Mediaboss Marketing

-Analysis-

BERLIN An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute at the end of March called for all labs working on artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4 to immediately pause their work for at least six months. The idea was that humanity should use this time to take stock of the risks posed by these advanced systems.

Thousands of people have already signed the letter, including big names such as Elon Musk, who is an advisor to the Future of Life Institute. The organization's stated aim is to reduce the existential risks to humankind posed by such technologies.

They claim the AI labs are locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful minds that no one not even their creators can understand, predict, or reliably control. Forbesmagazine wrote, In the near term, experts warn AI systems risk exacerbating existing bias and inequality, promoting misinformation, disrupting politics and the economy, and could help hackers. In the longer term, some experts warn AI may pose an existential risk to humanity and could wipe us out.

Although these warnings sound sensible, the fact that Elon Musks name is at the top of the list of signatories to the open letter is worrying enough. When Musk starts speaking about ethics and social responsibility, alarm bells start ringing.

We may remember his last big ethical intervention: his takeover of Twitter, to ensure that it remained a trustworthy platform for democracy.

So what has caused this sudden wave of panic? It is about control and regulation but control in whose hands? In the suggested six-month pause humankind can take stock of the risks but how? Who will represent humankind in this capacity? Will there be a global, public debate?

What about those IT labs that will (as we must expect) secretly continue their work, with the authorities turning a blind eye, not to mention what other countries outside of the West (China, India, Russia) will do? Under such conditions, a serious global debate with binding conclusions is unimaginable. What is really at stake here?

In his 2017 book Homo Deus, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who also signed the open letter, predicted that the most realistic outcome of developing true AI would be a radical division within human society, one that would be far more serious than the divisions imposed by class.

Harari predicted that, in the near future, biotechnology and computer algorithms would join forces to produce bodies, brains and heads, meaning that the gulf between those who knew how to construct these and those who didnt would widen dramatically: those who are driving forward progress would achieve godlike abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind would struggle to survive.

The panic expressed in the open letter from the Future of Life Institute is motivated by a fear that those driving forward progress will no longer be able to control what they create in short, it is expressing our fear of our new, digital overlords.

Clearly what the open letter is aiming for is not a wide-ranging public debate it is more like cooperation between governments and companies. The threat posed by advanced AI is very serious, and it affects those in power and those currently involved in developing, owning and controlling AI.

The future waiting on the horizon is nothing less than the end of capitalism as we know it: the prospect of a self-reproducing AI system that requires less and less human involvement the explosion of automated trade on the stock exchange is the first step in this direction. So the true choice facing us is clear: a new form of communism or unchecked chaos, in which machines interact with us as pseudo-human partners.

Many lonely (and also not so lonely) people spend their evenings having long conversations with chatbots, talking about new films and books, debating political and ideological questions, and so on. Its not surprising that they find these exchanges relaxing and satisfying: to repeat an old joke of mine, what they get from this exchange is an AI version of decaffeinated coffee or a sugar-free drink a neighbor with no hidden motives, an Other who perfectly meets their needs.

There is a kind of fetishistic denial at work here: I know (that Im not talking to a real person), but still (it feels like I am, without any of the risks that arise from a conversation with a real person)! Therefore a chatbot is at its most disingenuous when it openly admits that it is just a machine for example, if you ask a chatbot which films it likes, the response will likely be an honest admission that it is a machine and has no individual preferences. I recently asked a chatbot: Should I be a communist? The answer I received was:

As an AI chatbot I have no personal opinions or convictions, and I cant make decisions for you. In the end, the decision to embrace a particular political ideology, for example communism, is a personal choice that should be made based on carefully weighing the principles, values and possible outcomes of the ideology.

Why is that a lie? The content of the answer is true, but it is a lie because of the implied position: a chatbot speaking as if it were a real person, in that it openly admits its limitations and the fact that it is not, in fact, a real person. This mystification is the opposite of the fetishistic denial: the AI system is not denying anything, it is simply saying, I know that Im not a real person!, without a but still because the but still is the very fact that it is speaking (and thereby imitating subjectivity).

On closer reading, it is easy to see that the attempts to take stock of the threats posed by AI will tend to repeat the old paradox of forbidding the impossible: a true post-human AI is impossible, therefore we must forbid anyone from developing one To find a path through this chaos, we should look to Lenins much-quoted question: Freedom for whom, to do what? In what way were we free until now? Were we not being controlled to a far greater extent than we realized?

Instead of simply complaining about the threat to our freedom and intrinsic value, we should also consider what freedom means and how it may change. As long as we refuse to do that, we will behave like hysterics, who (according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) seek a master to rule over them. Is that not the secret hope that recent technologies awaken within us?

The post-humanist Ray Kurzweil predicts that the exponential growth of the capabilities of digital machines will soon mean that we will be faced with machines that not only show all the signs of consciousness but also far surpass human intelligence.

We should not confuse this post-human view with the modern belief in the possibility of having total technological control over nature. What we are experiencing today is a dialectical reversal: the rallying cry of todays post-human science is no longer mastery, but surprising (contingent, unplanned) emergence.

The philosopher and engineer Jean-Pierre Dupuy, writing many years ago in the French journal Le Dbat, described a strange reversal of the traditional Cartesian-anthropocentric arrogance that underpinned human technology, a reversal that can clearly be seen in the fields of robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, artificial life and AI research today:

How can we explain the fact that science has become such a risky activity that, according to some top scientists, today it represents the greatest threat to the survival of humankind? Some philosophers respond to this question by saying that Descartes dream of being lord and master of nature has been proven false and that we should urgently return to mastering the master. They have understood nothing. They dont see that the technology waiting on the horizon, which will be created by the convergence of all disciplines, aims precisely for a lack of mastery.

The engineer of tomorrow will not become a sorcerers apprentice due to carelessness or ignorance, but of his own free will. He will create complex structures and try to learn what they are capable of, by studying their functional qualities an approach that works from the bottom up. He will be a discoverer and experimenter, at least as much as a finisher. His success will be measured by how far his own creations surprise him, rather than by how closely they conform to the list of aims set out at the start.

Even if the outcome cannot be reliably predicted, one thing is clear: If something like post-humanity truly comes to pass, then all three fixed points in our worldview (man, God, nature) will disappear. Our humanity can only exist against the backdrop of inscrutable nature, and if thanks to biogenetics life becomes something that can be manipulated by technology, human life and the natural world will lose their natural character.

And the same goes for God: what people have understood as God (in historically specific forms) only has meaning from the perspective of human finiteness and mortality. God is the opposite of earthly finiteness, and as soon as we become homo deus and achieve characteristics that, from our old human perspective, seem supernatural (such as direct communication with other conscious beings or with AI), that is the end of gods as we know them.

From Your Site Articles

Related Articles Around the Web

See the original post:
The AI Capitalists Don't Realize They're About To Kill Capitalism - Worldcrunch

The Alaska House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would allow the state to set up a system for using state land to sell carbon-offset credits. The House action amounted to final passage of the bill, which was approved the previous day by the state Senate.

The measure, Senate Bill 48, authorizes the Alaska Department of Natural Resources to lease out state land for up to 55 years for the purpose of preserving its powers to absorb atmospheric carbon.

The bill has been a high priority for Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The Republican governor responded immediately after the House vote with a brief message on Twitter: Thank you to the House for passing SB 48! We are changing the conversation for Alaska concerning new revenue.

A follow-up news release by the governors office said that once the bill is signed into law, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources will begin to develop regulations for the program, and that there will be a robust public input process as those rules are created.

From left to right: Department of Natural Resources Commissioner John Boyle, special assistant Rena Miller and legislative liaison Joseph Byrnes smile on Tuesday in the House chambers shortly before House Bill 48, the governors carbon credits measure, passed the House. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)Today marks an exciting new chapter for natural resources in Alaska with the passage of Governor Mike Dunleavys carbon offset bill, John Boyle, commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources, said in the governors release. He credited work by his department and by the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Im grateful our DNR experts and AOGCC partners were able to work with the legislature to deliver a bill giving Alaska a new revenue stream that complements our current resource development industries and Alaskans use of State land, Boyle said. Im particularly excited about the opportunities to more actively manage and invest in our forests.

Most of the comments made on the House floor leading up to the vote touted the bills potential for generating state revenue from national and global demand for carbon offsets, which are seen as tools to combat climate change. Because of its focus on the states forested land, the measure has been dubbed the tree bill.

But at least one legislator, Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, described it as good for the Alaska environment, aside from its resource-development qualities.

Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, asks a question about Senate Bill 48, the carbon credits legislation, on Tuesday in a House Finance Committee meeting. Josephson said the bill can help conserve Alaskas environment. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)In fact, its supposed to, it must, its compelled to have no net loss on biomass. We heard that testimony. So this is, in that respect, a conservation bill from an Alaskan lens, he said during a Tuesday afternoon House Finance Committee hearing that preceded the floor vote.

Unlike the Senate vote on Monday, Tuesdays House vote was not unanimous. There were two votes against the bill from Rep. David Eastman, R-Wasilla, who called it climate communism, and Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer.

A separate but related bill introduced by Dunleavy would establish a system for using old oil and gas wells to sequester carbon gases produced through petroleum operations and other industrial activities. That proposal, in Senate Bill 49 and House Bill 50 and nicknamed the hole bill, did not move as quickly as the carbon-offsets bill. However, one element of the hole bill was transferred to Senate Bill 48: a provision authorizing AOGCC to gain primary enforcement authority over the injection wells that would be used to store the carbon. Currently, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has enforcement authority over those wells in Alaska.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

SUBSCRIBE

Continued here:
Alaska House follows Senate to pass bill authorizing sale of carbon ... - Alaska Beacon

Bones of tortured prisoners. Kolyma Gulag, USSR (Nikolai Nikitin, Tass).

NOTE: This post largely reprints last year's Victims of Communism Day post, with some modifications.

Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century's other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so.

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had comparably horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

November 7, 2017 was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first-ever communist regime. On that day, I put up a post outlining some of the lessons to be learned from a century of experience with communism. The post explains why the lion's share of the horrors perpetrated by communist regimes were inherent flaws of the system. For the most part, they cannot be ascribed to circumstantial factors, such as flawed individual leaders, peculiarities of Russian and Chinese culture, or the absence of democracy. Some of these other factors, especially the last, probably did make the situation worse than it might have been otherwise. But, for reasons I explained in the same post, some form of dictatorship or oligarchy is virtually inevitable in a socialist economic system whire the government controls all or nearly all of the economy.

While the influence of communist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely unreformed communist regimes remain in power in Cuba and North Korea. In Venezuela, the Marxist government's socialist policies have resulted in political repression, the starvation of children, and a massive refugee crisisthe biggest in the history of the Western hemisphere.

In Russia, the authoritarian regime of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin has embarked on a wholesale whitewashing of communism's historical record. Putin's brutal and indefensible invasion of Ukraine probably owes more to Russian nationalist ideology than communism. But it is nonetheless fed in part by his desire to recapture the supposed power and glory of the Soviet Union, and his long-held belief that the collapse of the USSR was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." It is also telling that most communists in Russia and elsewhere have joined with far-right nationalists in largely backing Putin's line on the war.

In China, the Communist Party remains in power (albeit after having abandoned many of its previous socialist economic policies), and has recently become less tolerant of criticism of the mass murders of the Mao era (part of a more general turn towards greater repression).

The Chinese regime's repressive policies also played a major role in its initial attempts to cover up the coronavirus crisis, which probably forestalled any chance of containing it before it became a massive pandemic. The brutal mass lockdowns entailed by the government's "zero Covid" policies also had much in common with the communist totalitarian legacy.

Perhaps worst of all its recent atrocities, China's horrific repression of the Uighur minority is reminiscent of similar policies under Mao and Stalin, though it has notso farreached the level of actual mass murder. But imprisoning over 1 million people in horrific concentration camps is more than bad enough.

In a 2012 post, I explained why May 1 is a better date for Victims of Communism Day than the available alternatives, such as November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia) and August 23 (the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact). I also addressed various possible objections to using May Day, including claims that the date should be reserved for the celebration of labor unions.

But, as explained in my 2013 Victims of Communism Day post, I would be happy to support a different date if it turns out to be easier to build a consensus around it. If another date is chosen, I would prefer November 7; not out of any desire to diminish the significance of communist atrocities in other nations, but because it marks the establishment of the very first communist regime. November 7 has in fact been declared Victims of Communism Memorial Day by three state legislatures.

If this approach continues to spread, I would be happy to switch to November 7, even though May 1 would be still more appropriate. For that reason, I have adopted the practice of also commemorating the victims of communism on November 7.

I would also be happy to back almost any other date that could command broad support. Unless and until that happens, however, May 1 will continue to be Victims of Communism Day at the Volokh Conspiracy.

See more here:
Victims of Communism Day - 2023 - Reason

It seems everyday now that Biden and his dysfunctional administration find new ways to emulate actions of communism, or even worse, total incompetence. Lets look at what happened just this week:

Home Loans: Biden signed a law beginning on May 1,2023, that will benefit people who have bad credit and punish those of us who live within our means and build a good credit rating. This law states those with bad credit will be assisted by adding a penalty of $40.00 a month to the mortgage payment of taxpayers who have a credit rating of 650 or higher. The bill does not state income limits for bad credit mortgage seekers who will benefit from his actions. In that case, a person who makes a salary of $100,000 a year ro more with a bad credit rating, would be subsidized. This huge communist type action redistributes income by force of law and punishes good hard working taxpaying citizens who struggle to pay their bills and keep a good credit rating. This should be struck down before it begins. It is a violation of our constitution.

Biden recently signed an order to allow trans men to compete in womens competition.

It was met with outrage by female athletes and today Congress approved a bill, totally opposed by Democrats, that will prevent biological men from competing in female sports. Bidens order is a violation of Title 9 goals and destroys the fairness of all womens sports. Consider this example: in a recent female championship swimming competition a male who had competed in mens sports in 2021 (He was ranked in top 500 male swimmers) was allowed to compete against the current record setting champion female swimmer. It ended in a tie. The male was given the trophy because the judge said it would make a great photograph. The female champion went home empty handed.

These two actions are not only wrong, they are damaging and demoralizing to the public. How can any American look at these two actions and not be angry and disgusted.

Noel Ison

4/20/2023

Read more from the original source:
A Case Of Communism, Incompetence And Politics? - Walterboro Live

Tonia Lechtman, a Polish Jewish woman living in the early twentieth century, could be any one of us. A member of a minority who continuously seeks space in mainstream society. A single mother overwhelmed with the shrinking possibilities of keeping her children safe. A migrant who left her home country hoping that her next destination would bring more options. A woman who became a refugee in a country she had chosen for her home, which now considered her an enemy. A woman who insisted on a right to a home. She was an ordinary woman who lived in extraordinary times.

My work on An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 19181996 coincided with me beginning to teach jailed men in the United States, as well as working with formerly incarcerated men and women. I had just finished a book on the life of political prisoners in Stalinist prisons in Poland in the years following World War II; I thus moved from thinking and writing about the darkness and violence of the Stalinist government that sentenced Polish patriots to ten years confinement, to interacting with men in the United States who carried thirty- or forty-year sentences (or even life sentences without any possibility of parole) for drugs or gang violence.

Such crimes often emerged from the circumstances in which many of these men of color were destined to live; some among them were also wrongfully convicted. What I have learned from a select group of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people was the power of self-reinvention and hope, and a deep sense of responsibility: for their families, for the students I brought to learn with them, and for their various real and imagined communities. I also learned that humanity is best discernible through vulnerability and a conscious decision to share life with others. This is where Tonias story fits in.

Tonia Lechtman experienced different forms of confinement six times at the hands of five different dictatorships. She was imprisoned either because of her identities (a Jew, a communist, a single mother) or because of her insistence that ideas and actions can change the world. She was both similar to and different than the incarcerated men I met. The reasons for their imprisonments as well as the choices they made in life could not be more different, but the drive to navigate difficult circumstances, the urge to reinvent hope, and the reasons to ask for (even demand) a right to full participation in the world were similar. At times, while facilitating conversations inside prison, I wondered what Tonia would say to these men who sought ways to redeem themselves, who attempted to understand their crimes and societal roles, and who embraced interdependence. The responsibility for each other and the critical value that we should attach to the recognition of individual dignity speak to us louder in moments of suffering. Tonia understood this well.

Tonia Lechtman (ne Bialer) was born in 1918 into a Jewish family of well-off industrialists in d, Poland. Early in her life, at the threshold of her childhood and teenage years, she embraced communism as a form of engagement with the world. Communist ideas matched her youthful idealism and sensitivity to social justice, while also grounding her by providing her with multiple social circles. Her commitment to communism strengthened in Palestine, where her parents moved in 1935 in the hope of escaping growing antisemitism in Eastern Europe.

It was in Palestine where she engaged seriously with communist networks: she wrote communist slogans on walls, distributed flyers, and did propaganda work among Zionists promoting the view that the main enemy of the Jews was not Arabs but the British Empire. Doing this work she met and fell in love with a man Sioma Lechtman also committed to communism, and also experienced her first interrogation and imprisonment. Her first imprisonment was a menacing but also formative experience: she remembers it as a time of female solidarity, preparing and sharing food with Arab women prisoners, joining in back talk to the guards, and caring for people who had less. It was a moment of no return. The prison offered a lesson in persistence, community building, and strengthening commitment, despite the fear.

As pro-communist political prisoners, both Tonia and Sioma were expelled from Palestine. With only transit visas, they traveled to Paris the epicenter of world democracy, the place where the promise of equality was pushing forward hope. It was in Paris where the couple wanted to build a new life for themselves and a better world. That audacity was perhaps arrogant, but it was driven by a need to lessen helplessness. If fascism was on the rise and the world was crumbling in front of their eyes, then joining movements that tried to stop these developments was the only logical conclusion. One of the couples most intense desires was to leave for Spain, to fight fascism there. But Tonias pregnancy forced her to reconsider her involvement. While in December 1937 Sioma traveled to Spain, Tonia remained in France, supported by multiple people who offered help people who fed her, helped her find a temporary home, and, in July 1938, took her to a hospital when her time came to have her baby. These supporters kept her hope in communism alive while feeding her understanding of it as a responsibility for one another.

Life was already overwhelming for a single mother with no French-language skills, stable job, or family support. Her situation deteriorated when, at the beginning of World War II, almost overnight, Tonia turned from a migrant into a refugee who needed to run for her life. First, she ran toward the border with Spain, where she hoped to reconnect with Sioma, who was confined in Gurs, a camp for former members of the International Brigades that had fought in Spain. She visited him briefly a few times, one visit resulting in her second pregnancy. Her second child was born in March 1940, a few months before France fell to the Nazis. The Nazi-collaborationist and increasingly antisemitic Vichy regime assigned people like Tonia both Jewish citizens and foreigners an inferior position. People like her belonged to camps of concentration, as French officials often called them.

After trying to place her children for some time in a shelter for Jewish children in Limoges, she ran again, this time to Switzerland. She and her children spent the rest of the war there, first in various camps for refugees, then under the protection of a woman who ran a shelter for the displaced. The atmosphere of isolation and suspicion did not leave her for the rest of the war. A sense of exile accompanied her daily. To use the words in which Hannah Arendt described the refugee condition, Tonia had lost her language, the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.

In the early postwar months, Tonia learned about the death of her husband, who was killed in Auschwitz in January 1945. She had planned to change the world with him and for people like him displaced and persecuted minorities. Now that he was gone, the only thing that made sense was to return to the place where he died, to Poland. That return was supposed to end her rootlessness. Poland in 1946 promised a new and better future. This war-ravaged country was rising from the rubble while claiming its victory over fascism. It needed and also offered hope. Though it was largely a Soviet creation, the communist rule that had firmly established itself by 1948 appeared as an answer to all her dreams. Sioma was not there to witness it. But it was in Poland where she believed she could raise her children while following their shared dream.

She returned to work on reinstituting, with American financial help, a trauma hospital in Upper Silesia, and then moved to a job in public administration in Warsaw. Yet, as historian Marci Shore writes, the promised land of Communism was also the hell of Stalinism. Once again, Tonias dreams were shattered. The same communist state that she fought so hard to serve crushed her. In 1949 she was imprisoned as an enemy of the state (faced with orchestrated suspicion of conspiring against the Polish state) and kept under interrogation for five years. Before the war she was imprisoned for being a communist, during the war she was interned for being a Jew, and after the war she was confined because the Stalinist government considered her suspicious and untrustworthy. This third and last incarceration was no longer a lesson in strength and persistence, and not even a training in solitude. If anything, it was a school of how to mentally survive by believing herself and in herself, despite being imprisoned by people she had considered comrades, perhaps even friends.

After several years, she left prison still believing that communism or an ethical sense of responsibility for each other, one that can nullify racial and national inequalities was worth fighting for. She left prison both physically and mentally spent; a few years after leaving, she had a gallbladder attack, similar to one she experienced in jail. To deal with the pain, she ran on a square the size of her former cell, similar to what she did while incarcerated during her first painful attack. Although she left prison, the prison never left her. What ultimately broke her came a few years later: illnesses that affected her grandchildren with which Polish doctors in the context of the late 1960s could not deal. Poland looked increasingly like a caricature of a dream she wanted to dream. Withdrawing even further into herself, in 1971 she left Poland for Israel. She died there in 1996, surrounded by a family bewildered by the role that communism had occupied in her life.

When I was writing and then editing this book on Tonia, the world was seemingly falling apart again. It began with COVID-19 and continued through the Black Lives Matter protests, the consequences of the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine: more pain, more death, more refugees, but also more signs that the struggle for dignity never dies. The country where Tonia was born and one that I call my home Poland closed its borders to Syrian refugees while opening them to Ukrainian refugees just a few years later.

The pandemic is a portal, said philosopher Arundhati Roy in 2020 while watching growing suffering and hoping for it to become an opening to a new and better future, as if pain could become a conduit of change. The rupture of COVID or perhaps the multiple ruptures that followed it was supposed to make us rethink the kind of normalcy we wanted to return to, but it seems as if our prejudices and hatred have walked through the portal with us. Now, almost everywhere we look, the world looks grimmer. There is something wrong with the world, said Polish writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 as she called on us to narrate the world not through oneself but through others exactly the way Tonia wanted to live her life.

In summer 2022, I traveled to the frontier between Switzerland and France near Geneva to try to find the spot where Tonia crossed the border. On the French side, to my surprise, I ran into a historical marker with a quote from Rosa Luxemburg: La liberte cest toujours la liberte de lautre (Our freedom is always the freedom of others). Tonia survived her lonely life in France, Nazi roundups, an illegal and dangerous crossing to Switzerland, and separation from her children in Switzerland thanks to numerous and often anonymous gestures of help. Various people supported her when all else was failing. A family of German socialists offered her a home in the last months of her pregnancy. A French policeman warned her about an imminent roundup. A soldier protected her from being caught by the Nazis when she embarked with two small children on a journey into the unknown. A guard on the French-Swiss border fed her and her children. Are people that good and ready to help, or did she simply decide to remember what was good in her life, rather than reflect on the losses?

While in times of crises almost boundless suffering and pain arise, some good also emerges. Amidst overwhelming misery and suffering, help often goes unnoticed. Early on during her life in Paris, Tonia found herself in a circle of women a new generation of social activists who worked with young women living in various shelters and who believed that by creating the right conditions one can help those who appear to be lost. Hannah Eisfelder Grnwald, for example, thought about her social work as a mission aimed at restoring an individuals sense of worth and not just offering passive help. Margaret Locher fought hard for Tonia and her children while trying to move them from a refugee camp to her home. Lily Volker, in beautiful Ascona surrounded by Swiss lakes and mountains, decided to turn her family business a hotel into a place for refugee children, which at the time meant Jewish children. Love and respect were supposed to help them to move past war traumas. No monuments are devoted to these women; they are hardly ever mentioned or remembered as harbingers of good in dark times. In Ascona, by accident I came upon the grave of Volker, which has the inscription Lily Volker. Ciao and Grazie and a globe with silhouettes of children. Help to one is help to us all.

Tonia built her world from a place of vulnerability as a minority, woman, migrant, single mother, and refugee. She recognized this vulnerability and welcomed any assistance she could receive, but she also lived to assist. She chose life with others and through others. Was communism a necessary or the even only ethical and moral framework for her? Probably not. At the time of her youth, socialism and communism were only some of the responses to Jewish exclusion from the mainstream. Communism was Tonias choice in response to being pushed to the margins and a growing fear of fascism. As a means of dealing with fear and alienation, it was also her response to solitude, a means of feeling grounded in the world and embracing fears with newfound courage and tenderness. As an ideology, communism is distrusted in the part of the world Tonia and I come from, and stories of committed communists make many people uneasy. A story of Tonias trust in communism can make others question her reasoning.

Tokarczuk calls for tenderness as an antidote to alienation in the world: it is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself. Tenderness should guide us through our attempts to understand people unlike us, those who make different choices, those who follow an idea that is incomprehensible to us, and those who fail and attempt to stand up again. Placing people and their choices in their contexts is a big part of that process.

Tonia saw happiness not only as an emotion or psychic state but rather as a way of acting in the world. That acting also meant accepting her dependence on others, which feminist Lynne Segal sees as embracing our humanity. Accepting the fragilities of life means being fully human. Sharing her vulnerability and committing to protect others who were also vulnerable, Tonia made an ethical and political decision a responsibility for others because it is the quickest way to changing the world. She remained fearless in believing that only with others and through others, in small and big gestures of tenderness, in consciously deciding that the personal is political, she could remain faithful to herself, her late husbands ideals, and all the people who died or did not have a chance to fully live because their own state, society, and the world failed them. Her story a story of someone so ordinary teaches us to give and receive and to participate in sharing small gestures of tenderness, which can be life-sustaining. It takes courage to give and receive these gestures on a path to rebuilding oneself.

See more here:
Tonia Lechtman's Life Embodied the Struggle for Human Dignity - Jacobin magazine