Die Zeit:

The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man

It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Great Britain: Penguin, 2017), 349.

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And yet who was to control the controllers? The Bolshevik leaders assumed that things would be fine so long as public institutions, especially the control organs, drew their personnel mainly from Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers. But how were the leaders to know who among such persons were genuinely reliable? Under the NEP the system known as the nomenklatura was introduced. Since mid-1918, if not earlier, the central party bodies had made the main appointments to Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Cheka and the trade unions. In 1923 this system was formalized by the composition of a list of about 5,500 designated party and governmental posts – the nomenklatura – whose holders could be appointed only by the central party bodies. The Secretariat’s Files-and-Distribution Department (Uchraspred) compiled a file-index on all high-ranking functionaries so that sensible appointments might be made.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 148.

Seymour Hersh:

Civilian defense attorney George Latimer speaks to his client Army Lieutenant William Calley as they leave a court-martial hearing.

At 6 am or so, Calley told me that his much admired company captain, a guy named Ernest Medina, who was known to his troops, I would later learn, as “Mad Dog Medina,” was also at Fort Benning awaiting legal proceedings. Medina would tell me, Calley said, that all he had done at My Lai came pursuant to Medina’s direct orders. He dialed a number, and Medina—about whom I knew nothing—picked up immediately. Calley explained that a reporter from Washington was on the phone with him.“Please, Captain,” Calley said, “tell him what I did was under your orders.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Medina said, and he hung up. Calley was stricken.

It was clear that he’d just figured out that he would be the sacrificial lamb. The bad apple. It would all be on him. The generals and colonels and captains who planned the slaughter—to get a high body count in the war and make the generals in Saigon and Washington happy—were going to ride into the sunset.

I was totally exhausted. I told him I had to leave. Calley, in a panic, said: “Let’s go bowling.”

It couldn’t happen. I left, got to the airport, took a plane to Washington, and, exhausted as I was, I began writing the first of what would be five stories over the next months about what happened at My Lai.

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

—Анна Андреевна Ахматова

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This outcome of the war between the Reds and the Whites determined the result of most of the many armed conflicts elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. In the Transcaucasus, the Georgians contended against the Armenians; the Armenians also fought the Azeris. And each state in the region had internal strife. For example, battles and massacres occurred in Georgia between Georgians and Abkhazians. Consequently the armed struggle in the lands of the Romanov dynasty was never merely a ‚Russian‘ Civil War. Indeed it was not just one Civil War at all: there were dozens of civil wars after 1917, wars in which the Red Army was able to intervene after its defeat of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 113.

CNN:

President Joe Biden addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2024, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool) Evan Vucci/AP

“Here I am,” he added. “That’s what’s so special about America.”

The president then walked out to the Rose Garden, where he addressed hundreds of White House staffers who walked over to the executive mansion to see Biden and share ice cream with him.

After command module pilot Michael Collins returned to Earth after the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, he famously said that future flights “should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher, so we might get a much better idea of what we saw.”