Last evening's certification,
that the Republican Party would
not refuse nomination for the
Presidency to Donald Trump, has
eliminated one prospect of being
spared the negligence of the oth-
er Party, in yielding its nomina-
tion without care or scruple, to
a dispiritingly unworthy claimant.
It's for eventualities such as these, that trains were invented. Means of escape, not deportation, to settings where one can clear one's desk, one's calendar, to reason through a predicament. I go hiking, for everything about it. From the variable textures underfoot to the impromptu alternations in sun and shade overhead, hiking registers to me my presence, which is to say, it counts me. The demand not to abstain from voting is the argument offered for torture: if you could do good, wouldn't you willingly do wrong? This is the torture of a loyalty oath, and compulsion, as we learned at Nuremberg, affords no excuse. One has no vote, if none against that.
Philippe Sands
East West Street
On the Origins of
Genocide and Crimes
against Humanity
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016©
i Maxim Steklyanov
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