Why Determination Beats Inspiration - Next Comes What

Next Comes What: Episode Summary – "Why Determination Beats Inspiration"

Release Date: December 31, 2024
Host: Andrea Pitzer
Podcast Series: Next Comes What

Introduction: Authoritarianism and Resilience

In the episode titled "Why Determination Beats Inspiration," Andrea Pitzer delves into the intricate dynamics of authoritarian regimes and the human spirit's resilience in the face of oppression. Setting the stage for the New Year, Pitzer reflects on historical and contemporary examples to explore how determination can be a more potent force than mere inspiration in combating authoritarianism and preserving cultural and personal identities.

Authoritarian Suppression of Cultural and Religious Practices

Pitzer begins by examining the Chinese government's brutal repression of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. She highlights the systemic efforts to dismantle Uyghur cultural and religious practices, underscoring the Chinese Communist Party's fear of losing complete supremacy over China.

Andrea Pitzer [04:30]: "The Chinese government perceived us as a potential threat to their complete supremacy over China, which, along with imposing a concentration camp system and massive surveillance against Uyghur Muslims, has managed to punish and limit the celebration of key religious holidays in this community."

Despite heavy security measures, Pitzer notes a deceptive sense of normalcy enforced by pervasive surveillance, illustrating the government's belief in having subdued the Uyghur population.

Historical Resistance: Denmark's Rescue of Danish Jews

Drawing parallels to World War II, Pitzer recounts the remarkable story of Denmark's resistance against Nazi deportation plans. In 1943, as German occupiers aimed to round up Danish Jews post-Rosh Hashanah, Danish citizens, guided by figures like the 19-year-old Henny Sinding, orchestrated the escape of over 7,000 Jews to Sweden.

Andrea Pitzer [12:15]: "Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime's attempt to deport its Jewish citizens."

This collective effort demonstrates how determination at every societal level can thwart oppressive regimes, even under dire circumstances. Remarkably, nearly 90% of those deported survived the Holocaust, partly due to Danish officials' interventions.

Acts of Defiance in Concentration Camps

Pitzer transitions to the harrowing experiences of detainees in various concentration camps, emphasizing their efforts to maintain humanity amidst dehumanizing conditions. She shares poignant accounts, such as Bart Stern's recollection from Auschwitz, where prisoners covertly celebrated Hanukkah despite brutal suppression.

Bart Stern [20:45]: "We made our own fire and said our own prayers to preserve ourselves and our own traditions."

Similarly, detainees in Nazi Germany, Chile under Pinochet, and Soviet gulags organized cultural activities—from circuses to educational lectures—to sustain their spirits and assert their identities. These acts were crucial for survival, serving as a testament to human resilience and the imperative of maintaining agency.

Contemporary Reflections: Rohingya Camps and Arctic Expeditions

Pitzer connects historical resistance to contemporary issues, such as the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar. She observes the stark differences in treatment between Rohingya and other displaced individuals, noting the ongoing restrictions on their movements and cultural practices.

Venturing further, Pitzer shares her Arctic exploration research, illustrating how individuals like William Barents and Fridhof Nansen employed determination to survive extreme isolation and harsh environments. These narratives reinforce her argument that proactive efforts and personal agency are essential in overcoming adversity.

The Limitations and Necessity of Determination

While acknowledging these inspiring stories, Pitzer emphasizes that not all efforts result in success. She cautions against the illusion that everything will naturally improve, advocating instead for sustained determination to effect change.

Andrea Pitzer [40:20]: "What do we do will not always work, but the cost of doing nothing in the big picture is often very high."

This perspective underscores the importance of continual action and vigilance in safeguarding freedoms and preventing the resurgence of authoritarian practices.

Historical Presidential Failures: Carter and Truman

Pitzer reflects on American political history to illustrate how even well-intentioned efforts can be undermined. She discusses Jimmy Carter's attempts to oversee and limit covert operations, which were eventually overturned by subsequent administrations, leading to scandals like Iran-Contra.

Similarly, she examines President Harry Truman's vetoed legislation against concentration camps, which was passed by Congress over his objections. Although these laws were never fully implemented, they serve as cautionary tales about the fragility of democratic safeguards.

Andrea Pitzer [55:10]: "In one case, however, that undoing led to international disgrace and a scandal... And in the case of Truman, those laws went on the books against his will."

These examples highlight the precariousness of efforts to curb authoritarian tendencies and the necessity for persistent advocacy and oversight.

Conclusion: Embracing Determination Over Passive Inspiration

Pitzer concludes by contrasting determination with inspiration, arguing that while inspiration can be fleeting and sometimes self-serving, determination drives sustained action and meaningful change.

Andrea Pitzer [1:05:45]: "Don't let it happen. It depends on you. There will always be possibilities in the new year. I wish you determination to explore those possibilities, to live a full life, to be aware of the places in which you still have agency, and to use it."

She urges listeners to actively participate in shaping a better world, emphasizing that collective and individual actions are critical in preventing authoritarianism and fostering freedom.

Final Thoughts

"Why Determination Beats Inspiration" serves as a compelling exploration of how steadfast resolve and proactive efforts can counteract oppressive forces. Through historical and contemporary lenses, Andrea Pitzer underscores the vital role of determination in preserving humanity, culture, and freedom.

Listeners are encouraged to internalize these lessons, recognizing that while inspiration is valuable, it is the consistent and intentional actions fueled by determination that truly effect lasting change.

Notable Quotes:

Andrea Pitzer [04:30]: "The Chinese government perceived us as a potential threat to their complete supremacy over China..."
Andrea Pitzer [12:15]: "Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime's attempt to deport its Jewish citizens."
Bart Stern [20:45]: "We made our own fire and said our own prayers to preserve ourselves and our own traditions."
Andrea Pitzer [40:20]: "What do we do will not always work, but the cost of doing nothing in the big picture is often very high."
Andrea Pitzer [55:10]: "In one case, however, that undoing led to international disgrace and a scandal..."
Andrea Pitzer [1:05:45]: "Don't let it happen. It depends on you..."

For more insights and discussions on authoritarianism and resistance, subscribe to Next Comes What and consider giving a five-star review to support the podcast.

Transcript

Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. This is Andrea Pitzer. As we come into the New Year, we have a lot of uncertainty in the US and the world about what lies ahead. And today I'm thinking about celebrations that took place in dark times in the past. In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening shade I hear my echo in the echoing wood. Just a warning. This is not a sentimental post. The message here is not that people will always find a way to do what matters, or that every story has a good ending. That's just not how it works. Sometimes repression successfully interferes with holiday celebrations or religious observances, and in deep and damaging ways. The traditions of Islam were once everywhere in Xinjiang. I'm thinking currently of the brutality of the Chinese government against the Uyghur populations in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. What is it about the Uyghur people that threatens the Chinese Communist Party? Ethnically, we're not Chinese. We're not Han Chinese. We're separate from the majority of China. The Chinese government perceived us as a potential threat to their complete supremacy over China, which, along with imposing a concentration camp system and massive surveillance against Uyghur Muslims, has managed to punish and limit the celebration of key religious holidays in this community. At night in Urumqi, we did see some heavy security presence, but overall, with facial recognition cameras everywhere, the policing and the atmosphere were relaxed. The very fact of this tour shows China's government believes it has brought the Uyghurs to heel. World War II offers other examples of when holiday observance itself was used to try to detain a vulnerable group. In 1943, German occupiers in Denmark planned to round up the country's entire Jewish population for deportation and murder, but waited until the close of Rosh Hashanah, when they expected that their targets would be at home. In that case, word of the roundup leaked three days before, and Sweden immediately said it would welcome refugees. In 1943, Henny Sinding was just 19. There are no known photos of her, but in just a few months, she helped dozens and dozens of Danish Jews escape. She turned her father's small workboat into the most unlikely rescue ship of the Second World War. The country's active resistance, along with regular citizens, managed to evacuate more than 7,000 of the Jews still in the country, ferrying many of them by boat to Sweden, which sits very close to Copenhagen. And according to the US Holocaust Museum, Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime's attempt to deport its Jewish citizens. As a country, more than 500 Jewish citizens were still captured by the Germans, but again, more than 7,000 managed to get out of Denmark. And it's important to note that pressure from Danish officials about the fate of those 500 who were deported appears to have kept many of them from being murdered. Nearly 90% of those who were deported in that operation survived the Holocaust. Here is an example of people at every level, from everyday citizens to resistance movements, to actual government under occupation, keeping agency and doing what they could to preserve life as they hope they themselves might live it, or that others might be able to. And again, I do not mean to soft focus anything here or given up with people's sermon. There are plenty of harder examples. A Holocaust survivor named Bart Stern home I was known as Beru or Beryl. Stern offered a pretty terrifying example of what happened when Hanukkah at Auschwitz. Prisoners were set on fire while surviving detainees were forced to sing, we had to think Christmas songs. But the Jewish prisoners had, who survived that incident had been planning to celebrate Hanukkah, saving what little oil they could day to day and gathering some rags with knots in them. Can you imagine? Faced with the barbarity of their captors, they made their own fire and they said their own prayers to preserve themselves and their own traditions. Go take with rags and soak it in the dirty oil to burn it for a minute so that we should say the brocha. As Bert Stern said, future there was none, but we didn't give up. A decade earlier, before the most horrific oppression was in place in Nazi Germany, detainees put on a circus. Circus Concertzani at Bergamor, a labor camp established in northern Germany during the first months of Nazi rule. And despite their fear of punishment, inmates organized acrobats, gymnasts, singers and jugglers who performed for other prisoners and even for camp staff. One detainee even walked past the commandant's office wearing a sandwich board, advertising what was billed as a great gala performance. And in one particularly dicey sketch, detainees playing clowns dressed up as detainees discussed their forced labor. That attempt to exert creative control over one's own life is an almost universal impulse. I'm reminded also of Jorge Escalante, a young leftist in Chile who was arrested and tortured when the military seized power in 1973. There, he told me about being thrown in with other detainees into the hold of a ship, and the captain of that ship turned out to be the father in law of one of the detainees. And he was sympathetic to their situation. So one day they asked him for ribbons and colored pencils and paper. To alleviate their suffering and mock the very legitimacy of their detention, they, too put on a circus, a variety show. Even after the prisoners were later moved to a resort that had been converted to a concentration camp under Pinochet, they continued to hold a weekly performance. Escalante was the director. One Sunday, he had been put into solitary confinement, and the cast refused to perform, saying they were unable to perform without their director. And this strike, if you will, led to his release back into the general population of the detention center. Likewise, in Russia, gulag detainees described giving lectures on art, philosophy or science, whatever expertise or backgrounds a given detainee had while they were waiting for their sentences. When Czapski was in a Soviet camp, he was allowed to give French lessons, and he did so in the form of recapitulating remembrance of things Past by Proust, which is, for me, one of the most extraordinary civilizational achievements imaginable and deep and profound in all kinds of ways. This was not some inevitable triumph of the human spirit. These were active efforts from people trying to stay sane or even to stay alive. Detainees exercised their humanity in beautiful and powerful ways. Weeks after I visited Rohingya camps in 2015, and there weren't just Rohingya that were in some of these camps, although they were segregated. But in the camps where it was non Rohingya people whose homes had been burned down, they were allowed to come and go at will. And the Rohingya today, still, five years later, cannot come and go at will. Detainees there sent me photos of preparations for the feast at the end of Ramadan. I'm thinking mostly about cases of political or religious persecution because of public fears and some of my own fears about what might happen in a second Trump administration. But even in my Arctic exploration research, there are similar examples of this kind of phenomenon. William Barents and Dutch sailors who were stuck in the high Arctic, hundreds of miles north of the Russian mainland in the time of Shakespeare. Barents remained energetic and cheerful. In difficult times. Everyone went to him with any questions. The winterers weren't cast down. They played hockey, Gulf. We read books, they saved up their rations, and they held a Christmas feast as close as they could make to the kind that they would have had back home. I think also of Fridhof Nansen and Kjalmar Johansen in the winter that they Spent huddled together in 1895 in a hole on Jackson island on Franz Josef Land in the high Arctic, hundreds of miles north of the Russian mainland, the men had failed in their quest to reach the North Pole on foot and were headed south on foot, well, in kayaks and on skis and dog sleds, trying to return to any kind of human civilization that they could reach. As the new year came in in 1896, they turned their clothing inside out to mark the event, and after more than two years of traveling to the literal ends of the earth in each other's company, stopped using their formal titles of Mr. And Professor, switching instead to their first names again as a way to stay human and to stay Alive. And in 2021, I sailed north of Russia to the shelter that they had in that winter. As I crawled into it to lay down, it really seemed like more than a hollowed out ditch, than a shelter. They had laid a long driftwood log that's still there over it, and they had put covering over that, but it didn't really seem like much with which to survive. And my companions on that voyage and I said to each other, this, this is the legendary place. This was all that they had. And it made their survival seem even more extraordinary. Of course, the two of them had already traveled for months through the snow and ice, and they had to stay put there for the whole winter with no realistic hope of rescue until spring. And even then, only if they managed to cross more than another hundred miles to the southwest corner of this archipelago where they knew a hut sat and it might, might have provisions. All this is just to say that not everything will go right in the end, but extraordinary events can. What I want is not only passing the impeachment motion, but also continuing the impeachment process until it is fully implemented. More importantly, not everything that could go wrong will go wrong. In a shock result for all and a huge relief for many here, the left. The Far Left coalition has unexpectedly become the biggest party in the French Parliament, beating the far right. I'm thinking of two times in American history when presidents tried to do the right thing but were defeated by political foes. This week saw the death of Jimmy Carter at 100 years of age. During his time as governor of Georgia, Carter established a trust to identify and protect several river basins and wilderness areas in the state. While in the White House, President Carter famously installed solar panels at the executive Mansion. Additionally, he expanded federal lands to establish and protect wilderness, including 103 million acres of land in Alaska that became part of the National Park System. He was a good man, but he wasn't a good fit in many ways for the US Presidency and made some serious errors during his administration, not least of which was giving shelter to the deposed Shah of Iran for medical treatment. But he tried to defang some of the worst aspects of the presidency too, something he's not often given credit for. And on the heels of the Church Committee's work in the Senate, exposing the abuses of the rights of US Dissidents and exposing covert assassinations abroad. Why Frank Church? Why 1975? 1975? Because in December of 1974, the New York Times published a front page above the fold blockbuster article authored by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh. And that article alleged that the CIA had operated a domestic intelligence collection program nationwide. In clear violation of its 1947 charter. Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12,036. His order was meant to establish a process to impose oversight of covert operations and to buttress his predecessor Gerald Ford's prior Executive order against covert assassination. And this is an example of when things don't quite work out as one might hope. Carter's work on this front was undone by an executive order by Ronald Reagan, as in his first term, in ways that made the Iran Contra scandal possible. Later, once I realized I hadn't been fully informed, I sought to find the answers. Some of the answers I don't like. In a Second example, in 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security act over the veto of President Harry Truman. In a series of dawn raids, FBI agents swooped down on communists indicted on charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the government. As red fear gripped the nation, Congress passed the McCarran act to target both immigrants and American citizens whom the government determined were communist sympathizers. Among other provisions, the act allowed the President to declare a state of emergency and detain U.S. citizens preemptively. One candidate for U.S. senate that year who opposed the legislation claimed the measure would legalize concentration camps in America. Truman himself told Congress not to make these camps legal and publicly denounced the law as a long step toward totalitarianism. But they did pass it over his veto and it went into effect. Now, in both presidential cases I've mentioned here, the President did what I believe is the right thing and was thwarted. Carter's work was undone by Reagan. Truman's attempts to stop it were undone by Congress. In one case, however, that undoing led to international disgrace and a scandal. But even in that case, the direct machinations of the Reagan administration's intentions were laid bare. By their overturning Carter's order. And in the case of Truman, those laws went on the book against his will. And though they stayed there for more than two decades, well into Nixon's presidency, those camps were never used for dissidents. It was a horrible future that had been laid out and made legal by Congress. Post war concentration camps were there and ready to hold us dissidents at the whim of a declaration from any sitting president. But that possible alternate future of the 1960s unrest that might have included concentration camps never happened. So not all of the bad things that might happen will happen. Sometimes we will escape through dumb luck, but more often we'll have to make that luck, or at least make it lead to something more permanent. What we do will not always work, but the cost of doing nothing in the big picture is often very high. When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, it's going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle. It will disappear. Have to be calm. It'll go away. It will go away. Just stay calm. It's going to go away. It's going to go away. It will go away. You know it, you know it is going away. It's going to go away hopefully at the end of the month, and if not, it hopefully will be soon after that. I said it's going away and it is going away. You were saying things like, I think it's a problem that's going to go away, with which I'm right about, it will go away, it's going to go away. This is going to go away. It's going to go, it's going to leave, it's going to be gone. I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine. For these examples, I've picked sort of the widest range possible of camp settings, from one that was almost comic for a period of time up to Auschwitz, and sort of the most horrific moments that one could experience there. And all that is just to say that even inside that range, everybody in the examples I gave you was in a bleaker situation than we ourselves are facing. And again, that's not to make you feel that you don't need to do anything or that you need to save the whole world yourself, but to figure out, in avoiding similar futures, in protecting other people from being vulnerable to some of these kinds of actions, to look realistically at what you want to do to build that future for yourself and for other people. But this is just the beginning of a very long story. Freedom is a constant struggle. For a long time I felt inspiration can be dangerous because for many people it seems to be a gauzy, transient thing. A lot of people seem to turn to other people's suffering like it's grist to spark a good feeling for themselves. A good feeling that often passes before it has any lasting effects, as if feeling inspired itself is the whole point. Or worse. Hearing about inspirational moments from the past creates a feeling that, well, I'm here, everything will work out fine. But I would say, as we come to this New year, that if you want to live this next year in a more beautiful world, go make that world. Make it where you are right now, without waiting for things to get worse or better before you act, or assuming that they will get better without you taking part. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you. There will always be possibilities in the new year. I wish you determination to explore those possibilities, to live a full life, to be aware of the places in which you still have agency, and to use it. That's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.