George Packer's Blog, page 218

The Demise of Hezbollah’s Untraceable Ghost

Mustafa Badreddine, a cocky Lebanese bomb maker and one of the architects of Islamic terrorism, was buried Friday. He was Hezbollah’s top military commander, and, along with his brother-in-law Imad Mughniyah, who died in 2008, masterminded one of the longest-running sprees of violence—bombings, hostage-takings, assassinations, and airplane hijackings—in the Middle East. Badreddine, who was fifty-five, was killed in a mysterious explosion in Syria, where he commanded at least six thousand Hezbollah fighters who are propping up the regime of President Bashar Assad. A few months ago, he vowed, “I won’t come back from Syria unless as a martyr or a carrier of the banner of victory.” He came back in a box.

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Related:
Mercy for a Terrorist in Norway
Not Even Kabul Is Safe from the Taliban
Comment from the April 11, 2016, Issue

“Do Not Resist” and the Crisis of Police Militarization

Three years ago, when the Tsarnaev brothers set off a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding two hundred and sixty-four, Craig Atkinson, a New York filmmaker, looked on with as much horror as anyone else. But he noticed something, too: the police in Boston and its suburbs sent armored cars into the streets and deployed officers dressed like Storm Troopers, who carried assault rifles and fanned out across neighborhoods as though they were in an infantry division in Afghanistan. Atkinson asked himself, when did local police forces, in their equipment and tactics, come to resemble armies of occupation?

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Related:
The Chicago Police, Race, and the Legacy of Bettie Jones
What Niya Kenny Saw
Actually, Hillary, Hearts Do Change

Everyone Knows About the G.O.P. Crackup—Everyone Except the Voters

The Republican Party is shattered. Fissured. Over. Dead. These suggestions, and more, have been inspired by the rise of Donald Trump, who has defied and embarrassed Party leaders (and pundits!) to become the presumptive 2016 Republican nominee for President. The conventional wisdom was that he would be stopped, but it turned out that no putative stopper was equal to the task, and now the Party is stuck with a candidate whom many Republicans can’t stand, one whose elevation may portend the crackup of Republicanism itself. Or so we are told.

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Related:
The Maoism of Donald Trump
Donald Trump and the “John Miller” Tape: A Question of Character
Daily Cartoon: Friday, May 13th

Sumnerdämmerung

The trial that tested the mental competency of Sumner Redstone, the ninety-two-year-old media mogul and former chairman of Viacom and CBS, had promised weeks in which prurient details from a family drama reminiscent of the eighties prime-time soap “Dynasty” would be aired. Instead, the trial began on a Friday and concluded the following Monday, ending for the moment the attempt by Manuela Herzer, Redstone’s former companion, to be named his “health agent” and empowered to make his medical decisions. Short as it was, the trial demonstrated how a lifetime of aggressive, acquisitive behavior can play out near the end for a C.E.O. whose faculties are waning at a speed disproportionate to his power. Given that Redstone’s physical condition affects a global media conglomerate that employs, in total, some twenty-five thousand people, the implications are serious.

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Related:
A Cure For Rupert Murdoch’s Ills: Call Sumner Redstone!

The Maoism of Donald Trump

In February, 1957, eight years after the founding of Communist China and nine years prior to the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong made a speech at the eleventh meeting of the Supreme State Conference, entitled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” that defined his political philosophy. In the speech—arguably his best known—the Great Helmsman drew a distinction between “the people” and “the enemy.” The people were effectively the in-group, while the enemy was nothing but a collection of demons and thugs to be vigilantly resisted. The us-versus-them dichotomy, a cornerstone of Maoism later enshrined in his Little Red Book, effectively painted the world in black and white, banishing diversity, difference, or considerations of civil liberty. Yet that worldview has found curious potency sixty-odd years later in the mouth of another bombastic demagogue, reared in a wholly different political system, who shares Mao’s knack for polemical excess and xenophobic paranoia. America may still be reeling from Trump’s victory as the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, but many Chinese, watching from the other side of the world, view his ascent as natural: the rise of another strongman whose politics of exclusion and rhetoric of hate both reprise and reflect China’s past and present anxieties.

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Related:
Everyone Knows About the G.O.P. Crackup—Everyone Except the Voters
Donald Trump and the “John Miller” Tape: A Question of Character
Daily Cartoon: Friday, May 13th

Donald Trump and the “John Miller” Tape: A Question of Character

Back in the late eighties and early nineties, when I worked for the London Sunday Times out of New York and Washington, I sometimes wrote about Donald Trump—mostly covering his business deals, but also his personal life, which was splashed all over the New York Post and Daily News. In my recollection, Trump was easy to get in touch with, which was one reason why he got so much ink. After calling his office, you’d be put through to a woman named Norma Foerderer, who was his top aide. Foerderer, who died in 2013, would say that she’d check if Trump was available. You’d hear talking in the background, and then he would get on the phone and tell you how fabulously everything was going for him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Everyone Knows About the G.O.P. Crackup—Everyone Except the Voters
The Maoism of Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, May 13th

Raghuram Rajan and the Dangers of Helicopter Money

Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is a rising star in central banking. Since moving to Delhi, in 2013, after taking a leave of absence from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he is a professor of economics, he has presided over a period in which the Indian economy has performed better than that of many other developing economies. G.D.P. growth has rebounded from a slowdown, and the rate of inflation has been halved.

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Related:
Bernie Sanders and the Realists
A Reprieve from Black Friday Madness?
Why Can’t Republicans Support a Carbon Tax?

America in a Time of Campaign Violence

What was it about the news this week from Logan County, West Virginia, that was so disturbing? You may have seen the story, or at least the selfie that Richard Ojeda took in his hospital bed. Ojeda is a Democrat running for a state Senate seat. He was attacked at a campaign barbecue on Sunday, and in the photo, which he posted on his Facebook page, he looks awful—eight facial fractures, cuts, bruises, swelling. And yet he was defiant, even funny, in the Facebook messages he wrote. He was brushing his teeth with a sponge, he reported; he planned to get up and go to the polls on Tuesday—primary day—somehow, and he urged his neighbors to make sure to vote. His expression in the gruesome headshot had a hint of survivor’s satisfaction. A friend wrote, on his campaign page, “Though this attack seems to be politically motivated, Richard is as tough as woodpecker lips, as he often says, and he will pull through this.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Paul Ryan’s Quest to Really, Truly Unify with Donald Trump
Donald Trump vs. Family Values
Going There with Donald Trump

Paul Ryan’s Quest to Really, Truly Unify with Donald Trump

“His personality?” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said, raising his eyebrows and brightening his eyes, when he was asked, at a press conference, about his meeting with Donald Trump, on Thursday morning, at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. “I thought he’s—very good personality. He is a very warm and genuine person.” Ryan shrugged. “Like I said, I met him for like thirty seconds in 2012.” That was the year in which Ryan served as Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential running mate, and in which Romney flew to Las Vegas to get Trump’s endorsement, publicly flattered him, and featured him in radio ads. And it was a year after Trump’s advocacy of birtherism had reached its height. “So we really don’t know each other,” Ryan continued. “And we started to get to know each other. So I actually had a very pleasant exchange with him.” Reporters needed to understand, however, that he wasn’t ready to share everything Trump had said to him; they had been two men learning to trust each other, discussing things that were important and “personal, in some senses.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
America in a Time of Campaign Violence
Donald Trump vs. Family Values
Going There with Donald Trump

What the Pope Saw at Hiroshima

A charred tricycle, its rubber pedals melted away, is one of the most evocative relics of war in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum. It belonged to three-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani, who was riding it when an American B-29 dropped a nine-thousand-pound atomic bomb over the city, on August 6, 1945. Shinichi’s father found his son, barely alive, still grasping the handlebars under the rubble. He died a few hours later. Because Shinichi had loved that tricycle, his father decided to bury it with him—so that his son would not be lonely—in the back yard, where his son would still be close. Before the attack, the Americans had given the bomb a nickname—Little Boy. Four decades later, Shinichi’s father had his son’s remains exhumed for formal reburial in a cemetery. He donated the unearthed tricycle to the museum.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Actual-Sized Photograph: The Hidden Nuclear Ruins on the Border of Russia and Kazakhstan
Still Three Minutes to Midnight
A Rolodex for the Nuclear Age