[FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News

Sun Jun 29 04:14:16 EDT 2025

I was born during Apartheid in South Africa, and those were truly dark
times. It’s painful to say, but my people did terrible things to others —
and there’s no excuse for it. Still, I’m deeply thankful that things didn’t
end in disaster. In fact, considering how bad it could have been, we were
lucky.

Of course, South Africa today is far from perfect. There’s still a lot of
suffering — especially among young Black people. Unemployment is very high,
and living conditions in many townships and rural areas are still very bad.
Don’t be fooled by stories from some White Afrikaners (the kind Donald
Trump seems to listen to) — life for Afrikaners in South Africa is mostly
quite good.

Yes, if you just take a snapshot of the country today, things look rough.
But I like to look at it differently.

First, I think about what could have happened — the “what if” version of
South Africa. We came very close to full-scale civil war. One example shows
just how close we were: the story of two twin brothers.

Constand and Abraham Viljoen are identical twins. Constand became the head
of the South African Defence Force. He was powerful, well-connected, and
respected in the military. After retiring in the mid-1980s, he became a
political leader for the far-right Afrikaners — they considered FW de Klerk
as a traitor.

There was serious talk in right wing circles at the time of using military
force to stop the transition to democracy. Constand was under huge pressure
to lead such a revolt — but he hesitated.

Abraham, his twin brother, had taken a very different path. He was a minor
figure in left-leaning Afrikaner politics. Some of the leaders of the new
South Africa asked Abraham to speak to his brother. And he did.

We’ll never know for sure, but it’s highly likely that Abraham’s quiet
conversation with his brother helped avoid a bloody civil war. That small
act may have helped save the country.

The second way I look at South Africa is this: despite all the problems, I
believe we’re moving in the right direction. Slowly, yes — painfully slow
at times — but we are making progress. And for me, that’s a reason to feel
hopeful about the future.

On Sun, 29 Jun 2025 at 09:52, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> Many decades ago, one of my father’s senior colleagues gave him the
> serious counsel when he was an idealistic young man: “They are waiting to
> try again.”
>
>
>
> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Jochen Fromm <
> jofr at cas-group.net>
> *Date: *Sunday, June 29, 2025 at 12:11 AM
> *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News
>
> I was born in West Germany when the country was deeply divided in East and
> West. British, French and American forces had occupied the Western part,
> Russian/Soviet forces the Eastern part. My home town was part of the
> British zone. I remember British barracks, British forces on the streets,
> and British radio stations (British Forces Broadcasting Service, BFBS). At
> that time Putin was a small, insignificant KGB officer in Dresden in the
> Eastern part - the city where Victor Klemperer lived and suffered earlier.
>
>
>
> Americans were seen in the Western part as heroes. They were the ones who
> had defended England and freed France from the Nazis, rescued West-Berlin
> by the Berlin Airlift, and stopped the communists. In the cinemas Americans
> were the heroes too: first in American Western movies, like "The Tin Star"
> (Henry Fonda), "High Noon" (Gary Cooper), etc., later in action movies like
> Tom Cruise's Top Gun or Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones.
>
>
>
> After the Soviet Union collapsed everybody thought America and liberal
> democracy had won. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History". As we see
> now maybe it is not that simple. Communism has drawbacks - mainly that
> nobody has an incentive to work because no one owns anything - but
> capitalism has a dark side too: it unleashes evil corporations and tends to
> destroy nature.
>
>
>
> There is evil on multiple scales and in multiple dimensions. Corporations
> and their CEOs can be evil, politicians and presidents too, churches can be
> evil (think of "Roman Inquisition") and political parties in totalitarian
> systems can be supremely evil. Even if we look at nature where animals eat
> each other alive we must wonder if Vasily Grossman was right in his book
> "Life and Fate", where he asks whether life itself is evil.
>
>
>
> Yes, we live in interesting times. We have more knowledge at our
> fingertips than all generations before us, and yet it does not seem to make
> us wiser or act better.
>
>
>
> -J.
>
>
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
>
> From: steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>
> Date: 6/28/25 11:51 PM (GMT+01:00)
>
> To: friam at redfish.com
>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News
>
>
>
> TD;DR (Too Downer Don't Read)
>
> I am reading Shirer's Berlin Diary
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Diary> as Mary reads Navalny's
> autobiography <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(book)> (aloud to
> me) while our daily news rolls by this season (year? decade?) is pretty
> disturbing, but also comforting in a disturbing way.   We read (Mary out
> loud to me) Victor Klemperer's Journals
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer> (nod to Jochen's recent
> reference) a few years ago.
>
> <PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining>
>
> The *dis*comfiting part is really obvious I would say...  watching,
> through first person accounts of how an otherwise functioning, and in some
> cases vibrant culture can slip into a self-destructive spiral, usually with
> a strong opening game of abusing some *other* group of scapegoats
> (non-White, non-Christian, non-MAGA) on the way down.  Maybe invading your
> neighbors (Canada, Greenland, Panama?)
>
> Navalny's reports are most salient to some of the conversations here,
> notably glen's references to holding stocks as a strategy to keep tabs on
> our *evil corporate overlords* and even (potentally) attend stockholder
> meetings or demand extra documentation, etc.   It appears Navalny made this
> into a fine art in his early days of rising to attention and influence.
> *I* reduced all of my "blood stocks" to 1 share about the time of the
> election, some significantly before.  My dirtiest financial secret was
> riding Elno's coat-tails some ways up, but did begin to distance myself
> well before he went full-MAGA before the election.
>
> And best I can tell, as Chomsky indicated about "socially responsible
> investing", they are *all* blood stocks.   Some more than others.
> Palantir, Anduril, United Health, Purdue anyone?
>
> In Berlin Diary, I am just at the point where Paris has been occupied and
> the extreme contrasts THAT yielded.   The French government (as many may
> know) withdrew and declared Paris an "Open City" meaning they would not
> attempt to defend it as they had other cities and villages in the path of
> the Nazi Wermacht.   I was raised (anecdotes and history books) to believe
> that this represented some kind of moral failure of the entire French
> People (live to fight another day!).
>
> Shirer, an American, having lived/worked in Paris was very attached, and
> was "sent" into Paris (from Berlin) because all other foreign media had
> *fled* in the face of possible invasion (in spite of the Open City)
> status.  His reports of the police and fire remaining (mostly) intact
> (albeit disarmed) directing traffic (mostly Wermacht vehicles) while
> hundreds of thousands of evacuees were suffering (unto dying) on the roads
> leading away was stunning.  But the destruction of Paris itself (and the
> millions who did not flee) would not have served anything either?
>
> I also just spent 90 mins on a video chat with my Ukrainian colleagues
> (from Kiev) who have been unavailable since the invasion began.  We avoided
> direct discussion of their "troubles" in lieu of strictly technical
> discussions of their developments.   They did "let slip" that the bulk of
> their progress halted 4 years ago and they were just now trying to marshall
> those results into something marketable (e.g. triangular LED panels
> designed for constructing dome-sections at a scale from 9m to 90m
> (diameter)...   knowing that they are doing this under the constant threat
> of kinetic attacks from Russia and some of their (previous) descriptions of
> how hard they fought as young professionals (in their 30s) against the
> systemic corruption of (post) Soviet Ukraine gives me a little more
> perspective.
>
> As for the daily news: I recommend the apocryphal Twain quote: “I never
> read the newspapers until at least two weeks after they're published — that
> way I can be sure the lies have been corrected.”  and Tom Hanks' movie
> News of the World
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_%28film%29> for some
> perspective?
>
> Bottom line is "how good we have it" juxtaposed starkly with "this is how
> it all slides into oblivion", juxtaposed with "this too shall pass".
> Jochen (born in Cold-War E. Germany?) and Pieter (came of age through
> Apartheid), et al  can probably speak more personally to these contrasts?
>
> </PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining>
>
> Interesting times?
>
>
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