jewish people, it’s really hard for Twitter and anyone else reading that to escape that he is in fact assailing Jewish people. But had Kanye used one of the many popular euphemisms for Jews that exist both online and offline, and have for some time—whether that’s globalists or Zionists or bankers or Rothschilds—his tweets would likely still be up, and there would be people defending his comments.

There are many euphemisms that exist for Jews. Those terms can be tricky to identify, because they all have legitimate uses, but they’re often used illegitimately to imply an anti-Semitic conspiracy. It’s not that you can’t criticize those things or use those terms. It’s that they have to be used honestly, and they’re often used dishonestly.

Isabel: We’re living in a moment where conspiracy theories abound on the American right. How does the conspiracy of anti-Semitism fit in with other conspiracies, such as QAnon?

Yair: The more conspiratorial discourse your society has, the more likely people will become anti-Semites. You might start out as a freelance, equal-opportunity conspiracy theorist, but you’re just one Google search away from somebody telling you that the people behind the problems that you perceive are Jewish people. And that’s why you see a phenomenon where QAnon becomes Jew-Anon. It’s how you see someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is just your garden-variety conspiracy theorist, suddenly liking a tweet about how the Mossad, Israel’s security service, was behind the assassination of JFK.

And that’s why I think combatting conspiracy theories is a key component to combatting anti-Semitism. A lot of times, people parse anti-Semitism in political terms—left wing, right wing. But those are just ways people express their anti-Semitism. Fundamentally, anti-Semitism predates the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, communism, capitalism—all these categories that we use now. But the human propensity for conspiracy theories, for attributing simple, single explanations to complex phenomena, is old. And we’re all susceptible to it.

Isabel: Where does a person like Tucker Carlson fit into this conspiracy ecosystem?

Yair: Some people are conspiracy theorists, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Kanye West, as expressed in his interview with Tucker Carlson and in his tweets. And then there are people who know better but find conspiracy theories useful. Someone like Tucker Carlson sees West as a convenient tool with which to make certain political arguments.

Related:

Today’s News

The House committee investigating the January 6 riot held what may be its last hearing. The committee voted to subpoena Donald Trump, though it’s unlikely he will comply.
A jury decided that the gunman who carried out the 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, will be sentenced to life in prison without parole and will not receive the death penalty.
Next year, Social Security recipients will receive the largest cost-of-living increase since 1981.

Dispatches

Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry on Kanye West’s ideologies of domination.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf lays out the case against the death penalty.

Evening Read

(Getty; The Atlantic)

The Most Important Amicus Brief in the History of the World

By Mike Gillis

Tu stultus es. “You are dumb.” Last week, The Onion filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court beginning with those three Latin words. The case of Anthony Novak v. City of Parma, Ohio involves a man who was arrested and forced to spend four days in jail for creating a parody Facebook account satirizing the local police department. Novak sued, claiming that the city had violated his constitutional right to free speech. A federal appellate court ruled in favor of the police, and Novak is now seeking to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court.

Why did we file? Partially, because our livelihoods depend on putting parody out into the world and not being arrested for it. But more broadly, we filed because parody holds a powerful capacity that’s especially worth defending in the present moment.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

(Isabelle Eshraghi / Agence VU / Redux)

Read. Happening, a memoir by the new Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux, which tells the story of an abortion Ernaux had in 1963, when it was illegal in France.

Watch. The Novice, on Showtime, a sports drama that ratchets up the tension to nightmare levels.

Or check out the other picks on our list of “scary” movies for people who don’t like horror.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I asked Yair what keeps him sane amidst his coverage of some pretty disquieting topics.“Well, I try to spend more time writing about what fascinates me than what frightens me,” he said. “But also, I sing and compose music. My grandfather was a Hasidic composer, and for some time, I’ve recorded my own Jewish compositions, combining ancient lyrics with modern musical styles ranging from Irish folk to EDM. It took seven years, but I actually just released my first album!” Listen to Az Yashir: Songs for Shabbat here.

— Isabel

Later this term, the Supreme Court will decide Moore v. Harper, a case that has been pitched as a seismic clash between two troubling positions. One side asks for state legislatures to be freed from the traditional safeguards of state constitutional law, while the other asks the Court to effectively ignore the text of the Constitution. The Court should look beyond these unsupportable positions and take a commonsense middle ground. Fortunately, one is readily available: an approach that maintains the Constitution’s emphasis on state legislatures without divorcing them from their traditional constitutional constraints.

The Constitution contains two clauses that give power over congressional and presidential elections to each state’s “legislature”—not to the states generally, but to each state’s “legislature.” Similarly, other clauses in the Constitution specifically refer to state executives, judges, and conventions, while others, by contrast, mention “states” without specifying a particular institution.

[Adam Serwer: Is democracy constitutional?]

In Moore, the North Carolina legislature passed a law drawing new district boundaries, but the state supreme court concluded that the map was a partisan gerrymander in violation of provisions of the state constitution requiring that elections be “free” and that all people receive “equal protection of the laws.” It then adopted a map that had been commissioned by the trial court, which had appointed a team of experts independent of the litigants. The court’s map was less politically favorable to the leaders of the legislature who had orchestrated the original redistricting.

Those leaders have taken that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state court usurped authority vested in the legislature by the U.S. Constitution. Relying on a theory called the “independent state legislature doctrine,” they contend that because the legislature is exercising a power that derives from the federal Constitution, legislative discretion cannot be limited by state constitutional law. That would mean that state legislatures drawing legislative districts are not subject to state judicial review at all.

In response, the state board of elections and allied private parties contend that the term legislature in the Constitution is just another way of referring to the states, and thus that the federal Constitution does not limit the power of a state court to overrule its legislature. Whether the North Carolina courts were right to replace the legislature’s map, they argue, is purely a question of state law and not reviewable by the Supreme Court.

We think neither of those positions is convincing. The state respondents would rewrite the Constitution to replace the term legislature with the term state. Given the specific references to legislature, executive, judges, and conventions in various parts of the Constitution, it is not plausible to think that these institutional designations can be disregarded as meaningless. Rather, the Framers of the Constitution appear to have believed that a power so central to democratic governance should be vested in the branch of state government that is most representative of its people.

The state legislative petitioners, for their part, ignore the fact that the state legislature is created and governed by the people of the state through their state constitution. Even in matters of election law, the state legislature meets when and where its constitution says to meet and is organized the way the state constitution says it’s to be organized. There is no reason to think that the Framers of the federal Constitution intended to liberate state legislatures from the ordinary constraints of state constitutional law.

[J. Michael Luttig: There is absolutely nothing to support the ‘independent state legislature’ theory]

Neither history nor precedent resolves this dispute. On several occasions, justices constituting a plurality, or writing non-authoritative asides (which lawyers call “dicta”), have endorsed some version of the independent-state-legislature doctrine, but never in a holding and never in the unqualified way now being argued by the North Carolina legislators.

Missing from the debate has been a key principle that points to a sensible middle ground: A state constitution may limit a legislature’s power over federal elections, but it may not give that power to somebody else. We need not an independent-state-legislature doctrine, but a constitutional-state-legislature doctrine.

In a constitutional republic like ours, legislatures ultimately derive their authority from the people. This authority is conveyed through written constitutions that charter the government, vest power in different branches, and regulate the exercise of that power. A state legislature’s power to pass laws should be seen through this constitutional lens. Because state legislatures derive their lawmaking power from their own people, their authority is limited to what their state constitution gives them. When the federal Constitution gave state legislatures additional authority, it took them as it found them, as created by state constitutions rather than a new free-floating entity. State legislatures are not independent of their constitutions.

But the claim that state courts may hold state legislatures to state constitutional limits does not mean that they can replace the legislature. The federal Constitution’s text explicitly empowers one of these branches to regulate federal elections, not the other. (There is one Supreme Court case from 2015 that adopted a very capacious definition of legislature to uphold an independent redistricting commission, but that decision was 5–4, distinguishable, and, most important, wrong.) State legislatures must act according to their state’s constitutional constraints. But it must still be the state legislatures that act.

What does this principle mean for concrete cases?

It means that state constitutional provisions can restrain legislative districting, such as by limiting the use of partisan gerrymandering. The broad challenge to state constitutional law in Moore therefore should fail. But it also means that the North Carolina courts do not have independent constitutional power to adopt their own map.

In the past few decades, courts in redistricting cases have sometimes taken to seizing the pen and drawing their own map, advised by experts. Court-drawn maps are especially common when a legislature is slow or inadequate at fixing constitutional problems with its own proposals. This judicial mapmaking may sometimes offer the veneer of a nonpolitical, nonpartisan process. But more often it draws the courts into an inherently political exercise, where their decisions necessarily appear to benefit one party or the other. Recall that many state supreme courts are elected, sometimes along partisan lines. Giving these courts power to draw electoral maps breeds cynicism about the political nature of judging.

Moreover, the practice of court-drawn maps does not have an extensive constitutional pedigree. No such thing occurred in the early years of the republic. It was an innovation of the mid–20th century, emerging from modern trends in election law. The practice has never been put to the authoritative constitutional test.

In the 2002 case Smith v. Clark, a federal court held that court-drawn maps violated the federal Constitution’s reference to state “legislature[s].” This ruling was vacated by the Supreme Court because it proved unnecessary—the court-drawn maps in that case were enjoined under the federal Voting Rights Act, leaving the constitutional issue for another day. Perhaps that day has now come.

Without the power to draw maps, courts would be limited to their more traditional role of determining whether the acts of the political branches comport with the constitution. Their remedial authority would be limited to enforcing the law and blocking unconstitutional acts, not to assuming the powers of the legislatures for themselves—just as when the courts declare a law unconstitutional, they do not write a new one to replace it. Additionally, the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate congressional elections as well, so there is another politically accountable source of law if traditional judicial review proves insufficient.

A further possible implication of this principle is that in certain instances, a state-court interpretation of state law might be so far-fetched that, in reality, the court is legislating and not interpreting. This could transform what ordinarily would be a question of state law into a federal question. State judicial decisions were challenged on this basis in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, and in Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election, for example. But the Florida case was ultimately decided on other grounds, and the Pennsylvania case proved not to matter to the election’s outcome.

This kind of federal review might become necessary if a state supreme court truly went rogue, but it presents serious conceptual difficulties. It would require federal courts to decide how state law should be interpreted, which is normally a state law matter, and to draw lines between state-court decisions that are wrong but reasonable and those that are beyond the pale. There is no objective metric for judgments of that sort. Ultimately, if state courts are limited to their traditional role of judicial review, and stripped of their modern remedial power to take the power of districting upon themselves, the need for this radical step can probably be avoided.

The Supreme Court’s job is of course to enforce the Constitution, even when the results are inconvenient for modern practice. But in Moore v. Harper it can do its job through the constitutional-state-legislature doctrine, without accepting the more aggressive arguments for preempting all of state constitutional law. Fidelity to the constitutional text requires no more.

Updated at 11:00 a.m. ET on September 29, 2022

In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

Eight decades later, as a fascistic Russian regime wages war against Ukraine, a motley collection of voices from across the political spectrum has called upon the United States and its allies to adopt neutrality as their position. Ranging from anti-imperialists on the left to isolationists on the right and more respectable “realists” in between, these critics are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term. Few if any oppose the use of force as a matter of principle. But nor are they neutral. It is not sufficient, they say, for the West to cut off its supply of defensive weaponry to Ukraine. It must also atone for “provoking” Russia to attack its smaller, peaceful, democratic neighbor, and work at finding a resolution that satisfies what Moscow calls its “legitimate security interests.” In this, today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.

To appreciate the bizarrely kaleidoscopic nature of this caucus, consider the career of a catchphrase. “Is Washington Fighting Russia Down to the Last Ukrainian?” asked the headline of a column self-published in March by Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and presidential candidate. It was a strange question for Paul to be posing just three weeks into President Vladimir Putin’s unjustifiable and unforgivable invasion, especially considering the extraordinary lengths to which the Biden administration had gone to avoid “fighting Russia.”

[Tom Nichols: Two battles for democracy]

Even stranger than Paul’s assertion that the U.S. was goading Ukrainians into sacrificing themselves on the altar of its Russophobic bloodlust, though, has been the proliferation of his specious talking point across the ideological spectrum.

Ten days after Paul accused his country of treating Ukrainians as cannon fodder, the retired American diplomat Chas Freeman repeated the quip. “We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence,” Freeman declared sarcastically—even as he excused Russia’s “special military operation” as an understandable reaction to being “stiff-armed” by the West on the “28-year-old demands that NATO stop enlarging in the direction of Russia.” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, made these remarks in an interview with The GrayZone, a self-described “independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.”

Although The GrayZone would characterize itself as an “anti-imperialist” news source, the opaquely financed publication is highly selective in the empires it chooses to scrutinize; it is difficult to find criticism of Russia or China—or any other American adversary—on its site. A more accurate descriptor of its ideological outlook is “campist,” denoting a segment of the sectarian far left that sees the world as divided into two camps: the imperialist West and the anti-imperialist rest.

Freeman, who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, seemed to feel at home in The GrayZone. In that Manichaean domain—one that lacks, naturally, any shades of gray—no anti-Western tyrant is too brutal for fawning adulation, and America is always to blame. A Republican foreign-policy hand in conversation with a fringe leftist website might seem like an odd pairing, but Freeman has a fondness for dictators.

[Dominic Tierney: The rise of the liberal hawks]

In 2009, when Freeman was appointed to serve on the National Intelligence Council during the first year of the Obama administration, a series of leaked emails revealed a window into his worldview. Observing the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman praised the Chinese Communist Party for its bloody crackdown on peaceful student demonstrators; his only criticism of its dispersal of this “mob scene” was that it had been “overly cautious” in displaying “ill-conceived restraint.” It is quite something to read a retired American diplomat criticizing the Chinese regime for being too soft during the Tiananmen massacre, but such views are not as aberrational as they sound. Within the school of foreign-policy “realism,” notions of morality are seen as quaint distractions from the real business of great-power politics.

In April, it was Noam Chomsky’s turn to recite the Pauline mantra in a podcast with the editor of Current Affairs, a leftist magazine. Going out of his way to praise Freeman as “one of the most astute and respected figures in current U.S. diplomatic circles,” the world’s most famous radical intellectual endorsed the crusty veteran of realist GOP administrations for characterizing American policy in Eastern Europe as “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

From Chomsky’s mouth to Putin’s ears.

“A great deal is being said about the United States’ intention to fight against Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’—they say it there and they say it here,” the Russian president mused the following week, prefacing his mention of the gibe with his own version of that Trumpian rhetorical flourish, “A lot of people are saying.” That same month, an American Conservative article by Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute was headlined “Washington Will Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian,” denying Ukrainians any agency in their own struggle by answering the question Paul had rhetorically asked.

Soon after, the dean of realist international-relations theorists, the University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer, used the line as though he’d just thought of it. By then, the argument that America was “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian” had ping-ponged between both ends of the ideological spectrum an astonishing number of times. The point for the anti-imperialist left and the isolationist right, as well as the realist fellow travelers hitched to each side, was that blame for the conflict lies mainly with the U.S., which is using Ukraine as a proxy for its nefarious interventionism in Moscow’s backyard.

That the fringe left would blame America—which it views as the source of all capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and imperialist evil in the world—for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is predictable. It blames America for everything. When, two days after the Russian invasion began on February 24, the Democratic Socialists of America called upon “the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” mainstream Democrats condemned the statement. More significant has been the position taken by mainstream realists, who similarly fault the West for somehow “provoking” Russia into waging war on its neighbor. These politically disparate forces share more than a talking point. They also have a worldview in common.

Consider America’s leading realist think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. This “transpartisan” group enjoyed great fanfare upon its founding, in 2019, with seed funding from the libertarian Charles Koch and the left-wing George Soros. After two decades of “forever wars,” here at last was an ideologically diverse assortment of reasonable, sober-minded experts committed to pursuing a “foreign policy of restraint.” But counseling inaction as a rapacious, revisionist dictatorship wages total war on its smaller, democratic neighbor had a whiff of appeasement for at least one of Quincy’s fellows, leading to a split within the organization.

[From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order]

“The institute is ignoring the dangers and the horrors of Russia’s invasion and occupation,” Joe Cirincione, a nuclear non-proliferation expert and one of the group’s leading left-of-center scholars, said upon his resignation this summer, adding that Quincy “focuses almost exclusively on criticism of the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies.”

The moral myopia Cirincione identifies is an essential trait of the new online magazine Compact, where self-styled anti-woke Marxists and Catholic theocrats unite in their loathing of classical liberal values at home and their opposition to defending those values abroad. In an article titled “Fueling Zelensky’s War Hurts America,” the left-wing writer Batya Ungar-Sargon took issue with the U.S. supplying defensive weaponry to Kyiv, arguing that resources devoted to supporting Ukrainians would be better spent helping economically disadvantaged Americans.

Pushing the United States to prioritize the needs of its poorest citizens, even if that means forgoing its responsibilities for maintaining the European security order, is at least an intellectually defensible position (if a shortsighted and reductive one). But Ungar-Sargon also went out of her way to give credence to Russia’s specious territorial claims.

“If Ukraine’s territorial integrity were of such immense national interest,” she wrote, “surely we would have climbed the rapid-escalation ladder back in 2014, when Moscow invaded and annexed Crimea—a move that a referendum found was popular among Crimeans.” The plebiscite Ungar-Sargon endorsed was held under Russian gunpoint to provide a legal fig leaf for the first armed annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II. She also identified Donetsk and Luhansk—the two Russian-backed separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine that Putin recognized as puppet states on the eve of his invasion and where he has now held similarly meaningless referenda annexing them to Russia—as “independent republics,” conferring a legitimacy that was in marked contrast to the way she referred dismissively to “the United States and its European satrapies.”

Many commentators have likened Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill for his charismatic resistance to foreign invaders and his ability to raise the morale of his people. In light of this popular association, the headline that the editors of Compact devised for Ungar-Sargon’s apologia—“Zelensky’s War”—is nauseating, blaming the victim while seeming to evoke the title of a notorious book by the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, Churchill’s War.

Condemning the U.S. and its allies for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine requires one to ignore or downplay a great deal of Russian misbehavior. This is a characteristic that unites left-wing anti-imperialists, right-wing isolationists, and the ostensibly more respectable “realists.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe,” Mearsheimer wrote in a 2014 essay titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.” “But this account is wrong.” Eight years on, as Russian forces marched toward Kyiv and Putin issued vague threats of nuclear escalation, Mearsheimer made no acknowledgment of how very wrong his own earlier, sanguine assessment of Putin’s intentions had been.

[James Kirchick: Being gay was the gravest sin in Washington]

“We invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine,” he told The New Yorker a week into the invasion. Putin’s apparent goal of overthrowing Zelensky and installing a puppet regime would not be an example of “imperialism,” Mearsheimer argued, and was meaningfully different from “conquering and holding onto Kyiv.” All of this linguistic legerdemain would surely come as news to the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and other peoples of the region who once suffered under the Russian imperial yoke.

As evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians mounts, Mearsheimer has cleaved to his position that NATO enlargement is to blame for the war. “I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO,” he also told The New Yorker. Although the NATO communiqué did express the alliance’s hope that the two former Soviet republics would become members at some indefinite point in the future, it came after France and Germany had successfully blocked a proposal by the Bush administration to offer Ukraine and Georgia an actual path to membership. But even if the U.S. had made such a promise, how would that justify the invasion and occupation of Ukraine? Mearsheimer also ignores the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, according to which the United States, Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons. This concord lasted for 20 years, until Putin abrogated it by invading and occupying Crimea.

Even more obtuse are the excuses for Russian aggression made by Mearsheimer’s fellow academic realist, the Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs has worked as an adviser to a host of international institutions, such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as a development economist. Unlike Mearsheimer, he has no particular expertise in foreign political affairs, but this has not stopped him from pronouncing on geopolitical issues. Last December, as Russia was amassing its forces on Ukraine’s border, Sachs suggested that “NATO should take Ukraine’s membership off the table, and Russia should forswear any invasion.” This ignored the fact that Russia had already invaded the country in 2014.

Seeking to explain “the West’s false narrative” about Ukraine after the war began, Sachs noted, “Since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria and Yemen to name just a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.” This sentence contains two significant qualifications. First, Sachs’s counting only those “wars of choice” that Russia waged “beyond the former Soviet Union” implies that its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were permissible through some sort of Cold War–continuity droit de seigneur. Second, Sachs’s selection of 1980 as the starting point for his comparison conveniently excludes the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and became the Red Army’s own forever war, lasting almost 10 years and playing a crucial role in the Soviet Union’s demise.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin. It has also revealed the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people, who, contrary to Ron Paul’s ambulatory talking point, had no need of any American to prod or gull them into defending their homeland. Here in the U.S., the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign-policy commentators: the “anti-imperialists” who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the “realists” who make arguments unmoored from reality.

After President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Russia was conscripting some 300,000 reservists and military veterans to reinforce its war effort in Ukraine, international flights out of Russian cities quickly sold out. This latest wave of Russia’s exodus included Anton Shalaev, a 38-year-old senior manager at an IT company, and 15 colleagues.

On less than a day’s notice, these men of military age all left their relatively comfortable lives in downtown Moscow to fly to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Because of Putin’s war, Shalaev tossed a book, an iPad, and a laptop in a backpack and got out of Dodge.

Shalaev and his co-workers are true tech geeks, producers of high-value computer games. They represent their country’s brightest and best, members of a tech elite that was the economic foundation of Russia’s new middle class. In a last selfie from Moscow, Shalaev brandished a coffee mug that bore the slogan Not today, Satan.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anna Nemtsova: Why didn’t you want to be drafted to fight in Ukraine?

Anton Shalaev: On the day Putin declared the war, I knew I would never fight on behalf of this new Nazi Reich. They are my personal enemies: mercenaries who steal my country from me, occupy foreign territories, and kill innocent people. Putin’s army commanders have had plenty of time to turn down their contracts; instead, they are recruiting more cannon fodder now.

So I chose to help Ukrainians suffering from this horror—pay for shelters in Kyiv with crypto currency and write antiwar posts on social media. To encourage Russians at home, I said: “Guys, look, I am writing this from Moscow.”

Nemtsova: What was your escape like?

Shalaev: Unlike state-owned companies such as Yandex or the Mail.ru Group, which are making their employees stay, we were independent of government funding, so we made an immediate decision to relocate.

The atmosphere at passport control in the airport was quiet but tense; men waiting for the flight around me were exchanging alerted glances. I had bought my ticket right before the announcement—we were already hearing rumors of the mobilization—so it cost me only about $300. But my colleagues got their tickets the next day, and they cost more than $1,000.

The departure was super stressful. The border guards took each of my friends aside into a small room, interrogated them, asked if they had ever served in the military, and if not, why not. And you know that type of sly border official making their little jokes: “Aha, you are leaving on the day of conscription.” Of course, they checked whether our names were in the database for the mobilization.

Nemtsova: Did you do military service, in fact, when you turned 18?

Shalaev: No, I entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which had a military department, so that released me from the service obligation. I studied political science, and dreamed of becoming a Russian diplomat—Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was a graduate there. For a long time, I considered myself a Russian patriot, ready to serve.

When I enrolled in college, in 2001, there was some ideological diversity: We had a neo-Stalinist who taught us about how “Josef” ruled with an iron fist, but the next class would be with a professor telling us about liberal values. Today, the school recruits students for the secret services. And lately, I heard that the dean has urged students to call for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to surrender.

[Anne Applebaum: The Kremlin must be in crisis]

Nemtsova: What do you think of the Kremlin’s decision making?

Shalaev: A few old men and an army of zombies are leading us to hell. I say that because people around me in Russia behaved as if they had been bitten by a zombie, dragging my entire country into a dreadful war. All I saw was Russian loser husbands beating their wives, while the entire rotting house of the state system has turned my people into an army of the dead.

They are my enemies.

Nemtsova: What do you know of the situation in Ukraine?

Shalaev: I constantly follow the war news in Ukraine—and I seek out the best, most objective analysts. My main source on the atrocities are Ukrainian refugees from cities bombed by Russian forces.

I realize that I would rather go to prison than go to fight against the Ukrainian army. I openly embrace my antiwar position. I urge my social-media followers to donate to Ukrainians. This entire war is a crime against humanity.

Nemtsova: What do you think of the Russian state media?

Shalaev: Russian propaganda is a weapon, and the bastards working there are war criminals. The greatest guilt in this entire tragedy belongs to a small bunch of old men at the top: KGB officers.

Nemtsova: Do you yourself feel guilt?

Shalaev: I blame myself for our careless life, for our hedonism. We were completely relaxed, a bunch of computer geeks enjoying a happy and comfortable decade of Moscow life, creating and playing our games. We thought the entire country was like us; we did not know our country.

On February 24, when the invasion of Ukraine began, it became clear to me that the old man had nothing to lose. He is a psychopath and does not care what happens to us all, to our economy, to our future.

My only hope is that he has some instinct for self-protection that will stop him from nuking us all.