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Forbes
24-07-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Our Malady: Lessons In Liberty From A Hospital Diary by Timothy Snyder — Review
Health care should be a right, not a privilege, for the sake of our bodies, and for the sake of our souls. Emergency room visit. getty This summer, I have been deeply immersed in the many fascinating books written by Timothy Snyder, the inaugural Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto. Professor Snyder, who is currently on indefinite leave from his faculty position at Yale University, is an American historian specializing on 20th century atrocities, mainly those committed by the Nazis and the Stalinists. Amongst all his books – all brilliantly written – this particular book stood out to me because most people don't think so intensely about the intersections between history, politics, human rights and healthcare, including, as it turns out, the author himself. This changed abruptly after Professor Snyder fell ill in Germany just prior to the start of the pandemic in December 2019. He was released from hospital, undiagnosed, the following morning but ended up in hospital again a week or so later after returning to the United States, where an appendectomy seemed to correct his problems. He was released less than 24 hours after the surgery. A week later, he was back in hospital in Florida, suffering from a complex array of confusing symptoms. Were they related to the appendectomy or were they caused by something else entirely? No one knew. After this, Professor Snyder, who maintains a demanding schedule, was in and out of a number of hospitals in several states and European countries, but a diagnosis and an effective treatment remained elusive. Meanwhile, Professor Snyder became progressively, inexplicably, sicker. A few months later, he was gravely ill. Despite having health insurance, access to healthcare and a lot of support from family and friends, Professor Snyder almost died. Certainly, most Americans without healthcare in this situation would have died. I know I would have. Cover art for Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty and Solidarity by Timothy Snyder (2020, The Bodley ... More Head, London) The Bodley Head, London Throughout the entire ordeal, Professor Snyder kept a hospital diary where he recorded his symptoms, the test results and treatments provided, events and conversations, his dreams and he even drew pictures. This diary, which Professor Snyder refers to several times as 'a rant', was the basis of his book, Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020; Penguin Press / The Bodley Head). Despite its small size (168 pages, including 20 pages of notes in the back), Our Malady is a timely and gripping examination of the state of the healthcare system in the USA as compared to healthcare systems in several European countries. As you might guess: the USA does not measure up very well. 'Americans helped to establish health care as a human right around the world,' Professor Snyder laments (p. 41). 'Why then is health care not seen as such in the United States? Why are Americans not protected by the agreements that our government signed? Should we accept that citizens of other democracies enjoy a right that we are denied, and live longer and healthier lives than we do? Many of us seem to find that acceptable. Why?' The answer lies in the chokehold that the health insurance industry wields over Americans' access to healthcare and over the authority of medical doctors to provide adequate and necessary care to their patients. Without any relevant medical training or apparently, even any empathy, insurance agents often make medical decisions based on what's best for their insurance company's bottom line, rather than what's best for the patients; effectively prioritizing profits over people. 'When money becomes the only goal, values disappear, and people imitate the oligarchs,' Professor Snyder warns (p. 139). 'We do this now when we admire oligarchs' fantasies of immortality rather than ask why our own lives must be shortened. When we indulge the daydreams of the ultra-wealthy, we create what Plato called 'a city of the rich' and 'a city of the poor'.' Can you guess which of Plato's 'cities' all of us live in? Professor Snyder interweaves his thoughts about the U.S. healthcare system with his personal story of serious illness as he develops his ideas on democratic values, love of family, and even the meaning of life. Only by formally recognizing equal access to healthcare as a human right, by elevating the authority of doctors and of truth, and by planning for our children's future can everyone be truly free. Foremost, the author argues that we must see the provision of health services as a human right because without good health, any other ideas about freedom that we might have cease to have any value. This thoughtful and important book is a quick read and an incisive analysis of the profoundly flawed medical system in the United States. It presents a powerful and well-written proposition in support of the re-evaluation and reform of the healthcare system in the USA to make it more humane and effective for everyone involved, by removing the profit motive. What does a health insurance company do, anyway, except collect its subscribers' money and deny these same people access to healthcare when they become ill? Although this cri de coeur is largely based on Professor Snyder's participation as a patient in the US healthcare system, I find myself increasingly worried about what I see happening in Britain, where some of my family live, as that country appears to be moving towards abandoning the NHS in favor of privatized, for-profit medicine. Don't do this to your country , to your communities, to your families, to yourselves, I want to shout. This is a grotesque mistake. This will not end well . Throughout the entire book, Professor Snyder writes passionately about how prioritising profit over human lives in health care makes us all more unhealthy and more unfree. 'America is supposed to be about freedom, but illness and fear render us less free,' Professor Snyder observes (p. 17). 'The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree […] Rather than pursuing happiness as individuals, we are together creating a collective of pain.' Highly recommended. © Copyright by GrrlScientist | hosted by Forbes | Socials: Bluesky | CounterSocial | LinkedIn | Mastodon Science | Spoutible | SubStack | Threads | Tumblr | Twitter
Spectator
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Raise the age of suffrage to 25
If I had been given the vote at the age of 16, I would have put my cross beside the name of the Communist party candidate, assuming that he was not a tankie. If he was, I would have had to think long and hard; a left-wing Labour candidate might well have been preferable. I was a moderate within the CP, you see – a fan of the Italian Communist party leader, Enrico Berlinguer – and I had no time for the wretched Stalinists who, swaddled in dystopian nostalgia, comprised a broad rump of the British party. They were nicknamed tankies because they thoroughly approved of Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). I was what was then called a Eurocommunist. I knew my stuff too. I'd read Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto and Marx's Grundrisse, desperately dull though they were, as well as Edmund Wilson's brilliant history of the left, To the Finland Station. And yet of course, I still knew less than nothing. My vote for whatever bitter and deluded old oaf was standing for the CP would have been an act of radical-chic performative attitudinalising and far more fraudulent than even my mother's vote for the National Front in the first general election of 1974 because she couldn't stand Asians. All Asians. At least she meant it. Luckily, if 16-year-olds had been enfranchised in 1974, I would have still been more than two years too young to vote, thank the Lord. Sense took some time to work its way into my skull. In the 1979 general election I voted Labour and compounded that mistake by then voting for Tony Benn as the party's deputy leader in 1981. But my direction of travel was evident, at any rate. I was 25 before common sense properly dawned, which – no coincidence – is exactly the age at which the medical profession assesses a human's brain to be properly developed. It is the age at which I would grant suffrage now, providing there were also a property qualification, if I were running the country. It is the prefrontal cortex, the bit of the brain responsible for decision-making, that's the last to form. This is why, in Scotland, people under 25 are not treated as full adults when being sentenced for crimes in a court of law. But they are still allowed to vote in Scottish parliamentary elections from the age of 16. This clear contradiction in terms used to make me laugh, but not now, seeing as the whole UK is on a similar trajectory. I am a little surprised that there has not been more outcry about the government's decision to lower the voting age to 16: it is political gerrymandering of the very worst kind. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are about 1,500,000 16- and 17-year-olds in the UK and these wretched, entitled little shits may well decide the result of the next election. Don't attempt to console yourself with the notion that they won't bother voting, they'll be too busy scrolling through their phones, ha ha. The lesson from Scotland is that they vote in very great numbers – a larger proportion than for any age band until you reach the mid-fifties. And they will vote for whatever jackanapes provides them with the most unrealistic, utopian vision of the future. They will slouch towards the polling booth determined to make the world a 'kinder' place and in so doing will fuck us over completely. Nor is there any logical reason why 16 should be the end of it. I think 18 is too young to vote, but at least it has a resonance as the age of majority; 16 does not. Already, in Scotland, one can register to vote at the age of 14 and there was an article in the Guardian recently (which I blogged about for The Spectator) which suggested that babies should be allowed to vote. That's the way we're going, and it would not surprise me if one day the left attempts to win back the foetal vote by assuring the unborn that, while they are probably going to be killed a few hours before birth, they still have full voting rights. The counter-argument, parroted by all those who support lowering the age of suffrage, is that while the brain may not be fully formed at 16 (or anywhere near being so), there are plenty of people in later years with cognitive impairment, such as those suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia. Yes, indeed – but they tend not to vote. I mean, I suppose they may venture out of the booby hatch intending to, but they will almost certainly find themselves half an hour later standing in Halfords asking if they can buy some gravy granules. And yes, of course, there are plenty of people over the age of 17 who are fantastically stupid, pig-ignorant of almost everything, scarcely able to draw a breath without becoming intellectually challenged, like the woman on the quiz show Tipping Point the other night who located Singapore in Europe. But broadening the spectrum of stupidity is not, to my mind, a means of redressing the problem. My clarion call is 'no representation without taxation', and to the ninnies who insist that 16-year-olds would be liable to pay tax if they earned more than about £12,000 per annum, I say: how many actually do so? Nine? But if that's the chief objection, then by all means allow voting only for those who pay tax – which would handily remove from the electoral roll around half of those in the next generation band, the 18- to 24-year-olds. I was 13 at the time of that first 1974 election, and my comprehensive school held a mock election which, as the Communist candidate, I won by a landslide. I think an end to exams and the school uniform were the central planks of my manifesto.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Stalin-era architectural marvel, Moscow's metro turns 90
A historic marble plaque on the wall of Sokolniki underground station marks the opening of the Moscow metro 90 years ago. Considered the most beautiful underground railway system in the world, the metro first opened on May 15, 1935, was designed by Lazar Kaganovich, a confidant of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. But the plaque bears no sign of that name, as our tour guide and trained engineer Daniil Shopkhoev notes. Instead, metal letters ater added spell out the name V. I. Lenin, the first Soviet leader. As Moscow, Europe's biggest city with an official population of some 13.5 million, marks the metro's 90th anniversary, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin plans to expand it further. The metro currently comprises around 472 kilometres of underground tracks and 302 stations, with 120 stops added since 2010. A picture on the floor of Sokolniki station shows workers digging a tunnel with drills. "The story begins here," the caption says. No trace remains of Kaganovich, who, like many Stalinists, has fallen out of favour over the communist terror and political purges perpetrated by the regime. Since 1955, the metro has borne the name of Lenin, who is said to have considered it as the means of transport of the future Following Stalin's death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev rejected the architectural extravagance of Moscow's underground railway, imposing a more sober style. Sophisticated transport system with superb frequency A train featuring historic carriages is travelling on the famous Number 5 circle line to mark the anniversary. A maintenance train used to check the condition of the tunnel systems and tracks is on display can also be seen at the Polezhayevskaya station as part of a tech show. Today, the metro, which employs more than 60,000 people, is one of the most sophisticated transport systems in the world, offering a unique time table. At peak times, a train should be arriving approximately every minute. Around 9 million people use the metro every day, according to the operator. Passengers hurry through the palace-like underground tunnels past huge mosaics and socialist realist artworks. Metro guide Shopkhoev pauses at particularly prominent points. He leads us through the columned halls at Komsomolskaya station, points towards the magnificent galleries above the tracks. A huge tiled mural depicts workers in clean clothes and sturdy shoes. However, according to eyewitnesses, the conditions for those building the underground railway were miserable, not least because of the risk of collapse due to groundwater and other geological problems, with many workers perishing in the process. 'Palaces for the people' Compared to London, the world's oldest underground, Budapest, Paris or Berlin, Moscow was late to the game. "Stalin wanted the metro, even if it wasn't the first, to delight with its aesthetics. These palaces for the people should not only show the superiority of socialism, but also convince people that they have the most beautiful underground railway in the world," says Shopkhoev. While Soviet citizens were hardly able to judge whether their metro was on par with railway systems elsewhere as they were barred from travelling abroad, Moscow's metro remains unrivalled in many ways. The railway system was never intended to be only functional like others and served as a model for many metros in other Soviet republics, including the Ukrainian capital Kiev and the Georgian capital Tbilisi. In Kiev, stations serve as shelters In Kiev, where the similarities are clearly visible, people seek shelter in the capital's metro stations during Russian air raids as the war launched by Moscow continues unabated after more than three years. Sandbags have been set up to protect the historic structures. Moscow's metro also moonlights as a mega bunker system - and is even designed to provide protection in the event of a nuclear attack, with the deepest station situated 75 metres underground. At Ploshchad Revolyutsii - or Revolution Square station -, a number of life-size sculptures depicting the defenders of the fatherland had to make way for the contraptions to hermetically seal the station. Unlike in Kiev, no one in Moscow wants to think about having to seek shelter in the metro in the event of war, as residents did during World War II. Muscovites value their railway as a place to cool off in the summer heat and warm up in the winter - and as a generally safe and reliable means of transport. Even the 2010 Moscow metro suicide bombings that killed at least 40 and the fatal 2014 accident, which claimed 22 lives when train carriages derailed, did nothing to dampen the popularity of the mode of transport. A bright future? Of all metro systems in the largest former Soviet cities, Moscow is the one that is growing the fastest. It was only in 2020 that a ban barring women from driving the underground trains was lifted, but today engineers are already talking about autonomous driving and driverless trains. Wi-fi and Face Pay, which allows registered passengers to simply pay by using their face, have long been standard. Meanwhile, design continues to be a central concern, with marble as popular a building material as ever. On the new large circle line, architects have also toyed with futuristic motifs. Mayor Sobyanin says he is planning to add a further 71.4 kilometres of tracks and 31 stations by 2030 to lure even more people from the city's congested roads to the metro.
