New York Times:

If carried out, the public execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad set for Dec. 3 would be the first in modern U.S. history.

Many things are changing quickly.

I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called “the free world.” And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable.

Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.

—Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), 23.

Leonid Ragozin, Jacobin:

The question that looms largest is whether, by helping Ukraine, the West is promoting its declared values, like democracy and human rights — or simply pursuing an imperialist geopolitical project in which members of the Russian opposition, but more importantly Ukrainians, must be satisfied with the role of useful idiots and cannon fodder while their countries are being destroyed. Does the West really see Putin and his oligarchs as its deadly enemies — or rather as partners in the lucrative and mutually beneficial business of fomenting wars?

Geoffrey Roberts:

What is the alternative for European states to keeping the war going for as long as possible and sustaining the Zelensky administration? The alternative is a negotiated settlement that will be damaging for Ukraine and politically and economically humiliating for European governments. Consequently, European leaders soldier on, hoping against hope that the ultimate outcome will be less severe, that unexpected developments will intervene, and that the United States will re-engage fully.

Volodymyr Ishchenko, X:

Understanding the war not as arising out of systemic contradictions that determined objective interests cutting across the whole post-Soviet space and globally, but out of the idiosyncrasies of a very narrow clique or just Putin alone, facilitated by the regressive dynamics of a personalist regime, casts the war, of course, as much easier to prevent. And if it was conceivable to prevent it from within Russia by more collective action, then all Russians share collective responsibility.

I am ruminating about living in a German state where large numbers of people show such anxiety about the political choices of their neighbors that they openly call for criminalizing a political party which garners one quarter of the national vote. Each day’s headlines carry bellicose illegal nonsensical threats by a seeming madman bully in the American White House. The UK’s prime ministers enter and exit government through what seems to now be well-oiled revolving doors. And the media of these societies apportions guilt for the war in Ukraine to Russian citizens, who are apparently assumed to bear a responsibility for their state’s actions which German, British, and US citizens do not seem to feel they bear for the actions of their own respective states.

At a book club meeting yesterday several people commented on it being somewhat unusual for a group to meet and discuss non-fiction. It was a brief, light-hearted flicker of conversation here, nothing “heavy” 😀 but the observation was made that it sometimes seemed to the group that people had lost the ability to rationally discuss, argue, persuade about serious topics without conversation degenerating into emotional attacks. This does not seem an environment which sees itself as carrying much civic burden.

Die Zeit:

Im Berliner Stadtteil Wedding haben nach Polizeiangaben 2.400 Schülerinnen und Schüler gegen eine mögliche Wehrpflicht protestiert. © Sven Kaeuler/​dpa