Everything won't go wrong

On this New Year’s Eve, we face a lot of uncertainty in the U.S. and the world about what lies ahead. Today I’m thinking of celebrations that took place in dark times in the past.

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 not how it works.

Sometimes repression successfully interferes with holiday celebrations or religious observances in deep and damaging ways. I’m thinking of the brutality of the Chinese government against the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang autonomous region, 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.

Resisting the Holocaust

World War II offers other examples when holiday observance itself was used to detain or punish a vulnerable group. In 1943, German occupiers in Denmark planned to round up the country’s Jewish population for deportation and murder, but waited until the close of Rosh Hashanah, when they expected their targets would be at home.

But word of the roundup leaked three days in advance. Sweden said it would welcome refugees, and 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 sat very close to Copenhagen. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, “Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime's attempts to deport its Jewish citizens.” More than 500 were still captured by the Germans, but thousands more managed to get out of Denmark.

It’s important to note that ongoing pressure from Danish officials about the fate of even those who were detained appears to have kept many of them from being murdered. Nearly ninety percent of Jews deported from Denmark in that operation survived the Holocaust.

Here’s an example of people at every level—from everyday citizens to resistance movements to an actual government under occupation—keeping agency, each doing what they could do to preserve life as they hoped themselves or others might live it.

Again, I don’t mean this post to be a soft-focus, up-with-people sermon. A Holocaust survivor named Bart Stern offers a more brutal example that happened during Hannukah at Auschwitz, after prisoners had been set on fire while surviving detainees were forced to sing Christmas carols.

The Jewish prisoners had been planning to celebrate Hanukkah, saving what little oil they could. Faced with the monstrousness of their captors, they nevertheless made their own fire and said their own prayers, to preserve themselves and their traditions.

“Future, there was none,” Stern said. “But we didn’t give up.”

Circuses against despair

A decade earlier—before the most horrific oppression was imposed—detainees put on a circus, “Zirkus Konzentrazani,”at Börgermoor, a labor camp established during the first months of Nazi rule in Germany. Despite their fear of punishment, inmates organized acrobats, gymnasts, singers, and jugglers, who performed for other prisoners and camp staff.

One detainee even walked past the commandant’s office wearing a sandwich board advertising what was billed as a “great gala performance.” In one particularly risky sketch, detainees playing clowns dressed as detainees discussed their forced labor.

The attempt to exert creative control over one’s own life is an almost universal impulse. I’m reminded of Jorge Escalante, a young leftist in Chile who was arrested and tortured when the military seized power in 1973. He told me about being thrown with other detainees into the hold of a ship, whose captain turned out to be the father-in-law of one of the prisoners. He was sympathetic to them, and one day, they asked him for ribbons and colored pencils and paper.

To alleviate their suffering and to mock the legitimacy of their detention, they, too, put on a circus, a variety show. Even after the prisoners were moved from the ship to a resort that had been converted to a concentration camp under Pinochet, they continued to hold a weekly performance.

Escalante continued as the director. One Sunday after he had been put into solitary confinement, the cast refused to perform, saying they couldn’t do the show without their director. Their demand led to his release back into the general population.

Prisoners in the Soviet Gulag described giving lectures on art, philosophy, or science as they were waiting for their sentences. This was not some inevitable triumph of the human spirit. These were efforts from people trying to stay sane, or even alive. People exercised their humanity in beautiful and powerful ways. Weeks after I visited Rohingya camps in 2015, detainees there sent me pictures of preparations for the feast at the end of Ramadan.

I've picked a range of examples here, and almost everyone reading this will have more ability to do something than anyone in any of these settings. But you are the one who has to figure out what you can do.

New Year’s in the Arctic

I’ve been thinking mostly about cases of political or religious persecution, because of the public fears of what might happen in a second Trump administration. But even in my Arctic exploration research, there are examples of this kind of determination.

Dutch sailors who were stuck in the High Arctic hundreds of miles north of the Russian mainland, saved up their rations and had a Twelfth Night feast, one as similar as they could make it to the one they would have at home.

I also often think of Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen, and the winter they spent huddled together beginning in 1895 in a hole on Jackson Island on Franz Josef Land in the High Arctic. The men had failed in their quest to reach the North Pole. After giving up on their foolhardy attempt, they had headed south, trying to return to any kind of human civilization they could reach.

As 1896 arrived on Jackson Island, they turned their clothing inside out to mark the new year. And after more than two years traveling to the ends of the earth in each other’s company, they stopped using their formal titles of “Mister” and “Professor,” finally switching to first names.

In 2021, I sailed north of Russia to the High Arctic to the shelter they had lain in that winter. As I crawled into it and lay down there, it seemed like little more than a hollowed out ditch, over which they set a driftwood log braced with stones and covered it with walrus skins.

My companions on the expedition and I said to each other, “This? This is the legendary place? This was all the shelter they had?” Their survival seemed even more extraordinary.

The two of them had already traveled for months through the snow and ice, and had to stay put for the whole winter, with no realistic hope of rescue until spring, and even then only if they managed to go more than a hundred miles farther to the southwest corner of the archipelago, where they knew a hut sat—one that might have provisions.

All this is to say that not everything will go right in the end, but extraordinary events can happen. More importantly, not everything that could go wrong will go wrong.

Presidential failures

Along those lines, 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. He wasn’t a good fit in many ways for the U.S. presidency and made serious errors during his administration (not least of which was giving shelter to the deposed Shah of Iran for medical treatment). But tried to defang some of the worst aspects of the presidency, too.

On the heels of the Church Committee’s work in the Senate, exposing abuses of the rights of U.S. dissidents and covert assassinations abroad, Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12036. His order was meant to establish a process for oversight of covert operations and to buttress his predecessor Gerald Ford’s prior executive order against covert assassinations.

This is an example of when things don’t work out as hoped. Carter’s work on this front was undone by an executive order from Ronald Reagan in his first term, in ways that made the Iran-Contra Scandal possible.

In a second example, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950, over the veto of President Harry Truman. 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 these actions as "a long step toward totalitarianism."

In both presidential cases I’ve mentioned here, the president did the right thing and was thwarted. Carter’s work was undone by Reagan; Truman’s was undone by Congress.

In one case, 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 direct reversal of Carter’s order.

In the case of Truman, those laws went on the books against his will, but 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. Postwar concentration camps were there and ready for U.S. dissidents, at the whim of a declaration from any sitting president. But that possible alternate future of the 1960s unrest that included concentration camps never happened.

Not all 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. What we do will not always work, but the cost of doing nothing in the big picture is often very high.

For a long time, I’ve felt that 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 as grist to spark a good feeling, one that often passes before it has any lasting effects, as if feeling inspired is itself the goal. Or worse, hearing about inspirational moments from the past creates a feeling that everything will be fine.

My advice to you is 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 before you decide to act, or assuming that they will get better without you taking part.

There will always be possibilities. In the new year, I wish you determination to live a full life, to be aware of the places in which you still have agency, and to use it.

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