TODAY IN HISTORY
November 9, 1799: In what became known as the Coup of 18 Brumaire, a group of plotters including Napoleon Bonaparte forces the Directory and its legislatures to disband and replaces that government with the French Consulate, with Napoleon as First Consul. The plotters manufactured a phony Jacobin coup attempt and used that as cover to undertake their own coup. Napoleon was able to overthrow the Directory and sideline his fellow coup plotters, leaving him as the most powerful man in France.
November 9, 1989: An announcement (botched, as it turns out) by the East German government that it would open checkpoints along the Berlin Wall leads a throng of East Berlin residents to the wall in an attempt to get into West Berlin. Amid the crowds of people trying to cross, some began chipping pieces off of the wall, and over the next several weeks what had been the most in-your-face symbol of the Cold War was torn down.
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations COP 31 climate change summit kicked off in Turkey on Monday with calls for a renewed focus on a crisis that gets very little attention but is already well underway. The Turkish government has made “electrification” the theme of this year’s event but, in keeping with the futility of these annual meetings, it’s pushing an electrification pledge that doesn’t take into account how the electricity is produced. And while I hesitate to make these sorts of events All About Us, the fact is that the US is skipping the event and without US participation there’s no realistic chance of any meaningful progress.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” issued a statement on Monday calling on the Israeli government to do more to help Palestinians in Gaza survive the coming winter. This extraordinary and yet extremely mild bit of criticism of course drew an angry response from Israeli officials, who blamed Hamas for the fact that most of Gaza’s population is still living in inadequate tents despite the “ceasefire.”
