Lindbergh and America First
We had a discussion on this blog recently about Charles Lindbergh and whether he ever actually supported the Nazis in the buildup to World War II, rather than just being an isolationist.
First, an interesting bit of background from Wiki:
Lindbergh’s father, a U.S. congressman from 1907 to 1917, was one of the few congressmen to oppose the entry of the U.S. into World War I.
I’m going to assume that his father had some influence on the formation of Lindbergh’s viewpoint about entering foreign wars
After the tragic kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh’s first child in in 1932, Lindbergh and his wife moved to Europe to try to recover. They visited Germany during the 1930s:
In July 1936, shortly before the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, American journalist William L. Shirer recorded in his diary: “The Lindberghs are here [in Berlin], and the Nazis, led by Göring, are making a great play for them.”
This 1936 visit was the first of several that Lindbergh made at the request of the U.S. military establishment between 1936 and 1938, with the goal of evaluating German aviation.
Lindbergh was aware of Kristallnacht when it happened:
“I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans”, he wrote. “It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult ‘Jewish problem’, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” Lindbergh had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938–39. He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews, it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer, who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted. On the advice of his close friend Alexis Carrel, he cancelled the trip. ….
So it seems he continued to be German-friendly, and although he disapproved of the Nazis’ violence against Jews his main problem with it seemed to have been that it was disorderly and beneath his high opinion of Germans. The Jews themselves were undoubtedly a problem, however.
More:
In 1938, the U.S. Air Attaché in Berlin invited Lindbergh to inspect the rising power of Nazi Germany’s Air Force. Impressed by German technology and the apparently large number of aircraft at their disposal and influenced by the staggering number of deaths from World War I, he opposed U.S. entry into the impending European conflict. In September 1938, he stated to the French cabinet that the Luftwaffe possessed 8,000 aircraft and could produce 1,500 per month. Although this was seven times the actual number determined by the Deuxième Bureau, it influenced France into trying to avoid conflict with Nazi Germany through the Munich Agreement. At the urging of U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Lindbergh wrote a secret memo to the British warning that a military response by Britain and France to Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement would be disastrous; he claimed that France was militarily weak and Britain over-reliant on its navy. He urgently recommended that they strengthen their air power to force Hitler to redirect his aggression against “Asiatic Communism”.
Following Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Lindbergh opposed sending aid to countries under threat … He equated assistance with war profiteering: “To those who argue that we could make a profit and build up our own industry by selling munitions abroad, I reply that we in America have not yet reached a point where we wish to capitalize on the destruction and death of war”.
He reminds me somewhat of our current isolationists, and they even use the phrase that was used back then: “America First.”
In late 1940, Lindbergh became the spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, soon speaking to overflow crowds at Madison Square Garden and Chicago’s Soldier Field, with millions listening by radio. He argued emphatically that America had no business attacking Germany. Lindbergh justified this stance in writings that were only published posthumously:
I was deeply concerned that the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.
He seems to have been so focused on the evil of the Soviets that he was blind to the evils of the Nazis. Was he merely naive? I think that was part of it, but still another part was his affinity for German culture and what he saw as German “order and intelligence.” Nor was he keen on Jews. But I think he was more a German sympathizer than an actual Nazi sympathizer, although he shared their emphasis on race.
One of Lindbergh’s worst acts was a speech he gave in September of 1941 (emphasis mine):
… for an America First rally at the Des Moines Coliseum that accused three groups of “pressing this country toward war; the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration”. He said that the British were propagandizing America because they could not defeat Nazi Germany without American aid and that the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to use a war to consolidate power. The three paragraphs Lindbergh devoted to accusing American Jews of war agitation formed what biographer A. Scott Berg called “the core of his thesis”. In the speech, Lindbergh said that Jewish Americans had outsized control over government and news media (even though Jews did not compose even 3% of newspaper publishers and were only a minority of foreign policy bureaucrats), employing recognizably antisemitic tropes. The speech received a strong public backlash as newspapers, politicians, and clergy throughout the country criticized America First and Lindbergh for his remarks’ antisemitism.
Sound familiar? It certainly does to me.
Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.”
Lindbergh also believed that Communism would destroy the West’s “racial strength.” However, after the war he was shocked by what was revealed to have occurred at Nazi concentration camps: “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?”
Once the US entered the war, Lindbergh did work for the Allied war effort. But he retained his admiration for Germany, later visiting often, having several long-term affairs with women there, and fathering children with those women.
There’s a great deal more about Lindbergh, but this is already so long that I’ll just end with this, which expands on the topic of his father’s influence:
Lindbergh was the son of a Progressive Republican congressman from Minnesota. His father, Charles August Lindbergh possessed Populist agrarian views prevalent in the Midwest and adamantly opposed the so-called “Money Trust,” an alleged de facto monopoly of powerful New York bankers, led by J.P. Morgan. The farmers the senior Lindbergh represented were wary of more cosmopolitan Americans, especially bankers from the east coast. They assumed bankers were to blame for the travails of Midwestern farmers and incorrectly assumed they were primarily Jewish. Many of Lindbergh Sr.’s constituents were xenophobic and often antisemitic. These were not uncommon themes throughout the country at the time.
Unfortunately, very similar attitudes have become more common again in our time.
I saw a documentary some time ago about the Einsatzgruppen, and much of it concerned their push into Soviet territory and included their activities in the Ukrainian territories.
IIRC, one of their goals was to learn about how Stalin had subjugated these peoples so that they could copy and implement these tactics themselves. I believe initially some Ukrainians thought that these Nazi’s were liberators, only to discover that the Einsatzgruppen too sought to torture and kill them.
My recollection was that many of these Ukrainians were Jews, but I’m not certain. And my small point is that the Soviet mass murders came first, the Nazi ones second.
When thinking about our modern history of political atrocities and mass murder, I often suspect that it is probably China who has the biggest body count of them all. And yet, all that seems to be something of a black information hole.
Ironically, the individual convicted of the kidnapping and murder of the the Lindbergh baby was a German immigrant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Hauptmann never wavered in claiming his innocence.
Lindbergh was very good at one endeavor. He could fly an airplane boldly and accomplish something that no one had, and few would attempt. Given my own proclivities, I admire him greatly for that.
But those accomplishments hardly qualified him as a spokesman for any cause or ideology. His biographies all portray him as shy. Perhaps he was also naive. As a child of the South, I understand how prejudices that are introduced early, and by trusted elders, can become almost second nature. It takes effort, and sometimes distance from one’s heritage, to ‘outgrow’ them. I am trying to be charitable.
But, this account reminds me forcefully of our current celebrity class who do not have the decency, or good sense, to stay silent on matters that they don’t understand. And unfortunately, as was perhaps the case with Lindbergh, for spurious reasons their utterances are treated with an undeserved level of respect.
Hauptmann never wavered in claiming his innocence.
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Cue Mandy Rice-Davies.
He treated his wife and legitimate children with stupefying arrogance, quite apart from fathering seven ba*tards with a menu of German women during the postwar period.
Every country has to put some country first, usually itself. In fact we’ve been criticizing some other countries we have close ties to for NOT putting their own people first, and instead (to our mind) putting Muslim immigrants first. It’s right and proper for Norway to put Norway and Norwegians first, and Morocco to put Morocco and Moroccans first, and Israel to put Israel and Israelis first, and I’m not seeing the logic for Americans being somehow not legitimately able to do the same.
If it’s not legitimate for Americans to put America first, what country should Americans be putting first? To ask the question is to see the embedded false premise. It’s only the words “America first” that are objectionable, because at one time some objectionable Americans used the phrase, which dates back at least as far as the 1850s and was used by many groups of people over the years.
Perhaps we ought not to use an anodyne expression of nearly universal sentiment among Americans to tar some with the Nazi brush, the same way “states’ rights” was used to smear people with Jim Crow who intended no such thing.
Along with my love for my mom, apple pie, babies and puppies, yes I want the American government and Americans to put America and Americans first in all they do, even if the use of the phrase “America First” merits cancellation. I suspect I am not alone in that sentiment, not even among commenters here. We’re a bright bunch, perhaps we can think of other words for “America First” that leftist gatekeepers will allow us to use without attributing invidious motives to us?
Hmm, I seem to have asked another question with an embedded false premise. Leftists don’t actually object to the words “America First”, they actually object to putting America first no matter what words that is put in.
To the extent that bad people have also used the phrase–most of them have also loved their mothers, babies, apple pie, and puppies, and said so–maybe we should focus on what those bad things were and not trite things they said that virtually no one in America disagrees with.
It was not wrong of them to say “America First”. It was only wrong if they said it and didn’t mean it, or meant it and did evils in its name. Neither is any wrong excused if they sincerely had “America First” as a motive. Most people who do evil don’t have evil motives, at least not from the beginning.
American antisemitism in the 20s and 30s was widespread and mainstream, especially notable in elite circles, e.g. discrimination against Jews in Ivy League schools, even in the writings of Hemingway, T.S. Eliot , Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings.
Lindbergh wasn´t an isolated case. One might be more surprised if he wasn’t antisemitic.
@huxley:American antisemitism in the 20s and 30s was widespread and mainstream
Yes it was–not to mention anti-many other minority-isms, for example the Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943–and it was not correlated with or peculiar to isolationists and isolationism. Plenty of American antisemites died fighting Germany, and plenty of wartime American leaders could be characterized as antisemitic today.
Now do Joe Kennedy, US ambassador to Great Britain.
The Germans knew they had an opportunity with Lindbergh. Among other things, it is said that, when they demonstrated their first-line aircraft, they used dummy weapons to save weight and a jazzed-up ruel which would burn out the valves ni about ten hours’ flight time. But the performance was astonishing for the time, and the oversold their production by a factor of ten.
The vaguely Jewish flavor of the movie “Dirty Dancing” reflects the anti-semitism of the Catskills resort industry. It isn’t dated, afaik, except by Swaze’s old beater car and a reference to “the war” when they couldn’t get various foods.
Irwin Shaw’s “Act of Faith” short gives a view of a soldier’s view of anti-semitism during and immediately after the war.
As we have seen, most of us, all our lives, there’s a movement in the US which opposes practically any forthright action by the US in our own interest. It’s always cast as something we should not do. But it invariably advantages or would advantage our enemy, whichever that would be in the case. Still, they’re not on the enemy’s side…. Is it possible Lindbergh only thought through the first part and not about who of our potential enemies might be aided?
There’s a fine line between minding your own business and sticking your head in the sand. We sometimes act as though it were obvious which distant problems are safe to ignore and which are not. We often find out only in retrospect, and don’t necessarily learn lessons that will help us make a better judgment next time around.
So we can legitimately aim to put “American First” without knowing what policy will best achieve that aim.
“xenophobia” is a bias-based word. Google AI has it as an “irrational fear” of outside influences and cultures. Irrational. That is a judgment or opinion, not fact. Who uses that word today ? Why, leftist Democrats do, to besmirch those with whom they disagree.
@Wendy K Laubach:So we can legitimately aim to put “America First” without knowing what policy will best achieve that aim.
We can and should all have that goal, to put “America First”. Not every foreign adventure is going to qualify, but every one that is opposed draws down the “isolationist” smear on its opponents, it seems. None of us has a crystal ball to look in the answers in the back of the future’s history books and find out what threats were really worth it and which really weren’t.
The Left wrote the history books of today, and THEIR opposition to American entry into WWII, which vanished after Operation Barbarossa, is airbrushed out, and all the anti-war opprobrium transferred to those not on the Left, and smeared as “isolationism” which is an extreme variety of non-interventionism.
Fun fact: “Dr Seuss” drew cartoons not only smearing non-interventionist Americans as isolationists, but also depicting Japanese-Americans as being potential saboteurs and terrorists.
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s Father was in State Police and investigated the Lindbergh kidnapping. He was also involved in Iran and the Shah.
Nothing wrong with putting America first. It’s how that plays out that matters. Thinking you can ignore the rest of the world is madness. Nor does it actually protect America. Au contraire.
Like it or not Japanese-Americans and resident Japanese were potential saboteurs and terrorists. On the subject of things airbrushed out of history, the Ni’ihau Incident and Shindo Renmei are absolutely gut wrenching and bone chilling to study. The former happened just after Pearl
harbor when a group of long term Japanese residents of Hawaii betrayed their neighbors to help a Japanese pilot downed during Pearl Harbor, including attempted murder.
https://pearl-harbor.info/story-of-the-niihau-island/
But in some ways that at least makes more sense than Shindo Renmei late in WWII, when a part of the Japanese-Brazilian diaspora spontaneously radicalized and claimed Japan was winning the war, going on into a kind of war of assassins murder spree of loyal Japanese-Brazilians for “treason” to the Tenno, and particularly jaw dropping because this happened without any contact from Imperial personnel or propaganda.
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2018/11/7/shindo-renmei/
And this was hardly exclusive or unique since we know the Nazis, Italian Fascists, Japanese militarists, and a host of others like Mexican Syndicalists tried to recruit fifth columns in the US and elsewhere. And while Shindo Renmei was very late war and had little effect outside of Sao Paulo I think Ni’ihau particularly had to be jaw dropping and shocking to the US at the time and played a role in justifying internment.
That doesn’t mean all resident Japanese or Japanese-Americans were traitors or terrorists. Obviously most were not. But we should honestly remember the truth, the stakes, and the kind of terror involved.
Ya got any numbers to back that “plenty,” up? Or just your opinion casting back to before you were born?
You still go to war with the army (and soldiers) that you have, not with the angels that you want.
Tiresome and long winded.
@neo:Thinking you can ignore the rest of the world is madness.
If I see such people I’ll be sure to tell them, but “isolationism” is a very extreme position and there’s not very many people who actually fit it. The vast majority of Americans are in favor of some trade, some alliances, some diplomatic relations, some immigration, even those who oppose the intervention du jour.
Nor does it actually protect America.
Nor does every foreign intervention.
Turtler pops Nick’s gass bag.
@Turtler:Like it or not Japanese-Americans and resident Japanese were potential saboteurs and terrorists.
Yes, a vanishingly small fraction were, as were some German-Americans who acted for Germany.
That doesn’t mean all resident Japanese or Japanese-Americans were traitors or terrorists.
You’ll not find that nuance in the Dr Seuss cartoon I linked. If he made a similar one for German-Americans I missed it.
But we should honestly remember the truth, the stakes, and the kind of terror involved.
Indeed we should. The world of WWII was a very different time, which is why I object to misapplying what happened then to the politics of today, which don’t fit it very well.
The Japanese internment was partly to protect them from their fellow Americans. That’s a nuance often missed. And it wasn’t practical in Hawaii, 40% Japanese and at high risk for invasion. In the UK British people were interned.
“Every” actually has a meaning.
“Not does every foreign intervention.”
Not a strong argument.
We aren’t naive around here.
But Nick knows better than those Neandertals who were actually fighting a world war at the time. Good for us he is “with” us today.
Nick somehow forgets Pearl Harbor and Japanese behavior in China, things that added to racial attitudes of the last century.
High horse hindsight.
Pre-war anti-semitism was manifest in the five o’clock shadow, exclusion from membership organizations, exclusion from certain hotels and resorts, restrictive covenants on real estate, and exclusion from small segments of higher education. It was disagreeable, but did not prevent Jews from prospering and it dissipated after the war. Henry Ford was the most consequential figure promoting it, followed by Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith.
“After the tragic kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh’s first child…” It was “the Lindberghs’ first child,” as they were a couple.
When you question the amount of money we send to Israel these days ,you are called an antisemite. When you point out they get free education and healthcare , housing subsidies and the like you are an fn Nazi . Antisemitism has changed in the last 80 plus years.
@Art Deco:exclusion from small segments of higher education
Which is why Dick Feynman had to go to MIT instead of Columbia, and was nearly kept out of Princeton, but the head of the physics department there was assured that Feynman didn’t look or act obviously Jewish.
Ya got any numbers to back that “plenty,”up? Or just your opinion casting back to before you were born?
You still go to war with the army (and soldiers) that you have, not the angels you want.
Tiresome and long winded.
Some (only some) of what we are calling anti-Semitism is applying contemporary standards to what people said 75-100 years ago. In any case, Hemingway apparently developed a more sanguine view of Jews later in life. There’s a story about how he received a group of young rabbis who just dropped in on him in Havana in 1956:
https://aish.com/my_encounter_with_hemingway/
According to the rabbi, Hemingway said:
Sadly ironic that he chose death a few years later.
Sometimes I wonder if Dick Feynman could get into Columbia now.
Lindbergh’s statements about the overwhelming power of not only the Luftwaffe but also of ongoing German aircraft production are kind of parallel to the people who say that China is so far ahead in manufacturing that the US can never catch up.
Lindberg was a deeply flawed man and that, by the moral standards of his day.
“perhaps we can think of other words for “America First” that leftist gatekeepers will allow us to use without attributing invidious motives to us?” Niketas Choniates
Contemptuous dismissal, rather than accommodation is the appropriate response to “leftist gatekeepers”… Jesus advised that we not “Cast not your pearls before swine” and Robert Heinlein drove home the point; “Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
@Jimmy:Some (only some) of what we are calling anti-Semitism is applying contemporary standards to what people said 75-100 years ago.
Most certainly. Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton are often today characterized as antisemites, but they were also critical of the antisemites of their own day. And it’s not like they were much easier on Germans or Irish. They were pugnacious writers and religious minorities in their own country, and people back then were pretty comfortable with broad brushes and stereotypes.
Niketas–No kidding, and that’s even AFTER he won his Nobel.
Lindbergh was a Progressive and eugenics advocate. But even FDR admired Mussolini. But he did train our pilots in WWII. People are complex and messy
AmericaDENMARK First!!“Danish PM Resigns After Disastrous Election Losses For Social Democrats”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/danish-pm-resigns-after-disastrous-election-losses-social-democrats
Thought they could capitalize on their “robust” Anti-Trump credentials…
(I guess one oughtta wish the Danes ”good luck with that”….
IOW, what happens when the
EmpireE.U. strikes back?)Kiki
I have no problem sending money to Israel. It’s a lot better investment than sending money to other places. And I like the fact that they are killing Muslim terrorists, our common enemy. Oh that’s right. Terrorism is embedded in Islamic theology. Islam should never have been allowed in the West.
This was highly interesting. I must confess I knew little of Lindbergh, and what I did know stems primarily from Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America”. I would agree that the resemblance to today’s America First movement is striking.
It’s remarkable, by the way, how easily this thesis of “them Jooz control everything” falls apart upon closer investigation. It also removes agency from important — arguably the most important — actors, such as Trump, Bush 43, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hegseth, Powell, Rice, Rubio, and many others not of Jewish descent. As if these people are all too gullible and ignorant to decide for themselves what’s in the U.S. interest and primarily serve Jewish/Israeli paymasters. The thought is preposterous.
When you question the amount of money we send to Israel these days ,you are called an antisemite. When you point out they get free education and healthcare , housing subsidies and the like you are an fn Nazi . Antisemitism has changed in the last 80 plus years.
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No, you’re not and no you’re not.
Which is why Dick Feynman had to go to MIT instead of Columbia, and was nearly kept out of Princeton, but the head of the physics department there was assured that Feynman didn’t look or act obviously Jewish.
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There was an ample population of Jews at Ivy League institutions during the pre-war period, just fewer than there would otherwise have been due to contrivances in admissions screening. The scale and significance of such unpleasantness is higher in our own time than it was in 1925.
It’s remarkable, by the way, how easily this thesis of “them Jooz control everything” falls apart upon closer investigation. It also removes agency from important — arguably the most important — actors, such as Trump, Bush 43, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hegseth, Powell, Rice, Rubio, and many others not of Jewish descent.
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The Unz comment boxes are made of men quite convinced of their own perspicacity (of which ‘knowing the score’ about the Jews or the Kennedy assassination is one aspect). You get the impression that a lot of them are technicians who think of George W. Bush as the dolt in the marketing department.
” He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee”
I lived in Wannsee when I was working in Berlin and when I was working in Hawaii in the early 1960’s, I visited Maui where Lindbergh is buried now.
The Unz comment boxes are made of men quite convinced of their own perspicacity (of which ‘knowing the score’ about the Jews or the Kennedy assassination is one aspect). You get the impression that a lot of them are technicians who think of George W. Bush as the dolt in the marketing department.
Exactly. And not only Bush either. Basically every U.S. president and foreign policy team going back to Truman. It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
While I’m quite sure that FDR was convinced Lindbergh was a Nazi, considering that he also originated the now nearly century old practice of Democrats smearing their opponents as at best fascist adjacent (and doing so while Republican GIs were dying fighting the real deal) I don’t consider his opinion to be unbiased.
As a number of comments have rightly noted there was considerable admiration for Hitler (and Mussolini)’s economic and social programs among high-ranking people all across the political spectrum at the time (Jonah Goldberg covered the OG Progressive’s infatuation with them in Liberal Fascism), and no small amount of evidence (such as the St Louis incident) that nobody in the FDR administration was particularly motivated to challenge abhorrent Nazi policies regarding Jews before it became politically advantageous to do so. This ‘six degrees of separation’ seeking to tie current politicians to people long dead who used similar verbiage seems to me to be extremely counter productive when another political party is electing people who make outright anti-Semitic remarks. If you want to know why young people are receptive to those kind of statements its because they are routinely presented as reasonable positions by broad swathes of that party, not because some washed-up TV talking head has gone round the bend.
The political parties in Denmark favoring resistance to population replacement won 27% of the vote. The rest of the electorate plays Mr. Magoo.
I favor the term “Jew-hater” rather than “anti-Semite.”
This ‘six degrees of separation’ seeking to tie current politicians to people long dead who used similar verbiage seems to me to be extremely counter productive when another political party is electing people who make outright anti-Semitic remarks. If you want to know why young people are receptive to those kind of statements its because they are routinely presented as reasonable positions by broad swathes of that party, not because some washed-up TV talking head has gone round the bend.
The young, white, Jew-hating anti-Semites on campus here are all wearing keffiyehs and openly, loudly, and proudly chanting from the river to the sea, not watching Fox News, or listening to anyone who used to be associated with the evil that is Fox News. Jew hating is very cool and popular right now, and it’s not coming from the skinhead groups or the KKK (which is mostly FBI anyways). Those weirdo groups only wish they had the popularity, reach, deference, and celebration that the keffiyeh and hijab crowd gets. Both types of anti-Semites believe the same thing, but only one type dominates and receives deference from the government, the media, and pop culture nowadays. NYC 25 years later – who’da thunk it? Those damned neo-Nazis, man.
@ Lab Rat:
While the “cool kids” wearing keffiyehs and chanting their anti-Israel nonsense on college campuses may all be on the Left, unfortunately a counter culture has sprung up on the Right which has spread far beyond skinheads and the KKK. I will deny nobody the right to criticize Israel, of course, but guys like Nick Fuentes and also Tucker, Dave Smith, Candace Owens (and I’m sure there are others) have taken their dislike a bit too far, to put it mildly. These people now have a massive influence among the young. My 15-year-old son tells me many of his classmates in school lap this stuff up on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It’s no longer fringe, I regret to say.
The outgoing PM is currently considered the favorite to lead the new government.
She has already been offered the chance:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/25/denmark-braces-lengthy-challenging-coalition-talks
It’s not guaranteed that she can succeed.
The usual European pattern this century, when a nationalist party gains a lot of seats, is for the left and establishment center to unite in a globalist alliance to shut them out and keep borders open.
A lot of people assume that if Farage’s Reform party managed to gain anything short of an absolute majority in the Commons in Britain, that the Tories would unite with Labour and the Greens to shut them out even if they held the largest minority status. The ruling class is desperate to keep borders open.
Her party lost a lot of seats, but the Danish legislature is divided up among many mini-parties and factions, aligned in big alliances.
Which is why Dick Feynman had to go to MIT instead of Columbia
Also Paul Samuelson to MIT instead of Harvard in 1940. From Wiki:
And anti-Semitism has returned to Harvard under the guise of “diversity.” I saw statistics showing that the Jewish share of students went from 20-25% 50 years ago to 7% now, while at Brown and Cornell the shares are still up in the 20-25% range.
“the head of the physics department there was assured that Feynman didn’t look or act obviously Jewish.”
That’s pretty funny. I guess he looked and acted no more Jewish than, say, Mel Brooks. Wait, Mel Brooks is Jewish? Who would have guessed it?
Jimmy:
Yes, I though it extremely odd that that person didn’t see Feynman as Jewish-looking or Jewish-sounding. Perhaps he meant he didn’t look or sound like Alec Guiness in Oliver Twist as Fagin?
Not sure what people were expecting ca. 1945.
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Feynman’s New York accent in his later years was about as strong as that of Irving Kristol and stronger than that of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Howe. (Michael Walzer, Roger Rosenblatt, and Leon Wieseltier have perhaps a remnant of an accent. Most intense New York accent: Nathan Glazer’s).
Former Boy Scout here.
Looking for something to read, I pulled a reprint of the first 1911 “Boy Scout Handbook” from my Library shelves.
Just reading the preface–with its straightforward, upright, and earnest tone– demonstrated, yet again, how far we have fallen; how far today’s mindsets are from those of 1911.
(You could argue that it was all pretense, and that the organization contained the seeds of it’s corruption from it’s inception–the fine words a facade–but I believe that the people who wrote the Preface believed in, and meant what they wrote.)
The Boy Scouts–which, aspired to, and starting in 1911, apparently very successfully played a major and very positive role in forming the character, knowledge, and experience base of several generations of boys and, as well, the character of America–was an obvious target of the Left, and the LGBTQXYZ movement, which have subverted, and basically destroyed it.
It started off well, but, over the decades–especially the last couple of decades–it became increasingly corrupted, and it just lost it’s way.
Another rather important support deliberately knocked out from under the foundations of the United States.
What a shame!
P.S. Of course, there were other factors leading to its downfall, some of them having to do with new things to occupy young people’s attention–TV, then video games, and now the Internet.
You could also factor in today’s anti-male bias against an active, traditional outdoor “man’s life” as being, what? old fashioned, uncouth?
The history of the Boy Scouts in recent years is evidence in favor of business corporations being debarred by law from making philanthropic donations. One might add that the law should prohibit most philanthropies from making donations to other philanthropies, which would limit the activities of foundations to making donations to a subset of philanthropies, and which would require that all foundations liquidate within 60 years of their founding.
It is worth commenting on, just how much things have changed in our “modern” era, say, since electricity came in.
What did people do in the “Old days” for entertainment?
Well, from what I’ve read, there was farming–a lot of farming, their were lots of card games, board games, attending church and long sermons, visiting relatives, friends and neighbors, get togethers and parties, a lot of fraternal organizations to join and participate in, horse races, hunting and fishing, horseback riding–and remember getting from here to there consumed an awful lot of time.
It was all much more face-to-face, and people oriented.
So, people’s lives were filled up with a lot of things to do, just different things to do than today, a lot of those “old timey” things were done outside, and the pace of life was much slower.
Medical care was, of course, much more primitive, and life expectancies a lot shorter than they are today.
Even given that, though, was it a better, grounded, ultimately a more satisfying life?
You be the judge.
P.S. I also think that, back then, when Christianity was so pervasive and much stronger than it is today, it gave everyone a stated, a very clear framework, an orientation, a purpose, and a goal to life.
Now, well, it seems to me that many, perhaps most people–especially young people–are just floundering, without a clear direction, or a goal to life, something worthwhile to commit to besides the acquisition of more things or money, to Video Games, or to TikToks.
In our era of Cell Phones we’re mostly looking down at our phones, not at other people, forward, or up at the sky or stars.
P.S.S. In one of my comments above I pointed out that back in the “old days” things were more face-to-face and people oriented, and that there were a myriad of fraternal organizations that people could join and participate in.
Nowadays, you read reports about how membership in the old timey fraternal organizations has and is experiencing a massive decline–I expect helped to be killed off by the alternatives of TV and the Internet, and a much less face-to-face society.