Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.
Yes the student mobs of 1933 Germany have just been about forgotten -- the book burnings at the doorstep of Friedrich-Willhelm University were just one manifestation.
There was early anti-Hitler momentum in academia, though -- in the UK it was led by nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, William Beveridge, Ernest Rutherford and Harold Laski.
In the US, it resulted in the formation of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars. One Edward Murrow who later became the American voice of the Blitz and helped to bring down Joseph McCarthy served as the general dogsbody. The aim was to get Jewish academics places in American colleges and universities (often at cut rate prices)
Harvard notably refused-- the then president A Lawrence Lowell made a specific declaration against giving places to emigres or in protest against Nazi policies, a policy confirm the following year by his successor James Bryant Conant.
Other universities and colleges did try to help -- the roll call includes University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology (who sponsored Einstein), MIT, Mount Holyoke, Stanford and Columbia. In the end, 91 academics were saved by US efforts.
It is easy to overlook the glimmers of good when faced with an onslaught of evil.
And the reason why 'calls for genocide to any group' are always against university policy (or should be) is that they are an incite to violence and incitements to violence are not protected speech under the First Amendment. Even when you consider the robust nature of political argument (see NYT v Sullivan 1964), the line was drawn before actual incitement to violence.
Harvard, Yale and other prestigious schools in the New England area were all Anti semitic in the 20’s and 30’s. There were quotas on Jews being allowed to enter their undergrad and medical schools. My father was in the first class of Jews allowed at a certain university in that cluster. Similar to what Asian students experience now. The feeling has always been “ There are too many of them”.
I think it is far more complicated, but Harvard made the wrong decision in the 1930s and indeed appears to be making the same sort of wrong decision now.
It is well known that Harvard generally discriminated against Jews during the pre-war period. Paul Samuelson finished his doctorate there in the late 1930’s and could not find a job. Given how path-breaking his dissertation was they otherwise would have hired him themselves. Instead, MIT hired him and along with other Jewish economists turned their economics department into one of the best departments in the world. Samuelson was the first American to receive a Nobel prize in economics.
The story of his textbook is also interesting. He was asked to teach principles of economics and learned that his students were taking detailed notes and sharing them. This lead to his getting a deal with a textbook company. His book changed the way principles of economics. There is an address by Ken Elzinga published in the Southern Economics Journal titled The Eleven Principles of Economics about Samuelson’s textbook.
Agreed. But because I haven't actually researched Harvard's position in the intervening period between 1934 -2023, I couldn't possibly comment.
I do think all 3 presidents fell into a trap. The question was incredibly specific and did not use any of the terminology which has so confuddled the British Metropolitan police. So not asking about 'jihad' or 'intifada' but rather the 'calling for the genocide of Jews'. Calling for genocide of any group is normally considered incitement of racial hatred and should have been expressly forbidden by Codes of Conduct, particularly when coupled with some of the scenes which have been witnessed on the various campuses.
I agree again. It was not a trap, at least not at that very point. perhaps down the road.
when Rep Stefanik asked them a simple question whether calls for Jewish genocide constituted a violation of college policies, she expected them to say “yes” but then to follow up with questions about their failure to enforce those regulations. That is where the "trap" was due to their dereliction of duties. Were they so afraid of the down-road-trap, that they just wracked the train before even going over there?
Yes, the question posed to the three Presidents was very specific. So much so, that it tripped up otherwise intelligent people into making a horrible error. But the error was of their own making. Why ? Because their ideology forced their brain into a series of considerations that overruled simple human morality. They essentially closed the logic loop of their ideology upon themselves. Leaving themselves exposed. It was masterful.
Not all antisemites are Nazis, some are content to not rub shoulders with Jews and sneer at purported Jewish moral failings without actually wanting to kill them.
They are then guilty not of commission but omission. Not wanting to kill someone does not exonerate those who standby and watch while someone else does the deed.
In the mid-1990’s I heard an elderly chemist (in his 80’s or 90’s) who did a post-doc in Germany during the mid to late 1930’s, talk about the emergency committee. He was supposed to work with a Jewish chemist but the Jewish guy was fired while he was in route to Germany. The fired professor got a position in the USA because of the work of American scientists trying to salvage careers of those who lost their jobs in Germany. He told us many scientists stayed because they knew Hitler was going to get Germany into a war that would destroy the country and they chose to remain so that they could help rebuild it. The man I heard talk about this ended up doing his post-doc with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother.
Really interesting. Thank you for sharing. I love learning little nuggets of history like this. I only really know about the Emergency Committee because I have done some research on Edward Murrow. But I think it was tremendously important.
Apparently some Jewish refugees who had been forced out of academic positions in Germany taught in Historically Black Colleges. There was a 60 minutes episode on this a very long time ago.
That is so v interesting. I wonder if there was link to this and the v close involvement that the Jewish community in general had with early civil rights. For example, did Moorhouse College (MLK jr alma mater) provide academic positions?
Hi Michelle, I’m assuming you are a Brit, am I right? I was born in Ireland raised all my life in England and am now a US citizen. Thanks for all your salient updates and insights on UK and European news, much appreciated.
On Bonhoeffer, I thought you might be interested in what he said about evil just before he was executed. Because I believe the people we have at the top of our institutions today are not what we think. I’m not exonerating or excusing them in any way, far from it. However, because they’re likely DEI candidates I believe they’re too intellectually void, or “Stupid”, to know just how stupid they are. Therefore they’re far more dangerous to society. Here’s Bonhoeffer on the subject:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
I was born and raised in Mtn View CA (back when it was still v rural in many ways and people didn't want to admit to hailing from there -- how things alter) and moved to the UK in 1988 when I married. I took British citizenship in 2018 and so am now a dual citizen. You gain another soul when you become a naturalized citizen in many respects.
Bonhoeffer had great insight. And I suspect you are right about people at the top of institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. You can do a lot about a lot of things but you can't do much about wilful ignorance coupled with stubborn obstinacy.
My story is the directional reverse of yours, we even share the year we moved. Quite uncanny. I know Mountain View as we have a home in California, lovely part of the world, very high tech now. We visit in laws in Los Gatos all the time. Spot on about becoming a naturalized citizen, it took me a long time, over thirty years, because I felt disloyal in a way. Silly me. I have dual citizenship too. Though I can’t say I’m too proud of my Irish citizenship at the moment.
Spot on too about the intellectual descent on both sides of the Atlantic. My daughters went to school in Europe as we traveled for work so much. It was enlightening for them in many ways, often the wrong ways, very PC. Still, they’ve turned out beautifully, strong, discerning, confident, kind and loving. Can’t ask for more.
Willful ignorance is right. Intelligent people know that they don’t know and enquire and enlighten themselves. The cretins we have at the top now double down when they’re wrong. We’re living in a time of absurdity. Even the Pope is part of the “Stupid” brigade.
My daughter has just moved to Dublin for her job and so suddenly I have a serious interest in Ireland. Her office ended up being closed due to the riots, but the city council have worked hard to clean everything up and people have returned for the shopping. Ireland has its difficulties including the rapid development in tech which has resulted in a large number of tech nomads as the population was not geared up to produce the engineers etc required, a sudden increase in the need for social housing after decades of being stable (alone amongst the EU countries they housed the Ukrainians in hotels which has had a knock on effect on the tourism industry and the small businesses which are dependant on that etc). There are also glimmers of a return to common sense with the Keep Prisons Single Sex bill passing its first reading.
Los Gatos is a lovely place btw -- when I was little we used to go to the Old Town shopping centre for Sunday Brunch sometimes. Just a really pretty place. And yes, very high tech now. Saved it in many ways as the farming industry was faltering.
Parenting is a long game -- you can never truly be certain until they are grown and flown. Congratulations to you both for winning it. No you can't ask for more.
They say King James was the wisest fool in Christendom. Some of the current world leadership like to give him a run for the money...
In the 30s, German academics from the “Frankfurt school“ (Marxism, and critical theory) escaped to the US and found places universities. Interestingly, many of these academics some of whom were Jewish were Marxists fleeing persecution from Nazis. Is it strange to wonder how Marxism underpins many of the left.
Niall Ferguson touched on this in his FP article The Treason of the Intellectuals.
Have you read Ben McEntyre's Agent Sonya which is about Ursula Kuczynski -- a German Jew who became one of the most effective agents for the USSR? It is a fascinating read and McEntyre can tell a story. One of the things which drove her that way was Nazism (there are clear and obvious reasons why Jewish people opposed that ideology) -- there was indeed this huge polarization in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. It is also easy to forget the level of poverty Germany endured after WWI and that both movements gained followers by promising to combat it.
It is one of the reasons why I have such a soft spot for Natalie Wales Latham and Common Cause (1947) as it sought to be a moderate anti-communism organization -- recognizing the totalitarian aspect of both extremes and the danger to democracy.
James B. Conant is actually somewhat familiar to me. I have read at least one book (recommended) written by his granddaughter. His granddaughter’s name is Jennet Conant. The book is titled “Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World”. James B. Conant promoted the SAT precisely as a mechanism for talented students from non-elite families (which meant mostly Jews back then, mostly Asians now) to attend Harvard. He was also a director of the Manhattan project.
Harvard restricted Jewish admissions around 1920. Apparently, FDR voted in favor of the restrictions. The restrictions were real, but the Jewish quota was high. These days Harvard is credibly accused of favoring Jewish applicants. Harvard does not favor Jews per se. However, Harvard has long favored the bi-coastal elite, which means (de facto) something of a pro-Jewish bias. Harvard discriminates against whites with the “wrong” values and/or geographic origins. See “The Roots of White Anxiety” by Ross Douthat.
What is truly scary is that many polls show that people don’t believe the holicaust happened. One said that Only 55 percent of Black Americans are convinced the Holocaust is not a myth, others that 20 percent of young people feel similarly. What a failure in higher education and secondary education that these trends can occur.
And it's not just that we fail to teach history, but that what we do teach is a warped and perverted view of the past that is intended to make change easier in the present. Exhibit One would be "The 1619 Project."
We see even now that University students don't believe that Oct 7 happened. That Israel was the culprit and perpetrator of the violence. We need to do more than just shake our heads in disbelief.
So true. The loss of civics, classic world history (non-revisionism based), and ethics in primary and secondary education is the cause. The treatment is that because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Those who fail to learn history are doomed to relive it
I have mentioned this before on this site. Last fall my son, at the time 20 years old, was backpacking Europe. He went to Krakow, Poland, and visited Auschwitz. Upon returning to the hostel in Krakow he was talking to some young Australian women who insisted that Auschwitz was a work camp where Jews volunteered to work. My son was incredulous, couldn't believe that they were so stupid and told them so and told them to take the bus to Auschwitz so they can see how wrong they were.
LOL. coming from a country where people were sent when deemed criminals and were never able to return. a definite "mort" without real death for some who left children behind and were worked to death
Dr. Robert Malone terms the madness that gripped Germany as a "mass formation psychosis." It isn't only our universities that are in the cold grasp of a similar madness.
Almost every American company, law firm, organization etc. fell over themselves to issue some virtue signaling twaddle over the alleged "murder" of George Floyd and their dedication to the idiocy of Ibram X. Kendi and other nitwits. But when real atrocity stared them in the face on October 7th, most remained silent. Masses of robotic cretins. Led by cowards and fools. My disgust for them knows no bounds.
I urge everyone to watch the recent podcast of Glenn Loury and John Mcwhorter on the new evidence that has emerged about the George Floyd Derrick Chauvin case. The Woke have no boundaries as to how far they will go to push their hate filled agenda.
And maybe what we need to do is to ensure that the show trial of Daniel Penny by the chubby little Beria wannabe in New York City never takes place and that Mr. Penny is released and compensated for his heroism.
Well in a sane city, there would be an outcry such as when the Hispanic bodega clerk stabbed the skell who assaulted him. Of course because Penny is white the leftist racists in NYC want to sacrifice him. Of course, a sane nation would not allow NYC to lynch an innocent guy who’s actually a hero. We shall see. In any event, I donated to his legal defense fund that I’m sure many others did as well.
I highly encourage watching this Glenn Show episode and then watching The Fall of Minneapolis (free on Rumble). It encapsulates the absolute insanity of the last decade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ffv4IUxkDU
Derek Chauvin needs a retrial he didn’t kill George Floyd - George killed himself, this is America and we need to correct this injustice, even if it means exposing the scam and sham of BLM we must do it.
Ideas start out as innocent or fairness. In the universities, this started out in their hiring practices in the late 1980s. Flaunting legal hiring practices in favor of hiring women and turning over the professorate quickly from a male dominated profession was the first step. Women were flooding into the social sciences and the humanities graduate schools and at the same time the French Intellectuals were exploring post-modern thought which appealed to women with its apparent explanatory power for how a patriarchal system was maintained. Power was in language and as such the objective was not real. Was this mildly Marxist in its orientation? Sure. But, it was a totally different project analyzing culture rather than the economic systems. Foucault's project was a direct assault of the objectivity in gender and sexuality. It was all discursive formations (language and how it was used) and had nothing to do with biology. Literally the throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Also look at what Germany has done to their country and economy in the name of green energy. That madness isn't the only madness our German friends are in the grip of these days.
The Green madness along the grifts and scams of the Covid 21/2 years + the lunacy of the current administration’s policies, lead by a man who just today said that Israel had been fighting Hamas for 65 years ( it may seem that way) when actually it is 65 days. Does one wonder why we are in such a shambles.
I take issue with only a sentence at the end of this important essay” Todays academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Brenda condemned insisting they are on the left whereas Brenda’s targets were on the right”. I would submit that the current DEI establishment and its leaders now entrenched and drunk on their power within the elite universities, in fact studied Nazism in depth. They know exactly what they are doing and how best to do it. They have taken our vocabulary and secretly repurposed it and applied it with an opposing meaning . Diversity, equity and exclusion... thinking no one will recognize their subterfuge. That is why it has taken the sane world so long to wake up to their deceit. We are awake now. We must hope that it is not too late .
Fascism is merely a differently flavor of socialism. It uses loyalty to the nation as its centralizing idea--the ideology that everyone is supposed to devote themselves to--but nationalism is far from the only possible centralizing idea. The Left has created a new centralizing idea with the Woke-ism and Intersectionality: devotion to a system of organizing and rewarding people by their group's level of "oppression."
What the far left and the far right politics have in common is their tendency to authoritarianism. Defined as lack of concern for the opinion or wishes of others and strict obedience to authority over individual freedom. The only difference is the actual ideas they are concerned with and impose authority over. The left is now dealing with the emotions of seeing ideas they generally agree with being pushed into an authoritarian regime, something the right has had to deal with for several generations.
Disa, I think you're giving the progressive establishment too much credit for their ability to organize a take over of universities. They are not that smart. In my mind the only thing they share with Nazis is a blinding belief in the purity and righteousness of their cause, almost religious in scope. As Ferguson mentions in his essay, how can anyone be against the anodyne term 'diversity, equity, inclusion'? It sounds correct, on its face. As with the words anti colonialism and to be against an oppressor. What could go wrong? But it goes very, very wrong when matched to an ideological fervor that transforms words and terms into a means to an end - an end that must occur no matter who objects, who dissents. The cause is so sacrosanct, and in their eyes so obviously the only corrective measure available, nothing must stand in its way - thus paving the way for the censorship and blatant hypocrisy we see in elite universities today.
We agree only partially. I do think they are that smart. I do think this DEI CRT crap is indeed a religion. They have studied well the rise of Nazism and what worked to make it possible within the enlightened educated soil of Germany. By taking the words Diversity , Equity , and Inclusion, words with long held definitions, and implementing them to mean exactly the opposite to fool the well meaning public, was brilliant. There is no other explanation for how this nasty ideology has permeated almost all elite institutions( save Univ of Chicago) here and in Canada. It was never well intentioned but was always a power grab by those who desire a shortcut to positions of leadership. Why work hard, study, publish in real areas of scholarship ( hard science, Economics, literature, ) debate openly and publicly? when it is easier to create DEI departments to protect bogus and mushy unscientific fields of gender and “ critical race “ garbage and call it scholarship. These people refuse to debate, outright lie about “ data” and have been able to “ cancel” and shut down anyone who dares speak truth to their insanity. I seriously doubt they believe this nonsense but it has given them a way to seize power. That’s what it is all about. They invent nothing, create nothing, contribute nothing. They are full of hate and vitriol for real and perceived wrongs of the past. That is NEVER the way forward to a constructive society. Jews are the proof of that. Oppressed again and again, Jews have started over in new countries and worked hard and made good and contributed in real ways to their new countries. Jews and the success of the state of Israel are the antithesis to CRT.
I disagree. They DO believe in their nonsense. Thus the bureaucracy in keeping DEI alive and well and growing. They refuse to debate because their cause in their minds is so blindingly correct, debate is beneath them. It is akin to debating with a Muslim that Mohammed does not exist. To them it cannot be debated, their belief is too strong and entrenched. Academic progressives 'hate' whites, Asians and Jews since they get in the way of their skin color bias. They will censor speech that they feel is a microaggression to precious students of whom they favour, yet allow macroaggressive speech towards Jews to go on.
What I mean by that they don’t believe in their nonsense is that they know full well that there is no science to CRT. That trans ideology is the exact opposite of biology ( that sex is indeed a binary ) .I don’t dispute that they believe their theology. I agree that this is a religion of sorts where” belief” is all that is necessary . That has no place in a University. That belongs in a mosque, church , temple, a synagogue. Imposing one’s religion on others especially in institutions of higher learning is an outrage. They know this. That is why they deliberately, sneakily and with great forethought and design couched it in pseudo scientific terms, using established vocabulary but coded to mean the opposite. It’s a great CON.to pass this cult off as science with its own departments. To make it work they simultaneously installed DEI bureaucracies to shut down, censor, expunge any one who dares to dissent.
I agree that adherents to progressive ideology favour pseudo scientific terms in an attempt to create and impose authority when, in essence, no authority should exist. It's taken decades for this progressivism through a belief system to take root, and now the bureaucratic infrastructure under the guise of DEI is used to rationalize, defend, justify and in the end, expand it.
"a blinding belief in the purity and righteousness of their cause, almost religious in scope."
This is the model of the True Believer, a person who cares only to be right or doing right as they see fit. Eric Hoffer, a former longshoreman in San Francisco wrote a wonderful little book on them, called appropriately, The True Believer. Works as well for Nazis, Marxists, and almost any religion or other self appointed group dedicated to what is right and should be.
I seriously doubt that many in the professorial classes have ever studied the rise of Hitler and the slide from a robust, functioning democracy to one of the most heinous regimes ever to have arrogate power to themselves in the
name of national identity. By the time Germans twigged to the excesses perpetrated in there name, they had become part of the mechanism of tyrany, or they lived in mortal fear of the Gestapo.
Middle ground was not tolerated.
Fast forward to today's academia. In a world of "publish or perish", orthodoxy has replaced scholarship and cautious bothsidesism has removed critical thinking and moral imperatives.
I suspect it will take decades-long housecleaning to purge the feckless robots that currently wield their PhDd to silence reasoned opposition to thier cultural Marxism and Moaist drivel.
Yes and no. They have all imbibed ideas derived from Naziism by way of Heidegger and Derrida. And ideas derived from Marxism by way of the Frankfurt School, Foucault and various and sundry anti- and post-colonialist writers who took Lenin's provably wrong imperialism theory as gospel.
This is a very good essay, but I'm saddened that the writer is still caught in myth that fascism is somehow magically a "right-wing" thing. Communism, socialism, and fascism are merely different flavors of the same ideology--an ideology that requires all individuals to serve the needs of the ideology in control of the state, with the promise that those who comply well enough will prosper.
' (Klemperer) remained in Dresden after the occupation of eastern Germany. It was not long before he began to notice resemblances between the language of the new Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic and the Third Reich. Like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Klemperer understood that the totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left had fundamentally similar characteristics. In particular, they loved to impose Newspeak on those they subjugated. '
By incuding that paragraph, I think Ferguson is alluding to the similarities of Left/Right totalitarianism.
I am beginning to think that the Left/Right paradigm has become meaningless.
It started, after all, as a description of French politics before the French Revolution, with supporters of the monarchy (the status quo) on the right and the supporters of a kind of democracy that turned into a nascent form of communism on the left.
There has never been a monarchy in the U.S.--that was kind of the point of its existence as a nation. The only sense in which modern conservatism is similar to the French right is that it wants to preserve the status quo...and at present, that status quo is the Classical Liberalism of our Founders. Which was, ironically, considered to be on the left at the time, although we wisely rejected the variety of democracy the French left embraced.
But the reality at present is that the extremes of what we call "right" and "left" want exactly the same thing: to control people in order to create the ideology's own brand of utopia.
well if you think of Classical Liberalism as ultimately splitting into Democrats and Republicans to each emphasize parts of CL - maybe Fascism is the opposite of Classical Liberalism, and there are both left and right Fascists.
Maybe we're all stuck analyzing left-right and that's the wrong axis. Maybe it's Classical Liberalism itself - engulfing both left and right in America, but not the fringes - that needs defending.
I think I can simplify things here a little bit: if in the center we put CL with the emphasis on individual freedoms and rights, and then start moving away from the center to the right and to the left toward more totalitarian society, but instead of a straight line we will use a circle, we will discover that the opposites will actually become confluent and morph into each other. In reality there is no difference between Left and Right Totalitarism. Rivers of blood in both.
You are absolutely right, but alas, the "distinction" is too useful to whose who call themselves "the Left", since they get to tar all their opponents as "fascists" or "Nazis".
In fact "right wing" has never had any meaning more coherent than "opposed to the normative Left", so when that was defined by the Comintern, classical liberals, Tories, any sort of nationalist not aligned with Moscow, ultramontane clericalists, monarchists, Nazis and fascists were all "right wing" even though they had nothing in common other than opposing the Comintern. Now that the normative Left is what we short-hand as "woke", a lot of folks who want to look out for the interests of the working class and think "intersectionalism" is rubbish suddenly are effectively part of the Right, however vainly they try to sweep back the tide of linguistic change and keep "Left" for their own political views.
As a young CPA working on tax returns, I was surprised to see so many doctors with poor investment choices. A senior tax partner told me that those who think they are very intelligent are often the easiest to dupe.
Review Nancy Pelosi tax returns for great investment strategies. Her investments increased 50% last year. The very sly and corrupt have the survival instincts of rats and roaches. It is an instinct that exceeds any bounds of ethics and requires cunning not intelligence.
That has been well known in financial circles since I was a young man in the 1980s. Also well known is how the wealthy are insecure, which leads to following fads of all types. Hence, why getting in with a doctor with your investment usually leads to other doctors investing. This following of fads might explain why the elite universities are at the forefront of the DEI stuff.
A glimmer of hope is that the DEI / critical race theory / identity politics that led to the current madness was not, unlike Nazism, directed exclusively at the Jewish community. It was aimed at the core values of America and had middle America as its target.
That means that today, unlike 1930s Germany, the Jewish community is not alone but is joined by all Americans who believe rules apply equally to everyone, men with beards in dresses are still men, advancement should be by merit instead of race. Public opinion surveys consistently confirm this:
A groundswell of American popular opposition to these woke ideologies is the major force in restoring balance, sanity and decency in public life. That is the great difference between today and 1930s Germany.
It leads us with so many questions. How did we as parents allow such behavior in our universities, and presently allow woke infiltration into our public schools? Why are the majority of Jews Democrat Liberals? Why were they so enamored of President Roosevelt, when surrounded by antisemitics, did nothing to save the Jews from the Holocaust? Why is there so much hate and killing on this beautiful planet?
The majority of secular and non religious Jews were part of the woke movement . Many have had their eyes opened since the massacre. The majority of religious Jews are Libertarian and Conservative. I doubt they are even polled .
All of my Jewish relatives are Liberal and those who came from Russia are Communists. They vote for Democrats all down the line and have never figured out that most of the problems in the US are caused by Liberal thinking and action.
Do you know many or any orthodox Jews? They are by and large Conservatives and libertarian. The more right wing orthodox the more that holds true. It becomes more and more insular and is not represented in most polls that I have seen. I do not dispute that the majority of the non orthodox Jewish communities have been Liberals and progressives( hate that term)
Most of my family, both sides, are orthodox Jews. The exceptions are the wealthy ones, they are Conservatives. I come from an earlier era than you and I imagine things have changed. I'm no longer in contact with my family. I live in a different country, so they too may have changed.
Yes, progressives is a misleading term. Regressives may be more accurate.
I believe the answer may be suggested in Dr. Ferguson's essay above. The Nazis & communists were enemies. Many Jews still carry that in the collective psyche.
Joanne, I don't write essays and that is what it would take. But just off the top of my head - and this is far from a formed, cogent thesis: For older Jews, there was much sympathy towards the Soviets who liberated the camps. They did not see Communists as a form of authoritarianism but as a liberating progressive movement. They also identified communism as an intellectual ideology vs Nazi knuckle-draggers. The Jews who grew up during WWII (and then witnessed the McCarthy Hearings) and then went on to join the civil rights movement saw the rights movements of the 60's as a continuation of the fight against Nazism, i.e., a continuation of the communist fight against Nazism and other so-called fascists ideologies (e.g., the far right today) - even when some saw that the USSR had "lost its way." This generation passed it on to their baby boomer generation who then brought these ideas to the mainstream. And the rest is history. Yes, this line of thinking was full of holes, but it was based on emotion. I am sketching this out based on my experience as a Jew growing up in the 60's and 70's.
I've also been following this trend with dismay for the last several years, and I studied German history as well, so much of this excellent piece was familiar. But even if there are the stirrings of backlash now, I still don't understand how so many adults who had responsibility tolerated this nonsense. Looking the other way from looting and crime, upending livelihoods for non-offenses, wholesale cultural arson, personal destruction--the Oberlin bakery case alone should have shocked every adult's conscience--all were met by shrugs and complicity from grown men and women in positions of authority.
Can anyone even imaginne the anti semitic student mobs NOT gleefully particpateing in a burning of Jewish authored books in Harvard square? On today's trajectory violence agains the jews and then others is assured.
The shortest path to evil is calling it good, and while doing so granting license and approval to the lowest, basest, worst impulses in all of us.
If it is true that extremes meet (I need to figure out who said that: I do remember about where I read it), then it is very logical that the hatred of irrational haters has led to generalized and unapologetic (and indeed almost entirely unconscious) irrational hatred of people whose actual profiles and beliefs and lives are largely invisible.
The goal, you see, was banishing hate. But the method itself consisted in hate. The hate has grown, the vision has diminished, and what was once becoming rare--true bigotry--has grown wings and sprouted everywhere.
The Left has become what it claims to hate. Why wouldn't it? If perception and a sense of personal accountability are not part of the process, why would the hallucinations not deepen and multiply?
What intelligence adds to all this is an expanded capacity for delusion, nothing more. Far from making ridiculous beliefs less likely, it makes them MORE likely.
Just look. Yes. There, there, and there. You cannot miss it.
I am actually going to excerpt a story from the book "The Wisdom of the Idiots". I have things to do and probably an idiot myself for doing this, but the hell with it. Could be fun.
The Mad King's Idol
"There was once a violent, ignorant and idolatrous king. One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life, he would capture the first three people who passed by his castle, and force them to dedicate themselves to idol-worship.
Sure enough, the king's wish was fulfilled, and he immediately sent soldiers onto the highway to bring in the first three people whom they could find.
These three were, as it happened, a Scholar, a Sayed (descendant of the Prophet Mohammad) and a prostitute.
Having them thrown down before his idol, the unbalanced king told them of his vow, and ordered them all to bow down in front of the image.
The scholar said:
This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of 'force majeure". There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real legal or moral culpability being in any way involved.'
So he made a deep obeisance to the idol.
The Sayed, when it was his turn, said:
'As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the Holy Prophet, my actions themselves purify anything that is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.'
And he bowed down before the idol.
The prostitute said:
'Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, and so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.'
The mad king's malady was immediately banished by this remark. As if by magic he saw the deceit of the two worshippers of the image. He at once had the scholar and the Sayed decapitated, and set the prostitute free."
That's a great story. I like the irony here too. Life has an amazing number of textures, if you feel for them.
But that book is one of my most prized possessions, along with my copy of the Tao Te Ching.
I look forward to your daily offerings. This one was especially good.
Reminded me of the the entire apparatus who pretend that our own emperor is not naked and mad. Sadly he cannot be cured of the malady of senility and corruption that hold him in its icy grasp. Our nation, however, can open its eyes and undo this idiocy.
Thanks!!! Yes, that was in effect a retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson story.
According to Alex Jones--make of that what you will--an unnameable source told him Joe LITERALLY runs around naked in the White House at night and that only large doses of methamphetamine enable him to function at all. This means the cocaine was likely for the legal President of the United States.
People think when they have to. Most Americans don't have to think. And clearly, they don't. Most seem to have lost the habit entirely, reacting with the minds and emotions of children to nearly everything.
They are pumping him full of something. Hes not fit to run a gas station.
And some sort of stimulant would make sense, but I’m not really qualified to comment on what it takes to make someone with advanced Alzheimers able to appear almost normal for short periods of time.
Probably not among core elite, who seem to be uniformly sociopathic, but definitely among the useful dupes. Most of them to this very moment think they are standing up TO, and not WITH, hate.
Go get a coffee near a college campus and watch people.
"Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny."
First they came for the conservatives, and I did not speak out because they're hateful.
Then they came for climate skeptics, and I did not speak out because... science.
Then they came for the anti-lockdown crazies and I did not speak out because... science.
Then they came for President Trump, and I did not speak out because he says mean things.
Then they came for the Jews and "Oh my! We have a problem with intolerance!"
The hate and intolerance have been evident for a long time. Congratulations on the epiphany. You are welcome among the sane. Please check your other preconceptions at the door.
I always wondered why Trump got so much blow back and how so many could have such crazy TDS. It's because he pointed out all the truths (see above) from the begining. FBI, the press, the deep state, etc. Obama said he wanted to fundamentally change America, but he said it with conviction and grace! Clinton has sex play with an intern and was impeached - but he is a moderate and had so much charisma! Biden lies and plagiarised, sniffs little girls heads, trips and can't finish a sentence - but he is just old Uncle Joe! All those Democrats went a long with the progressive lies and got rich and famous. Republicans get cancelled or put in jail.
I was struck by the sequence of events described in these sentences. "The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide." This sequence of reminds me of a progression that I observed. In 1985 a friend who was attending the Unitversity of California Santa Cruz used the term "politically incorrect," and then explained it to me. Now, several decades later, I see pseudo-legal discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. Is the next step "technocratic genocide[?]"
After visiting thr Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., I was struck by the high percentage of German Jews that were murdered in camps. They did not leave Germany in time - was it their disbelief that their most advanced country could do what was becoming obvious. My wife’s mother read Mein Kampf in Warsaw. And when war broke out she ran East.
What happened on Oct 7th was filmed and broadcast live and yet people still state that it did not happen. We read and listen to witnesses and still people call what Hamas did and continue to do as "resistance" and the silence from human and woman's rights groups is deafening.
"Nice" people who are educated, who recycle, who would never stand in a grocery line with a limit of 15 items with 16 items in their cart, are the the same people that are tearing down hostage pictures and screaming "from the river to the sea."
Denial and an inability to understand what evil really looks like is why German Jews stayed in Germany and maybe we aren't cleverer?
I think it was truly a frog-in-boiling water situation. Germany heated the water - noticeably, but not severely - so many times it was easy for people to say "surely they wouldn't" or "it's just one figure of speech I can't say" and that, although relentless, literally duped people into saying it wasn't that bad, it would probably go no farther, and staying. I think once the Einsatzgrüppen got going around 1939 it was undeniable things were not going to end well...but even the enormity of that was masked by the steady stream of chip-chipping away at the civil rights of the Jews in Germany, until suddenly it was apparent and terrifying...and too late.
You could make an argument that the 30s were the most dangerous time in Germany for Jews, and from 1939 on it was just taking their evil and depravity to logical and vile conclusions.
I read "The Warburgs" by Chernow. The Warburgs even helped Hitler to sell war bonds! They viewed themselves as Germans first and foremost, hence were resistant to the idea of leaving. To many, it became too late...
My old ancient Greek teacher was related to the Warburgs. She stayed in Germany to open a school for Jewish children and to tend to her elderly mother and, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, got out just by the skin of her teeth.
She felt German. Her family was well rooted in Berlin. Her brother was killed fighting for the Fatherland in World War One. Her work at university among her German fellow students gave her great joy. She wrote her poetry in German.
Betrayal is always hard to fathom. How many of us cannot believe the evidence of our eyes when it goes against our hearts?
Excellent article. I found the section describing the cost-benefit analysis of the continued support of an "idiot," and the economic benefits of killing mental patients to be particularly chilling/prescient. The merger of Canada's MAID program with their robust social welfare system seems more and more like an unholy alliance. The US better keep an eye on our neighbors to the north, and ensure such ideas don't fester here.
Romans 1:20-22 & Proverbs 9:10 are instructive. Humanism is ultimately hollow. Death comes, then what? We humans are profoundly finite making our arrogance disgusting. Well educated fools are dangerous. Where are the wise?
This moment is astounding. Will it give pause to the “woke”? So far not really. So righteous in their CRT that they can no longer distinguish
fact from fiction.
I wasn’t alive until after WWII. But I knew ppl who lived through that time, including my parents. It is a poor commentary that less than a century after the Holocaust there is a distinctly willful amnesia and a resurgence of anti-semitism. Maybe if this happened before such inventions as photography, audio recording or even general literacy but all of those things made it possible to record the events of the rise of Hitler. While literacy has taken a step back here in the past 20 yrs due to a failure of public education coupled with the age of digitalization (esp video) that removes ppl from print, most ppl can read enough to comprehend history books.
If someone told me that any of this nonsense now gripping the western world would be happening at this time, I wouldn’t believe it. But here we are AGAIN.
Like, WTF?
It’s Chanukah and there are crazed ppl defending a brutal attack against Jews!?! We have a blue Star of David lit up on our house and because this is still America, we can defend our home. I refuse to be bullied into shying away from supporting Israel.
By the same token I hate to see the loss of life in Gaza. Not Hamas, just all the other ppl who are the extended victims of Islamist extremists. They put their own children in harms way out of some demented notion that it glorifies their prophet. My God detests violence but gives permission to defend against evil.
Men and women of courage the world over need to stand up to terrorism, everywhere, every time.
That’s true but the urban myth that more ppl have been killed in the name of god persists. Between Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, assorted Chinese communist dictators, Pol Pot, Castro and a wide assortment of South American dictators (not to mention murderous tribes like the Aztecs) the total #of people is many millions. I’m sure I’ve missed a few peachy creepers but war is always horrible. Communism is the worst idea ever.
More ppl have been killed by flies than all the wars ever fought combined.
Yes the student mobs of 1933 Germany have just been about forgotten -- the book burnings at the doorstep of Friedrich-Willhelm University were just one manifestation.
There was early anti-Hitler momentum in academia, though -- in the UK it was led by nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, William Beveridge, Ernest Rutherford and Harold Laski.
In the US, it resulted in the formation of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars. One Edward Murrow who later became the American voice of the Blitz and helped to bring down Joseph McCarthy served as the general dogsbody. The aim was to get Jewish academics places in American colleges and universities (often at cut rate prices)
Harvard notably refused-- the then president A Lawrence Lowell made a specific declaration against giving places to emigres or in protest against Nazi policies, a policy confirm the following year by his successor James Bryant Conant.
Other universities and colleges did try to help -- the roll call includes University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology (who sponsored Einstein), MIT, Mount Holyoke, Stanford and Columbia. In the end, 91 academics were saved by US efforts.
It is easy to overlook the glimmers of good when faced with an onslaught of evil.
And the reason why 'calls for genocide to any group' are always against university policy (or should be) is that they are an incite to violence and incitements to violence are not protected speech under the First Amendment. Even when you consider the robust nature of political argument (see NYT v Sullivan 1964), the line was drawn before actual incitement to violence.
Harvard, Yale and other prestigious schools in the New England area were all Anti semitic in the 20’s and 30’s. There were quotas on Jews being allowed to enter their undergrad and medical schools. My father was in the first class of Jews allowed at a certain university in that cluster. Similar to what Asian students experience now. The feeling has always been “ There are too many of them”.
So Harvard has actually been run by Nazis for a century? Depressing, but now it all makes sense.
I think it is far more complicated, but Harvard made the wrong decision in the 1930s and indeed appears to be making the same sort of wrong decision now.
It is well known that Harvard generally discriminated against Jews during the pre-war period. Paul Samuelson finished his doctorate there in the late 1930’s and could not find a job. Given how path-breaking his dissertation was they otherwise would have hired him themselves. Instead, MIT hired him and along with other Jewish economists turned their economics department into one of the best departments in the world. Samuelson was the first American to receive a Nobel prize in economics.
And Samuelson was responsible for a widely used econ 101 textbook which undoubtedly influenced many. Harvard's loss was MIT and the world's gain.
The story of his textbook is also interesting. He was asked to teach principles of economics and learned that his students were taking detailed notes and sharing them. This lead to his getting a deal with a textbook company. His book changed the way principles of economics. There is an address by Ken Elzinga published in the Southern Economics Journal titled The Eleven Principles of Economics about Samuelson’s textbook.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1060226
Memories of Econ 11 still make me shudder involuntarily whenever I hear the nam “Paul Samuelson”… 😀
Really interesting. Thank you for finding me the link. I did use a version of his book in my econ class.
Many things are complicated on a behind-the-scenes level. But on the level of practical effects, there's not much difference.
Agreed. But because I haven't actually researched Harvard's position in the intervening period between 1934 -2023, I couldn't possibly comment.
I do think all 3 presidents fell into a trap. The question was incredibly specific and did not use any of the terminology which has so confuddled the British Metropolitan police. So not asking about 'jihad' or 'intifada' but rather the 'calling for the genocide of Jews'. Calling for genocide of any group is normally considered incitement of racial hatred and should have been expressly forbidden by Codes of Conduct, particularly when coupled with some of the scenes which have been witnessed on the various campuses.
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
― George Orwell
I don't consider that "a trap." It was an extremely clear question, and all three waffled it.
I agree again. It was not a trap, at least not at that very point. perhaps down the road.
when Rep Stefanik asked them a simple question whether calls for Jewish genocide constituted a violation of college policies, she expected them to say “yes” but then to follow up with questions about their failure to enforce those regulations. That is where the "trap" was due to their dereliction of duties. Were they so afraid of the down-road-trap, that they just wracked the train before even going over there?
I agree. Those university presidents are just dogmatic left wing bigots and that came through in their lockstep testimonies.
Yes, the question posed to the three Presidents was very specific. So much so, that it tripped up otherwise intelligent people into making a horrible error. But the error was of their own making. Why ? Because their ideology forced their brain into a series of considerations that overruled simple human morality. They essentially closed the logic loop of their ideology upon themselves. Leaving themselves exposed. It was masterful.
Our Creator has a weird sense of humor sometimes.
Words create worlds.
Jihad, intifada and genocide, my word is genocide, as in Jewish genocide.
Maybe because Harvard is populated by bigoted assholes that have a god complex.
they just were changing colors from brown to red and now to 1/2 red + 1/2 green.
Not all antisemites are Nazis, some are content to not rub shoulders with Jews and sneer at purported Jewish moral failings without actually wanting to kill them.
I'm sure that many German citizens felt that way. But when you side with people who DO want to kill Jews, any practical difference disappears.
They are then guilty not of commission but omission. Not wanting to kill someone does not exonerate those who standby and watch while someone else does the deed.
Bravo!!!
See my earlier comments. Harvard has not been run by Nazis for over a century.
Harvard has been consistent.
A boss of mine used to quote Emerson, 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers...'
My dad used to say: There's something to be said for being consistent.
In the mid-1990’s I heard an elderly chemist (in his 80’s or 90’s) who did a post-doc in Germany during the mid to late 1930’s, talk about the emergency committee. He was supposed to work with a Jewish chemist but the Jewish guy was fired while he was in route to Germany. The fired professor got a position in the USA because of the work of American scientists trying to salvage careers of those who lost their jobs in Germany. He told us many scientists stayed because they knew Hitler was going to get Germany into a war that would destroy the country and they chose to remain so that they could help rebuild it. The man I heard talk about this ended up doing his post-doc with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother.
Really interesting. Thank you for sharing. I love learning little nuggets of history like this. I only really know about the Emergency Committee because I have done some research on Edward Murrow. But I think it was tremendously important.
Apparently some Jewish refugees who had been forced out of academic positions in Germany taught in Historically Black Colleges. There was a 60 minutes episode on this a very long time ago.
That is so v interesting. I wonder if there was link to this and the v close involvement that the Jewish community in general had with early civil rights. For example, did Moorhouse College (MLK jr alma mater) provide academic positions?
Hi Michelle, I’m assuming you are a Brit, am I right? I was born in Ireland raised all my life in England and am now a US citizen. Thanks for all your salient updates and insights on UK and European news, much appreciated.
On Bonhoeffer, I thought you might be interested in what he said about evil just before he was executed. Because I believe the people we have at the top of our institutions today are not what we think. I’m not exonerating or excusing them in any way, far from it. However, because they’re likely DEI candidates I believe they’re too intellectually void, or “Stupid”, to know just how stupid they are. Therefore they’re far more dangerous to society. Here’s Bonhoeffer on the subject:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
I was born and raised in Mtn View CA (back when it was still v rural in many ways and people didn't want to admit to hailing from there -- how things alter) and moved to the UK in 1988 when I married. I took British citizenship in 2018 and so am now a dual citizen. You gain another soul when you become a naturalized citizen in many respects.
Bonhoeffer had great insight. And I suspect you are right about people at the top of institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. You can do a lot about a lot of things but you can't do much about wilful ignorance coupled with stubborn obstinacy.
My story is the directional reverse of yours, we even share the year we moved. Quite uncanny. I know Mountain View as we have a home in California, lovely part of the world, very high tech now. We visit in laws in Los Gatos all the time. Spot on about becoming a naturalized citizen, it took me a long time, over thirty years, because I felt disloyal in a way. Silly me. I have dual citizenship too. Though I can’t say I’m too proud of my Irish citizenship at the moment.
Spot on too about the intellectual descent on both sides of the Atlantic. My daughters went to school in Europe as we traveled for work so much. It was enlightening for them in many ways, often the wrong ways, very PC. Still, they’ve turned out beautifully, strong, discerning, confident, kind and loving. Can’t ask for more.
Willful ignorance is right. Intelligent people know that they don’t know and enquire and enlighten themselves. The cretins we have at the top now double down when they’re wrong. We’re living in a time of absurdity. Even the Pope is part of the “Stupid” brigade.
My daughter has just moved to Dublin for her job and so suddenly I have a serious interest in Ireland. Her office ended up being closed due to the riots, but the city council have worked hard to clean everything up and people have returned for the shopping. Ireland has its difficulties including the rapid development in tech which has resulted in a large number of tech nomads as the population was not geared up to produce the engineers etc required, a sudden increase in the need for social housing after decades of being stable (alone amongst the EU countries they housed the Ukrainians in hotels which has had a knock on effect on the tourism industry and the small businesses which are dependant on that etc). There are also glimmers of a return to common sense with the Keep Prisons Single Sex bill passing its first reading.
Los Gatos is a lovely place btw -- when I was little we used to go to the Old Town shopping centre for Sunday Brunch sometimes. Just a really pretty place. And yes, very high tech now. Saved it in many ways as the farming industry was faltering.
Parenting is a long game -- you can never truly be certain until they are grown and flown. Congratulations to you both for winning it. No you can't ask for more.
They say King James was the wisest fool in Christendom. Some of the current world leadership like to give him a run for the money...
In the 30s, German academics from the “Frankfurt school“ (Marxism, and critical theory) escaped to the US and found places universities. Interestingly, many of these academics some of whom were Jewish were Marxists fleeing persecution from Nazis. Is it strange to wonder how Marxism underpins many of the left.
Niall Ferguson touched on this in his FP article The Treason of the Intellectuals.
https://substack.com/profile/4712139-niall-ferguson
Have you read Ben McEntyre's Agent Sonya which is about Ursula Kuczynski -- a German Jew who became one of the most effective agents for the USSR? It is a fascinating read and McEntyre can tell a story. One of the things which drove her that way was Nazism (there are clear and obvious reasons why Jewish people opposed that ideology) -- there was indeed this huge polarization in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. It is also easy to forget the level of poverty Germany endured after WWI and that both movements gained followers by promising to combat it.
It is one of the reasons why I have such a soft spot for Natalie Wales Latham and Common Cause (1947) as it sought to be a moderate anti-communism organization -- recognizing the totalitarian aspect of both extremes and the danger to democracy.
Marxism is a Jewish rake of enormous proportions. Needs to be finally broken. The rake, otherwise the forehead may.
James B. Conant is actually somewhat familiar to me. I have read at least one book (recommended) written by his granddaughter. His granddaughter’s name is Jennet Conant. The book is titled “Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World”. James B. Conant promoted the SAT precisely as a mechanism for talented students from non-elite families (which meant mostly Jews back then, mostly Asians now) to attend Harvard. He was also a director of the Manhattan project.
Harvard restricted Jewish admissions around 1920. Apparently, FDR voted in favor of the restrictions. The restrictions were real, but the Jewish quota was high. These days Harvard is credibly accused of favoring Jewish applicants. Harvard does not favor Jews per se. However, Harvard has long favored the bi-coastal elite, which means (de facto) something of a pro-Jewish bias. Harvard discriminates against whites with the “wrong” values and/or geographic origins. See “The Roots of White Anxiety” by Ross Douthat.
What is truly scary is that many polls show that people don’t believe the holicaust happened. One said that Only 55 percent of Black Americans are convinced the Holocaust is not a myth, others that 20 percent of young people feel similarly. What a failure in higher education and secondary education that these trends can occur.
And it's not just that we fail to teach history, but that what we do teach is a warped and perverted view of the past that is intended to make change easier in the present. Exhibit One would be "The 1619 Project."
We see even now that University students don't believe that Oct 7 happened. That Israel was the culprit and perpetrator of the violence. We need to do more than just shake our heads in disbelief.
The %% of the young people ages 18-35 on supporting Hamas has l left me reeling it’s terrifying to say the least.
Agree. It’s frightening when you consider these kids are denying the Holocaust and now Oct 7th. Sad world we live in.
Well you’ve got one person here in that age category that doesn’t. Perhaps more of us will come out of the woodwork.
Thank you Rachael for believing pg more of you do come out!
History is rhyming as we speak. I find it hard to go about business as usual. Everything feels disorienting, shaken and malicious.
And 60+ years of "allyship" extended by many Jews to the civil rights movement has reaped what, exactly?
The irony of that, Blair, is lost on most of those teaching these days at the college level.
Cría cuervos. Te comeran tus ojos.
Yes. Were my dad still alive, he would share his experience of liberating the camps.
People tend to believe that they're taught. See the problem?
So true. The loss of civics, classic world history (non-revisionism based), and ethics in primary and secondary education is the cause. The treatment is that because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Those who fail to learn history are doomed to relive it
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/07/one-in-five-young-americans-thinks-the-holocaust-is-a-myth
I have mentioned this before on this site. Last fall my son, at the time 20 years old, was backpacking Europe. He went to Krakow, Poland, and visited Auschwitz. Upon returning to the hostel in Krakow he was talking to some young Australian women who insisted that Auschwitz was a work camp where Jews volunteered to work. My son was incredulous, couldn't believe that they were so stupid and told them so and told them to take the bus to Auschwitz so they can see how wrong they were.
A full analysis of how we got to this place could make an academic career for a dedicated historian.
But he would not be offered a position at a U.S. university because he was a white man.
LOL. coming from a country where people were sent when deemed criminals and were never able to return. a definite "mort" without real death for some who left children behind and were worked to death
Frightening!
They’re indoctrinated in elementary school. The damage is already done by the time students reach university level.
What is truly scary is that historical lessons are purposefully omitted and/or altered.
Dr. Robert Malone terms the madness that gripped Germany as a "mass formation psychosis." It isn't only our universities that are in the cold grasp of a similar madness.
Almost every American company, law firm, organization etc. fell over themselves to issue some virtue signaling twaddle over the alleged "murder" of George Floyd and their dedication to the idiocy of Ibram X. Kendi and other nitwits. But when real atrocity stared them in the face on October 7th, most remained silent. Masses of robotic cretins. Led by cowards and fools. My disgust for them knows no bounds.
I urge everyone to watch the recent podcast of Glenn Loury and John Mcwhorter on the new evidence that has emerged about the George Floyd Derrick Chauvin case. The Woke have no boundaries as to how far they will go to push their hate filled agenda.
And maybe what we need to do is to ensure that the show trial of Daniel Penny by the chubby little Beria wannabe in New York City never takes place and that Mr. Penny is released and compensated for his heroism.
Another case of injustice.
Any suggestions how to do that for Mr Penny?
Well in a sane city, there would be an outcry such as when the Hispanic bodega clerk stabbed the skell who assaulted him. Of course because Penny is white the leftist racists in NYC want to sacrifice him. Of course, a sane nation would not allow NYC to lynch an innocent guy who’s actually a hero. We shall see. In any event, I donated to his legal defense fund that I’m sure many others did as well.
Get Prof Dershowitz to defend him.
I highly encourage watching this Glenn Show episode and then watching The Fall of Minneapolis (free on Rumble). It encapsulates the absolute insanity of the last decade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ffv4IUxkDU
https://rumble.com/v3vyvzv-the-fall-of-minneapolis.html
Derek Chauvin needs a retrial he didn’t kill George Floyd - George killed himself, this is America and we need to correct this injustice, even if it means exposing the scam and sham of BLM we must do it.
The Black faction of the DNC brownshirts.
Thank you for recommending the Glenn Loury YouTube it was excellent I have watched “the fall of Minneapolis” it was very good.
Ideas start out as innocent or fairness. In the universities, this started out in their hiring practices in the late 1980s. Flaunting legal hiring practices in favor of hiring women and turning over the professorate quickly from a male dominated profession was the first step. Women were flooding into the social sciences and the humanities graduate schools and at the same time the French Intellectuals were exploring post-modern thought which appealed to women with its apparent explanatory power for how a patriarchal system was maintained. Power was in language and as such the objective was not real. Was this mildly Marxist in its orientation? Sure. But, it was a totally different project analyzing culture rather than the economic systems. Foucault's project was a direct assault of the objectivity in gender and sexuality. It was all discursive formations (language and how it was used) and had nothing to do with biology. Literally the throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Also look at what Germany has done to their country and economy in the name of green energy. That madness isn't the only madness our German friends are in the grip of these days.
The Green madness along the grifts and scams of the Covid 21/2 years + the lunacy of the current administration’s policies, lead by a man who just today said that Israel had been fighting Hamas for 65 years ( it may seem that way) when actually it is 65 days. Does one wonder why we are in such a shambles.
Ha, yes.
I take issue with only a sentence at the end of this important essay” Todays academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Brenda condemned insisting they are on the left whereas Brenda’s targets were on the right”. I would submit that the current DEI establishment and its leaders now entrenched and drunk on their power within the elite universities, in fact studied Nazism in depth. They know exactly what they are doing and how best to do it. They have taken our vocabulary and secretly repurposed it and applied it with an opposing meaning . Diversity, equity and exclusion... thinking no one will recognize their subterfuge. That is why it has taken the sane world so long to wake up to their deceit. We are awake now. We must hope that it is not too late .
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion….most definitely not . But it is Discrimination, Exclusion, and Indoctrination most assuredly.
Fascism is merely a differently flavor of socialism. It uses loyalty to the nation as its centralizing idea--the ideology that everyone is supposed to devote themselves to--but nationalism is far from the only possible centralizing idea. The Left has created a new centralizing idea with the Woke-ism and Intersectionality: devotion to a system of organizing and rewarding people by their group's level of "oppression."
What the far left and the far right politics have in common is their tendency to authoritarianism. Defined as lack of concern for the opinion or wishes of others and strict obedience to authority over individual freedom. The only difference is the actual ideas they are concerned with and impose authority over. The left is now dealing with the emotions of seeing ideas they generally agree with being pushed into an authoritarian regime, something the right has had to deal with for several generations.
Disa, I think you're giving the progressive establishment too much credit for their ability to organize a take over of universities. They are not that smart. In my mind the only thing they share with Nazis is a blinding belief in the purity and righteousness of their cause, almost religious in scope. As Ferguson mentions in his essay, how can anyone be against the anodyne term 'diversity, equity, inclusion'? It sounds correct, on its face. As with the words anti colonialism and to be against an oppressor. What could go wrong? But it goes very, very wrong when matched to an ideological fervor that transforms words and terms into a means to an end - an end that must occur no matter who objects, who dissents. The cause is so sacrosanct, and in their eyes so obviously the only corrective measure available, nothing must stand in its way - thus paving the way for the censorship and blatant hypocrisy we see in elite universities today.
We agree only partially. I do think they are that smart. I do think this DEI CRT crap is indeed a religion. They have studied well the rise of Nazism and what worked to make it possible within the enlightened educated soil of Germany. By taking the words Diversity , Equity , and Inclusion, words with long held definitions, and implementing them to mean exactly the opposite to fool the well meaning public, was brilliant. There is no other explanation for how this nasty ideology has permeated almost all elite institutions( save Univ of Chicago) here and in Canada. It was never well intentioned but was always a power grab by those who desire a shortcut to positions of leadership. Why work hard, study, publish in real areas of scholarship ( hard science, Economics, literature, ) debate openly and publicly? when it is easier to create DEI departments to protect bogus and mushy unscientific fields of gender and “ critical race “ garbage and call it scholarship. These people refuse to debate, outright lie about “ data” and have been able to “ cancel” and shut down anyone who dares speak truth to their insanity. I seriously doubt they believe this nonsense but it has given them a way to seize power. That’s what it is all about. They invent nothing, create nothing, contribute nothing. They are full of hate and vitriol for real and perceived wrongs of the past. That is NEVER the way forward to a constructive society. Jews are the proof of that. Oppressed again and again, Jews have started over in new countries and worked hard and made good and contributed in real ways to their new countries. Jews and the success of the state of Israel are the antithesis to CRT.
I disagree. They DO believe in their nonsense. Thus the bureaucracy in keeping DEI alive and well and growing. They refuse to debate because their cause in their minds is so blindingly correct, debate is beneath them. It is akin to debating with a Muslim that Mohammed does not exist. To them it cannot be debated, their belief is too strong and entrenched. Academic progressives 'hate' whites, Asians and Jews since they get in the way of their skin color bias. They will censor speech that they feel is a microaggression to precious students of whom they favour, yet allow macroaggressive speech towards Jews to go on.
What I mean by that they don’t believe in their nonsense is that they know full well that there is no science to CRT. That trans ideology is the exact opposite of biology ( that sex is indeed a binary ) .I don’t dispute that they believe their theology. I agree that this is a religion of sorts where” belief” is all that is necessary . That has no place in a University. That belongs in a mosque, church , temple, a synagogue. Imposing one’s religion on others especially in institutions of higher learning is an outrage. They know this. That is why they deliberately, sneakily and with great forethought and design couched it in pseudo scientific terms, using established vocabulary but coded to mean the opposite. It’s a great CON.to pass this cult off as science with its own departments. To make it work they simultaneously installed DEI bureaucracies to shut down, censor, expunge any one who dares to dissent.
I agree that adherents to progressive ideology favour pseudo scientific terms in an attempt to create and impose authority when, in essence, no authority should exist. It's taken decades for this progressivism through a belief system to take root, and now the bureaucratic infrastructure under the guise of DEI is used to rationalize, defend, justify and in the end, expand it.
Our positions are a little closer..
"a blinding belief in the purity and righteousness of their cause, almost religious in scope."
This is the model of the True Believer, a person who cares only to be right or doing right as they see fit. Eric Hoffer, a former longshoreman in San Francisco wrote a wonderful little book on them, called appropriately, The True Believer. Works as well for Nazis, Marxists, and almost any religion or other self appointed group dedicated to what is right and should be.
They just as easily could have studied the Soviet Union under Lenin or Stalin, the result would be the same.
I seriously doubt that many in the professorial classes have ever studied the rise of Hitler and the slide from a robust, functioning democracy to one of the most heinous regimes ever to have arrogate power to themselves in the
name of national identity. By the time Germans twigged to the excesses perpetrated in there name, they had become part of the mechanism of tyrany, or they lived in mortal fear of the Gestapo.
Middle ground was not tolerated.
Fast forward to today's academia. In a world of "publish or perish", orthodoxy has replaced scholarship and cautious bothsidesism has removed critical thinking and moral imperatives.
I suspect it will take decades-long housecleaning to purge the feckless robots that currently wield their PhDd to silence reasoned opposition to thier cultural Marxism and Moaist drivel.
Yes and no. They have all imbibed ideas derived from Naziism by way of Heidegger and Derrida. And ideas derived from Marxism by way of the Frankfurt School, Foucault and various and sundry anti- and post-colonialist writers who took Lenin's provably wrong imperialism theory as gospel.
This is a very good essay, but I'm saddened that the writer is still caught in myth that fascism is somehow magically a "right-wing" thing. Communism, socialism, and fascism are merely different flavors of the same ideology--an ideology that requires all individuals to serve the needs of the ideology in control of the state, with the promise that those who comply well enough will prosper.
' (Klemperer) remained in Dresden after the occupation of eastern Germany. It was not long before he began to notice resemblances between the language of the new Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic and the Third Reich. Like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Klemperer understood that the totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left had fundamentally similar characteristics. In particular, they loved to impose Newspeak on those they subjugated. '
By incuding that paragraph, I think Ferguson is alluding to the similarities of Left/Right totalitarianism.
I am beginning to think that the Left/Right paradigm has become meaningless.
It started, after all, as a description of French politics before the French Revolution, with supporters of the monarchy (the status quo) on the right and the supporters of a kind of democracy that turned into a nascent form of communism on the left.
There has never been a monarchy in the U.S.--that was kind of the point of its existence as a nation. The only sense in which modern conservatism is similar to the French right is that it wants to preserve the status quo...and at present, that status quo is the Classical Liberalism of our Founders. Which was, ironically, considered to be on the left at the time, although we wisely rejected the variety of democracy the French left embraced.
But the reality at present is that the extremes of what we call "right" and "left" want exactly the same thing: to control people in order to create the ideology's own brand of utopia.
Your last sentence is the key. I could not have said it better myself.
well if you think of Classical Liberalism as ultimately splitting into Democrats and Republicans to each emphasize parts of CL - maybe Fascism is the opposite of Classical Liberalism, and there are both left and right Fascists.
Maybe we're all stuck analyzing left-right and that's the wrong axis. Maybe it's Classical Liberalism itself - engulfing both left and right in America, but not the fringes - that needs defending.
Hmmm
I have seen things in terms of individual freedom vs authoritarianism for a long time.
Charles Tips on Quora has made a very useful diagram, which he explains here: https://qr.ae/pKUqmH
I think I can simplify things here a little bit: if in the center we put CL with the emphasis on individual freedoms and rights, and then start moving away from the center to the right and to the left toward more totalitarian society, but instead of a straight line we will use a circle, we will discover that the opposites will actually become confluent and morph into each other. In reality there is no difference between Left and Right Totalitarism. Rivers of blood in both.
Dear Celia, what I should do prior to typing a comment is read your posts and then simply agree with you.
LOL! Thank you.
No Miss, Thank you.
You are absolutely right, but alas, the "distinction" is too useful to whose who call themselves "the Left", since they get to tar all their opponents as "fascists" or "Nazis".
In fact "right wing" has never had any meaning more coherent than "opposed to the normative Left", so when that was defined by the Comintern, classical liberals, Tories, any sort of nationalist not aligned with Moscow, ultramontane clericalists, monarchists, Nazis and fascists were all "right wing" even though they had nothing in common other than opposing the Comintern. Now that the normative Left is what we short-hand as "woke", a lot of folks who want to look out for the interests of the working class and think "intersectionalism" is rubbish suddenly are effectively part of the Right, however vainly they try to sweep back the tide of linguistic change and keep "Left" for their own political views.
As a young CPA working on tax returns, I was surprised to see so many doctors with poor investment choices. A senior tax partner told me that those who think they are very intelligent are often the easiest to dupe.
Educated and intelligent are not the same
Education and intelligence both are different that wisdom
Review Nancy Pelosi tax returns for great investment strategies. Her investments increased 50% last year. The very sly and corrupt have the survival instincts of rats and roaches. It is an instinct that exceeds any bounds of ethics and requires cunning not intelligence.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12839125/congress-stock-market-nancy-pelosi.html
And insider knowledge and trading hence their great wealth. They should all be in jail Martha Stewart landed in jail for less.
Knowledge of biology doesn’t always translate into common sense needed for investing.
Best to choose clients who are better at business and creating wealth.
Your practice will grow with them.
That has been well known in financial circles since I was a young man in the 1980s. Also well known is how the wealthy are insecure, which leads to following fads of all types. Hence, why getting in with a doctor with your investment usually leads to other doctors investing. This following of fads might explain why the elite universities are at the forefront of the DEI stuff.
A glimmer of hope is that the DEI / critical race theory / identity politics that led to the current madness was not, unlike Nazism, directed exclusively at the Jewish community. It was aimed at the core values of America and had middle America as its target.
That means that today, unlike 1930s Germany, the Jewish community is not alone but is joined by all Americans who believe rules apply equally to everyone, men with beards in dresses are still men, advancement should be by merit instead of race. Public opinion surveys consistently confirm this:
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/time-to-throw-the-intersectional
A groundswell of American popular opposition to these woke ideologies is the major force in restoring balance, sanity and decency in public life. That is the great difference between today and 1930s Germany.
We are a bellwether. We always have been.
Christians United for Israel, the largest pro- Israel group in the world: cufi.org
Today the difference is mostly generational, in the 1930s it involved nearly everyone.
It leads us with so many questions. How did we as parents allow such behavior in our universities, and presently allow woke infiltration into our public schools? Why are the majority of Jews Democrat Liberals? Why were they so enamored of President Roosevelt, when surrounded by antisemitics, did nothing to save the Jews from the Holocaust? Why is there so much hate and killing on this beautiful planet?
The majority of secular and non religious Jews were part of the woke movement . Many have had their eyes opened since the massacre. The majority of religious Jews are Libertarian and Conservative. I doubt they are even polled .
All of my Jewish relatives are Liberal and those who came from Russia are Communists. They vote for Democrats all down the line and have never figured out that most of the problems in the US are caused by Liberal thinking and action.
Do you know many or any orthodox Jews? They are by and large Conservatives and libertarian. The more right wing orthodox the more that holds true. It becomes more and more insular and is not represented in most polls that I have seen. I do not dispute that the majority of the non orthodox Jewish communities have been Liberals and progressives( hate that term)
Most of my family, both sides, are orthodox Jews. The exceptions are the wealthy ones, they are Conservatives. I come from an earlier era than you and I imagine things have changed. I'm no longer in contact with my family. I live in a different country, so they too may have changed.
Yes, progressives is a misleading term. Regressives may be more accurate.
This
I believe the answer may be suggested in Dr. Ferguson's essay above. The Nazis & communists were enemies. Many Jews still carry that in the collective psyche.
Could you please expand on your comment.
Joanne, I don't write essays and that is what it would take. But just off the top of my head - and this is far from a formed, cogent thesis: For older Jews, there was much sympathy towards the Soviets who liberated the camps. They did not see Communists as a form of authoritarianism but as a liberating progressive movement. They also identified communism as an intellectual ideology vs Nazi knuckle-draggers. The Jews who grew up during WWII (and then witnessed the McCarthy Hearings) and then went on to join the civil rights movement saw the rights movements of the 60's as a continuation of the fight against Nazism, i.e., a continuation of the communist fight against Nazism and other so-called fascists ideologies (e.g., the far right today) - even when some saw that the USSR had "lost its way." This generation passed it on to their baby boomer generation who then brought these ideas to the mainstream. And the rest is history. Yes, this line of thinking was full of holes, but it was based on emotion. I am sketching this out based on my experience as a Jew growing up in the 60's and 70's.
Thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough and thoughtful response. I grew up in the 50s in a conservative home.
I should add - and this important. This type of thinking was mostly confined to secular and Reformed Jews.
I've also been following this trend with dismay for the last several years, and I studied German history as well, so much of this excellent piece was familiar. But even if there are the stirrings of backlash now, I still don't understand how so many adults who had responsibility tolerated this nonsense. Looking the other way from looting and crime, upending livelihoods for non-offenses, wholesale cultural arson, personal destruction--the Oberlin bakery case alone should have shocked every adult's conscience--all were met by shrugs and complicity from grown men and women in positions of authority.
This is the way it always happens.
Can anyone even imaginne the anti semitic student mobs NOT gleefully particpateing in a burning of Jewish authored books in Harvard square? On today's trajectory violence agains the jews and then others is assured.
You don't have to burn books, just label a book as "triggering". Consider it a virtual burn.
This is the essay I needed today from the Free Press to remind me they've still got it.
The shortest path to evil is calling it good, and while doing so granting license and approval to the lowest, basest, worst impulses in all of us.
If it is true that extremes meet (I need to figure out who said that: I do remember about where I read it), then it is very logical that the hatred of irrational haters has led to generalized and unapologetic (and indeed almost entirely unconscious) irrational hatred of people whose actual profiles and beliefs and lives are largely invisible.
The goal, you see, was banishing hate. But the method itself consisted in hate. The hate has grown, the vision has diminished, and what was once becoming rare--true bigotry--has grown wings and sprouted everywhere.
The Left has become what it claims to hate. Why wouldn't it? If perception and a sense of personal accountability are not part of the process, why would the hallucinations not deepen and multiply?
What intelligence adds to all this is an expanded capacity for delusion, nothing more. Far from making ridiculous beliefs less likely, it makes them MORE likely.
Just look. Yes. There, there, and there. You cannot miss it.
I am actually going to excerpt a story from the book "The Wisdom of the Idiots". I have things to do and probably an idiot myself for doing this, but the hell with it. Could be fun.
The Mad King's Idol
"There was once a violent, ignorant and idolatrous king. One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life, he would capture the first three people who passed by his castle, and force them to dedicate themselves to idol-worship.
Sure enough, the king's wish was fulfilled, and he immediately sent soldiers onto the highway to bring in the first three people whom they could find.
These three were, as it happened, a Scholar, a Sayed (descendant of the Prophet Mohammad) and a prostitute.
Having them thrown down before his idol, the unbalanced king told them of his vow, and ordered them all to bow down in front of the image.
The scholar said:
This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of 'force majeure". There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real legal or moral culpability being in any way involved.'
So he made a deep obeisance to the idol.
The Sayed, when it was his turn, said:
'As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the Holy Prophet, my actions themselves purify anything that is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.'
And he bowed down before the idol.
The prostitute said:
'Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, and so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.'
The mad king's malady was immediately banished by this remark. As if by magic he saw the deceit of the two worshippers of the image. He at once had the scholar and the Sayed decapitated, and set the prostitute free."
That's a great story. I like the irony here too. Life has an amazing number of textures, if you feel for them.
But that book is one of my most prized possessions, along with my copy of the Tao Te Ching.
I look forward to your daily offerings. This one was especially good.
Reminded me of the the entire apparatus who pretend that our own emperor is not naked and mad. Sadly he cannot be cured of the malady of senility and corruption that hold him in its icy grasp. Our nation, however, can open its eyes and undo this idiocy.
Thanks!!! Yes, that was in effect a retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson story.
According to Alex Jones--make of that what you will--an unnameable source told him Joe LITERALLY runs around naked in the White House at night and that only large doses of methamphetamine enable him to function at all. This means the cocaine was likely for the legal President of the United States.
People think when they have to. Most Americans don't have to think. And clearly, they don't. Most seem to have lost the habit entirely, reacting with the minds and emotions of children to nearly everything.
If he was taking meth he'd be talking a mile-a-minute and not fumbling for words. He has enough other problems without making up stuff.
They are pumping him full of something. Hes not fit to run a gas station.
And some sort of stimulant would make sense, but I’m not really qualified to comment on what it takes to make someone with advanced Alzheimers able to appear almost normal for short periods of time.
The goal was never banishing hate. It was to gain power in the name of banishing hate.
Probably not among core elite, who seem to be uniformly sociopathic, but definitely among the useful dupes. Most of them to this very moment think they are standing up TO, and not WITH, hate.
Go get a coffee near a college campus and watch people.
"Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny."
First they came for the conservatives, and I did not speak out because they're hateful.
Then they came for climate skeptics, and I did not speak out because... science.
Then they came for the anti-lockdown crazies and I did not speak out because... science.
Then they came for President Trump, and I did not speak out because he says mean things.
Then they came for the Jews and "Oh my! We have a problem with intolerance!"
The hate and intolerance have been evident for a long time. Congratulations on the epiphany. You are welcome among the sane. Please check your other preconceptions at the door.
I always wondered why Trump got so much blow back and how so many could have such crazy TDS. It's because he pointed out all the truths (see above) from the begining. FBI, the press, the deep state, etc. Obama said he wanted to fundamentally change America, but he said it with conviction and grace! Clinton has sex play with an intern and was impeached - but he is a moderate and had so much charisma! Biden lies and plagiarised, sniffs little girls heads, trips and can't finish a sentence - but he is just old Uncle Joe! All those Democrats went a long with the progressive lies and got rich and famous. Republicans get cancelled or put in jail.
First they came for the smokers and we applauded like healthier than thou morons... then they knew they could get away with murder!
I was struck by the sequence of events described in these sentences. "The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide." This sequence of reminds me of a progression that I observed. In 1985 a friend who was attending the Unitversity of California Santa Cruz used the term "politically incorrect," and then explained it to me. Now, several decades later, I see pseudo-legal discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. Is the next step "technocratic genocide[?]"
I did greatly enjoy this article. The historical content provided heft and context for its thesis. My snark above aside, high five from me.
Hear, hear.
After visiting thr Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., I was struck by the high percentage of German Jews that were murdered in camps. They did not leave Germany in time - was it their disbelief that their most advanced country could do what was becoming obvious. My wife’s mother read Mein Kampf in Warsaw. And when war broke out she ran East.
Or that "good and decent" socialists would never target Jews? The entire movement supporting the barbarian hordes of Hamas are leftists.
Yup.
What happened on Oct 7th was filmed and broadcast live and yet people still state that it did not happen. We read and listen to witnesses and still people call what Hamas did and continue to do as "resistance" and the silence from human and woman's rights groups is deafening.
"Nice" people who are educated, who recycle, who would never stand in a grocery line with a limit of 15 items with 16 items in their cart, are the the same people that are tearing down hostage pictures and screaming "from the river to the sea."
Denial and an inability to understand what evil really looks like is why German Jews stayed in Germany and maybe we aren't cleverer?
I think it was truly a frog-in-boiling water situation. Germany heated the water - noticeably, but not severely - so many times it was easy for people to say "surely they wouldn't" or "it's just one figure of speech I can't say" and that, although relentless, literally duped people into saying it wasn't that bad, it would probably go no farther, and staying. I think once the Einsatzgrüppen got going around 1939 it was undeniable things were not going to end well...but even the enormity of that was masked by the steady stream of chip-chipping away at the civil rights of the Jews in Germany, until suddenly it was apparent and terrifying...and too late.
You could make an argument that the 30s were the most dangerous time in Germany for Jews, and from 1939 on it was just taking their evil and depravity to logical and vile conclusions.
I read "The Warburgs" by Chernow. The Warburgs even helped Hitler to sell war bonds! They viewed themselves as Germans first and foremost, hence were resistant to the idea of leaving. To many, it became too late...
My old ancient Greek teacher was related to the Warburgs. She stayed in Germany to open a school for Jewish children and to tend to her elderly mother and, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, got out just by the skin of her teeth.
She felt German. Her family was well rooted in Berlin. Her brother was killed fighting for the Fatherland in World War One. Her work at university among her German fellow students gave her great joy. She wrote her poetry in German.
Betrayal is always hard to fathom. How many of us cannot believe the evidence of our eyes when it goes against our hearts?
Excellent article. I found the section describing the cost-benefit analysis of the continued support of an "idiot," and the economic benefits of killing mental patients to be particularly chilling/prescient. The merger of Canada's MAID program with their robust social welfare system seems more and more like an unholy alliance. The US better keep an eye on our neighbors to the north, and ensure such ideas don't fester here.
Romans 1:20-22 & Proverbs 9:10 are instructive. Humanism is ultimately hollow. Death comes, then what? We humans are profoundly finite making our arrogance disgusting. Well educated fools are dangerous. Where are the wise?
The wisdom of the wise is foolishness to God.
This moment is astounding. Will it give pause to the “woke”? So far not really. So righteous in their CRT that they can no longer distinguish
fact from fiction.
I wasn’t alive until after WWII. But I knew ppl who lived through that time, including my parents. It is a poor commentary that less than a century after the Holocaust there is a distinctly willful amnesia and a resurgence of anti-semitism. Maybe if this happened before such inventions as photography, audio recording or even general literacy but all of those things made it possible to record the events of the rise of Hitler. While literacy has taken a step back here in the past 20 yrs due to a failure of public education coupled with the age of digitalization (esp video) that removes ppl from print, most ppl can read enough to comprehend history books.
If someone told me that any of this nonsense now gripping the western world would be happening at this time, I wouldn’t believe it. But here we are AGAIN.
Like, WTF?
It’s Chanukah and there are crazed ppl defending a brutal attack against Jews!?! We have a blue Star of David lit up on our house and because this is still America, we can defend our home. I refuse to be bullied into shying away from supporting Israel.
By the same token I hate to see the loss of life in Gaza. Not Hamas, just all the other ppl who are the extended victims of Islamist extremists. They put their own children in harms way out of some demented notion that it glorifies their prophet. My God detests violence but gives permission to defend against evil.
Men and women of courage the world over need to stand up to terrorism, everywhere, every time.
Or as Chesterton said: "Being atheist doesn't mean you believe in nothing. It means you'll believe in anything".
Hence the great, atheist, mass murdering movements of the 20th century, Communism and Nazism, untethered from any moral restraint.
...and running rampant in the 21st. Never forget? No, it is, in fact, never learn.
That’s true but the urban myth that more ppl have been killed in the name of god persists. Between Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, assorted Chinese communist dictators, Pol Pot, Castro and a wide assortment of South American dictators (not to mention murderous tribes like the Aztecs) the total #of people is many millions. I’m sure I’ve missed a few peachy creepers but war is always horrible. Communism is the worst idea ever.
More ppl have been killed by flies than all the wars ever fought combined.