The edifice of political belief and the Jussie Smollett case
I’ve often thought that, for most people, political belief is a strong edifice made of hundreds of thousands of bricks.
Note I didn’t wrote “political affiliation,” because a lot of people merely have a kneejerk affiliation that doesn’t amount to much of a belief system at all. For some of them, it might be made of one big brick which is something like “my parents believe this so I do too” or “everyone in my neighborhood or of my race believes this so I do too.” This type of person could have a weak system that’s easily knocked down by information that challenges it, but the catch is that such people often are so uninterested in politics that they never even expose themselves to that information. Or some of them continue to care more about the opinions of others and are loathe to change their own because they see that as a betrayal of family or group.
But for those who have an actual belief system, it’s based on bit after bit of information the details of which are often imperfectly remembered but which all combine to form that edifice know as political belief.
And that in turn is why something like the revelation that Smollett perpetrated a hate crime hoax with the potential of causing riots and almost certainly motivated by Trump-hating animus is unlikely to matter to them at all.
Some, like BLM leader Abdullah about whom I wrote yesterday, will take the hardest left line and say that the police are lying, the evidence doesn’t matter, the jury system is rigged against black people, and Jussie spoke truth. But a lot more will probably rationalize it in the manner of CNN’s Oliver Darcy:
He complains that Sean Hannity, “and other bad faith media personalities on the right, used Smollett’s conviction to (predictably) attack the news media and aim to delegitimize the credibility of the entire press.”…
“Propagandists,” Darcy continues, “know that their power increases substantially when they can convince their audiences not to trust other sources of information. And so, Smollett’s case is very valuable to them.”
This is almost humorous to someone on the right, because of course it’s a good description of what the left does. But be not amused, because to Darcy’s audience this is a description of the right, and it gives them a way to dismiss Jussie Smollet as an exception to the rule they believe to be true, which is that such overtly racist attacks are real and are common in today’s America.
Darcy adds:
“When you cannot argue on the facts, it is much easier to dismiss a story in its entirety and go after the credibility of the press for reporting on it. It’s the timeless play — one that played on repeat during the Trump administration . . .”
So the message goes something like oopsies, the press made a teensy mistake regarding Smollett. It’s a one-off, an exception, but one that gives the always-nefarious right a golden opportunity to pounce and pretend that it means something when it doesn’t and when it’s the right that’s always lying.
That can persuade not just the stupid but many smart people, especially if not too many stories like Smollett’s come filtering through because their news sources fail to report them. Their brick edifice is made of many false “facts” that they “know” to be true. For them, it takes penetration by many many many such incidents as the Smollett story or one absolutely huge and sometimes personal incident, and even then it takes a willingness to say, “Hey, this thing I trusted to be true wasn’t true, and how many other things have I trusted in the past that weren’t true? I need to find out.”
Unless they take that last step and follow through, the building will stand.
I took that last step close to 20 years ago, and here I am. At the time, I was unaware of the huge social and emotional costs I would pay. If I’d known, I still would have gone down the road I traveled, because of some stubborn curiosity that’s part of my personality. But I understand why few people might be motivated to do the same, especially now when the high personal costs have been made clear.
Of course, the societal costs of not doing it are even clearer.
Ah yes…”the propagandists”.
Yet another name that the lazy put on their strawman-argument or their strawperson-argument.
It’s so nice to see, the strawman again.
To the true believers, Smollett’s story is “true”, even if fabricated, because it represents the “larger truth” about the anti-black hostility and the anti-gay animus which are pervasive in our “racist” society. No amount of logical argument or reasoned debate, nor any amount of irrefutably accurate data will ever be able to convince those whose entire identity is invested in the “truth” of the narrative which enables them to feel, albeit utterly absurdly and irrationally, superior, both morally and intellectually, to the “deplorables” in “flyover” country. Some indeed there are who change (and their stories are always of interest), but too few (alas!) by far.
My “turn” was in college when I took an Economics class. As a result, I voted for Nixon in 1960, enraging my 100% Democrat family. Especially as we were named Kennedy and thought we were some sort of shirt tail relative to JFK.
It’s often a very difficult thing for many folks who truly seek the truth to comprehend (it took me years to believe it, and I still get tripped up by reverting to assuming it), but the majority of people do not base their thoughts and opinions on a distillation of what is the most likely, honest, realistic explanation of events.
Listening to author, Andrew Klavan’s podcasts was the biggest help in my crystalizing a basic understanding of why. We all construct a narrative to explain the world. The closer one’s narrative is to actual reality the more likely a person is to have a fulfilled, joyous* life. People who are willing to accept that their narrative may be flawed, and can adjust it when met with conflicting evidence, ultimately get closer to the truth. But human nature makes us naturally unwilling to admit flaws and/or ignorance, so we often take the seemingly shorter path of lying about reality to adhere to a false narrative.
It is also a tendency when creating our narratives to spin a tale of ourselves as heroes in the story. Philosopher Curtis Yarvin (on a different podcast) recently explained the conundrum the Democrats have fallen into by exploiting that human trait. He used upper, middle-class, suburban white women (I’ll abbreviate them as UM-CSWW for brevity) as his example. Prior to Trump UM-CSWW felt important by putting their trash in different colored bins, attending posh fund raisers for political causes, etc. He compared the feeling they got from this to the equivalent of drinking a glass of wine or beer. But then our country literally elected literal orange Hitler, literally! Instead of serving them a glass of wine or beer, the Democrats and Corporate Media started serving them crack. Our nation needed UM-CSWW to save us from orange Hitler! What an exciting narrative! They were no longer middle-aged women with bobbed hair attending Pilates classes, they were members of an army who had to save the world from Trump! And, for four years they smoked that crack and lived that narrative. And they won!
It’s the old, how you gon’na keep ’em down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paris, France issue the U.S. had with returning WWII soldiers. The Dems gave these women a beautiful, wonderful, fulfilling and completely false narrative that made them feel more alive than they’ve felt in years. But since it was a lie it is collapsing in on itself. How many UM-CSWW will take the time to understand the edifice is a house of cards?
*Joy, not happiness. Until listening to Klavan I strove for happiness. Now I understand the difference in meaning of the two words and that is a fool’s errand to pursue happiness, and often leads to pain. It is no coincidence that so many commercial messages are based on selling and providing happiness.
Mike K,
I had a friend who was furious so many American Blacks voted for Barack Obama for President when my friend felt Obama’s policies would be bad for blacks. “They just voted for him because he is black!” my friend exclaimed.
My friend is Polish. And Catholic. I asked him if the house he grew up in had any pictures of religious figures hanging in it. “Yes,” he replied. “Let me guess,” I said, “There was just one and it was the Polish Pope.”
Rufus T. Firefly,
I should add to my comment on narratives that one of the most dangerous aspects of that approach are the people who are immune to the negative results their false narratives cause. The theme of “The Great Gatsby.” Bill de Blasio will be just fine. Lori Lightfoot will be just fine. Gavin Newsom will be just fine. No need for either of them to change course or even look in a mirror. The millions who suffer from their actions are not so fortunate.
Rufus,
Good explanation. “crack” indeed!
Having been on the right for a long time, long as I can remember, I had little or nothing to lose by…being on the right.
So it’s easy for me, and even fun in some circumstances. I anticipate a meeting shortly in which somebody’s going to say it’s good that the Oxford shooter’s parents are going to be prosecuted. I’ll ask about Darrell Brooks’ mom. Who?
But. I have a friend who abhors anti-Asan hate crimes. In fact, he has a colleague who is Asian-American. They were both forcefully against anti-Asian hate crimes. Once. When the Great White Defendant wore out and was not replaced, their employment depends on not noticing any anti-American hate crimes. Been better than a year since we heard word one. But Rittenhouse….
I don’t know for sure whether they actually care–can’t imagine such good people not caring–but they can’t say anything publicly.
What if the sole condition to get through the pearly gates is a committment to put truth before all else?
“This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene III
This homily, from Glenn Harlan Reynolds seven years ago — that’s pre-Trump, pre-Kavanaugh, pre-St.-George-of-Floyd, pre-Biden, pre-Sandmann, pre-Rittenhouse — has been demonstrated again and again in the ensuing seven years:
“When you know that there’s an entire infrastructure of people willing to support a lie if it advances a narrative, it’s reasonable to be skeptical of any story they put forward.”
— Glenn Harlan Reynolds, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/
Rufus T Firefly…”Prior to Trump UM-CSWW felt important by putting their trash in different colored bins, attending posh fund raisers for political causes, etc. He compared the feeling they got from this to the equivalent of drinking a glass of wine or beer…Our nation needed UM-CSWW to save us from orange Hitler! What an exciting narrative! They were no longer middle-aged women with bobbed hair attending Pilates classes, they were members of an army who had to save the world from Trump!”
I think there is much truth to this, although the universe of affected people is much larger than just suburban white women. Arthur Koestler wrote about what he called the Tragic and the Trivial planes of life. As explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hilary:
“K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”
I think much Woke behavior is an effort by people to get more Vie Tragique in their lives.
Continuing with the Crack of radical politics and its relationship to Koestler’s Tragic and Trivial planes: this phenomenon also makes an appearance in Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of life in Germany between the wars. At one point in Weimar history, there was a significant stabilization of the German economy, politics, and society in general. Most people were happy about this:
“The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.+
But…a return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:
“A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.”
and
“To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.”
@David Foster:
All very nice except you’re leaving the massive army of German Communist street fighters out of your tale. You know, the original AntiFa and and all that?
The Nazis didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.
There were people on left as well as the right who weren’t interested in retreating back into the private sphere — so much as this thing even exists (debate for another time).
I think, too, that Haffner’s telling of the lull after the Weimar Bad Years is a little too pat with everyone except for some sickos content to get back to their tomato trellises and herbaceous borders. Bad times leave terrible and often damaging psychological scars on a people. Just try telling Jews to chill about the Holocaust.
It’s arguable that the West is in its present bad way because things have been too easy for too long and that there is a distinct lack of Scar Tissue holding it all together.
FWIW I saw up close on prolonged visits in the late 90s and early 2000s what a quartering of the value of a currency could do to a country (Indonesia) and the effect it had on the national psyche and on relations between men and women (I won’t go into details… use imagination). Not pretty. The Weimar experience was far worse. And much of the sordid stuff doesn’t get into print in polite company.
Imagine seeing two generations of your womenfolk having to prostitute themselves concurrently. What does that do to a people?
Oh.. and they also went on a pogrom and raped and killed their Chinese commercial class minority. Now how about that? Must have been the Kultur.
See Sowell, “Are Jews Unique?” The minority middleman.
I’ll stop blaming them for everything when they admit that their case is just par for the course in human animals’ sad and sorry sordid history 🙂
The take home message, anyway, is Be the Majority. And if you can’t then be the (err) Alawite. Oh wait…
David,
I believe it was Remarque—perhaps it was someone else—who placed a large part of the blame for the Nazis’ growing popularity on the sexual licentiousness and ensuing social disintegration amongst the German youth during the later Weimar years. Accordingly, this rampant immorality, as it was perceived, generated apprehension, despair and anger amongst the “silent majority” (as it were) who feared things were veering out of control thus generating the backlash to increasingly favor the National Socialists, who vowed to “clean up” the country, improve its economy and restore its honor, while protecting it from Communist agitators.
A toxic combination that ought to serve as a concrete lesson on how not to allow one’s country to descend into tribalism and anarchy….
(Though the Democrats DO seem to be—enthusiastically—using Weimar as a textbook example, ripe for importation to and implementation in the USA…to go along with their assiduous appropriation of “1984”…)
Zaphod: “Imagine seeing two generations of your womenfolk having to prostitute themselves concurrently. What does that do to a people?”
You don’t have to imagine, Philip Kerr’s, Bernie Gunthrie, a good cop in the belly of the Nazi beast lays it out for you. Bernie takes you through, the Weimar Republic period, the terrible war years and the aftermath of the war. Thirteen novels in total. If you want a knowledge of the German mindset of this time – highly recommended.
@Xylourgos:
Thanks. Good to have some more crime novel recommendations lined up. I’ve just discovered Jill Paton Walsh’s continuations of the Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels. So far so good with them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Alexanderplatz
This, published in 1929, is out in a new translation and I should give it a look. I’ve never read it but has always been associated in my mind with Dos Passos and Joyce because gets mentioned along with them for reasons to do with literary technique.
@ Mike K > “My “turn” was in college when I took an Economics class.”
Thomas Sowell also credits his education in economics for turning him to the Right. I can’t find the exact quote that I wanted, in which he responds to a question about why he gave up being a Marxist by saying it was because he learned economics, but most of his work supports that general idea.
https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2021/01/thomas-sowell-from-marxism-to-the-free-market/
by John Stossel
https://lawliberty.org/encountering-thomas-sowell/
by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Some of his best quotes:
https://www.anquotes.com/thomas-sowell-quotes/
And one of my favorites from this compendium:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2056.Thomas_Sowell
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
-Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader
I encountered this quote by Sowell on the Goodreads post:
“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously.”
… and it triggered this observation on Bob Dole’s Final Words:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/bob-dole-gets-the-last-laugh.php
Give the Woke time, they aren’t above desicration of statues, or graves.
A toxic combination that ought to serve as a concrete lesson on how not to allow one’s country to descend into tribalism and anarchy….
A comfortable majority of each cohort in this country qualifies as licentious by the standards once observed by those born prior to 1938. If anything, the young today are less inclined toward off-the-books sexual activity than people a generation older once were. What’s changed is the prevalence of pornography and the value the young grant to various sorts of deviancy. Also, in the last 20 years, the propensity of the young to marry has declined by about 30%.
A note on Germany after 1929: members of the German establishment lost the war, then ruined the currency and destroyed the savings of anyone who’d invested in fixed-income instruments, then responded to the financial crisis in 1929 with measures which generated a disaster in the real economy. The only political parties not implicated in Weimar economic mismanagement were the Nazis, the Communists, and the National People’s Party. (The National People’s Party was the electoral vehicle of the people who’d lost the war).
Thanks Zaphod, Lord Peter Wimsey is unknown to me, I will check him out. I have been revisiting Rumpole of the Baily as of late – a very good antidote to the miserable declining state of our present culture. Mrs. X gave me a Christmas present of Döblin’s Alexanderplatz many years ago but I never got around to reading it. Instead we moved to Berlin in 1995-97 where I worked on the rebuilding of Potsdamer Platz practically under the shadow of Alexanderplatz. Very exciting times.
You can get Wimsey on youtube. He goes on at quite the upper class accent as if he has only a limited time to get his lines out. Sometimes hard to follow.
Part of the lords-and-detectives genre post WW I.
Lots of clubs, great houses, Rolls Royce, etc.
The protagonist was always an officer and his faithful manservant probably his batman.
Decades ago, I went to my alma mater to pick up my sister for Christmas vacation. It was 1969 and I may have been looking for a fight. So I wore my uniform…just commissioned Infantry. Didn’t happen. But we picked up a friend to be delivered on the way home. I was helping with the luggage when the friend’s grandfather asked, in a thick Scottish accent, where was my batman. Why would an officer be hustling luggage?
You’ll note that Frodo had the small pack and the posh accent, while Sam had the heavy pack and did the camp work, along with his rural accent. Tolkien had been an officer.
Zaphod…”All very nice except you’re leaving the massive army of German Communist street fighters out of your tale. You know, the original AntiFa and and all that?”
Many of the Communists were surely motivated by the same psychological factors as the Nazis. Indeed, transition from Communist>>Nazi was not uncommon. The traveler Patrick Fermor encountered on such man in 1933, the guy was laughing about how while his apartment was now filled with Nazi regalia, “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures or Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite!” He went on to say that he and his friends “We used to beat hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us…Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me!” His old friends had all changed sides as well; the only problem he saw was that there were hardly and socialists or communists left to beat up.
re the psychological & social impact of inflation, here’s Haffner again:
“(In 1923) year newspaper readers could again play a variation of the exciting numbers game they had enjoyed during the war…this time the figures did not refer to military events..but to an otherwise quite uninteresting, everyday item in the financial pages: the exchange rate of the dollar. The fluctuation of the dollar was the barometer by which, with a mixture of anxiety and excitement, we measured the fall of the mark.
By the end of 1922, prices had already risen to somewhere between 10 and 100X the pre-war peacetime level, and a dollar could purchase 500 marks. It was inconvenient to work with the large numbers, but life went on much as before.
But the mark now went on the rampage…the dollar shot to 20,000 marks, rested there for a short time, jumped to 40,000, paused again, and then, with small periodic fluctuations, coursed through the ten thousands and then the hundred thousands…Then suddenly, looking around we discovered that this phenomenon had devastated the fabric of our daily lives.
Anyone who had savings in a bank, bonds, or gilts, saw their value disappear overnight. Soon it did not matter whether it ws a penny put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. everything was obliterated…the cost of living had begun to spiral out of control. ..A pound of potatoes which yesterday had cost fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary of sixty-five thousand marks brought home the previous Friday was no longer sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday.”
The only people who were able to survive financially were those that bought stocks. (And, of course, were shrewd or lucky enough to buy the right stocks and to sell them at the right times.)
“Every minor official, every employee, every shift-worker became a shareholder. Day-to-day purchases were paid for by selling shares. On wage days there was a general stampede to the banks, and share prices shot up like rockets…Sometimes some shares collapsed and thousands of people hurtled towards the abyss. In every shop, every factory, every school, share tips were whispered in one’s ear.
The old and unworldy had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well. Overnight they became free, rich, and independent. It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience was punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction was rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the sixth-former who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slighty older friends. He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father.”
Haffner believes that the great inflation–particularly by the way it destroyed the balance between generations and empowered the inexperienced young–helped pave the way for Naziism.
“In August 1923 the dollar-to-mark ratio reached a million, and soon thereafter the number was much higher. Trade was shutting down, and complete social chaos threatened. Various self-appointed saviors appeared: Hausser, in Berlin…Hitler, in Munich, who at the time was just one among many rabble-rousers…Lamberty, in Thuringia, who emphasized folk-dancing, singing, and frolicking.”
People want to boil down complex cause and effect from a hundred years ago and find lessons for today, and yet something stands out to me: Socialism destroys nations and cultures. Germany and Russia for example, but not the CCP? Just a little crack, or heroin, or Oxy, or fentanyl what could go wrong? Socialism, a road to ruin. And some fixate on Magic Dirt.
A recent Western Front Association webinar posited that the weak Socialist politicians in 1920’s Germany were complicit with the Generals and paved the way for the Nazis. But no it was the treaty …..
David Foster:
Thanks for your insightful comments,
Leftists believe that they can do no wrong; that’s it.
Just as radical mullahs and their followers believe they have it all figured out; there is nothing to debate, nothing to reconsider. That’s it.
Facts are made to fit into their ideology so as to affirm their belief system; that’s it.
Look at how leftists describe Stalin’s mass exterminations; “there were some excesses.” (he ordered the deaths of 20 to 50 million USSR citizens)
Imagine someone saying that Hitler’s policies; ” uh, yes, there were perhaps some policies that went slightly to far.” (he exterminated 12 million).
Why the difference?
Because Stalin was a leftist, and Hitler was not (though he was a socialist, but let’s not quibble).
Andrew Cuomo enacts a covid policy in nursing homes that results in the death of thousands.
Why is this not genocide?
Why was he not immediately impeached?
Why was he not indicted for murder?
What would the reaction have been if Trump did this?
What caused Cuomo to quit the NY governorship?
His harassment of women, not his demonstrably deadly covid policies.
How does this make any sense?
But to the leftist, it’s totally logical.
Lefties are adept at “squaring the circle;” that is who they are.
See here for the leftist concept of social justice:
https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1469000377353842697?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1469000377353842697%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2F%3Fpost%3D356400
Yes David F, thanks for the very insightful comments. I was not aware of Sebastian Haffner. I will investigate further. Interesting that you mentioned Patrick Leigh Fermor. In the 30’s when he was 18, he trekked from Holland to Constantinople. He got to know the Germans very well during this period which served him well in later years. He is sometimes described by the BBC as “alloy between Indiana Jones , James Bond and Graham Greene “.
Due to his classical education with knowledge of Greek and his prewar time in Greece, Fermor was sent to Crete to assist in the resistance against the German occupation. He led the operation with Captain Moss to kidnap the German General Heinrich Kreipe. Dressed in German military uniforms, they were waiting for him 1 km before his residence. When Kreipe arrived, they ordered the driver to stop and asked for his papers. As soon as he stopped the car, Lee Fermor opened the door of the car, jumped in and threatened Kreipe with his pistol, while Moss took the driver’s seat. Eventually Kreipe was transported to Egypt, later to Canada as a POW and released from captivity in 1947. After the war Fermor returned to Greece, the country he loved and served well.
I often wonder if some of the people who were shaken slightly awake by the Rittenhouse trial have noticed more of the same falsehoods in the Smollett case. I sincerely hope they are closer to taking that red pill.
david foster —
I think much Woke behavior is an effort by people to get more Vie Tragique in their lives.
a/k/a Selma Envy
I’ve said it before: modern activists of whatever stripe — feminist, gay, racial, etc. — want to pretend that it is eternally 1970 while quietly pocketing the benefits of it actually being 2021.
@Xylourgos:
Have you seen the 1970s Greek TV show clip on YouTube where they reunited Fermor and Kreipe in front of a studio audience?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSUya-FPQWQ
Kreipe was one lucky fellow. He was a newish appointment and hadn’t had to order any major reprisals on his watch and therefore didn’t get tried and shot by the Greeks at the end of the war. His successor not so lucky. Nor was Kreipe’s driver.
“People want to boil down complex cause and effect from a hundred years ago and find lessons for today, and yet something stands out to me: Socialism destroys nations and cultures. Germany and Russia for example, but not the CCP? Just a little crack, or heroin, or Oxy, or fentanyl what could go wrong? Socialism, a road to ruin. And some fixate on Magic Dirt.”
Communism is not a good thing at all. But there’s always the Reaction. Neither China nor Russia are in any real way socialist today. China has since the 1990s been far more Wild West Robber Baron Gilded Age Capitalist than the USA. It just happens to have an authoritarian government with ruling party run on Leninist Lines and called for historical reasons the Chinese Communist Party.
And today China and Russia are more Chinese and Russian than the USA is American. Go watch old movies and mourn for your lost heritage. Perhaps after you’ve been through the fire (as the aforementioned two countries have been) you’ll come out More American than the Americans of yore? It’s a definite possibility.
Om, Old Fellow. Fent is not ruining China. Fent is ruining you. You try selling drugs *in* China, you quickly become a socially useful citizen again by donating your organs stat.
Wouldn’t be a Fent problem in the USA if there wasn’t a moral crisis in your own people. Nobody forces anyone to take the drug with a gun to the head. Same argument the West used when it shipped Opium to China… Not our fault you guys can’t handle the temptation, Old Boy… it’s just Free Trade.
Oxy scandal is/was a Usual Suspects billionaire family using bribes to get regulatory capture and profit hugely by pushing a supposedly safe prescription drug onto flyover whites in rust belt cities…. Nothing to do with the Chinese.
Globalism, Liberalism, Universalism: *these* destroy nations on the installment plan.
Zaphod doesn’t understand an analogy of drugs to ideology. Socialism as a gateway drug to communism or his favorite, authoritarian rule. I have to draw a cartoon for him.
Poor, poor, pitiful Z.
In today’s politics, every single brick the left relies on is a lie. Seriously, pick one.
Btw, I think Matt Briggs’s new book, “Everything You Believe is Wrong”, probably outlines a lot of these. https://wmbriggs.com/ Has anyone read it?
He’s part of the bloglist for Steve McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit. And Steve may be the smartest guy out there. Or at least a very close second to Glenn Reynolds.
Re. the redoubtable Paddy Fermor: “A Time of Gifts”, his travelogue of the first leg of his journey from Holland to Constantinople, offers a compelling, astonishingly articulate and detailed depiction of Middle Europe just before (1933-34) its Balkan monarchies and traces of its ancient regimes were to breathe their last. Far and away the finest travel book I know — and handsome Paddy himself, surely among last century’s most intriguing adventurers. (Freya Stark is another overlooked gem of a travel writer, like Fermor a gifted linguist, brilliant prose stylist, and omnivorously curious.)
See “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” by Rebecca West. She toured and investigated–apparently with official help–interwar Yugoslavia. But she wrote it under the looming shadow of WW II.
Prefix and suffix are good by themselves but the book is fascinating.
No Zaphod, I was not aware of this UTube clip. Fascinating. I was touched by how gracious and welcoming the Greek audience were. I imagine the Greek partisans on stage with the two of them had friends and family members shot by the Germans during the many reprisals that took place during this period. I think it was a tribute of their affection for Fermor that Kreipe was treated so well.
You are right about Kreipe being lucky. He spent several weeks on the run with Fermor before being picked up off the coast by British navy. I am sure the two of them had many interesting discussions one of which no doubt went along the lines…just cooperate Kreipe and you will sit out the war in Canada and return to Germany some day. His predecessor, Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, known as the Butcher of Crete also was executed by firing squad.
As long as we’re recommending books, Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy” is a superbly intriguing survey of events, describing British expats in Bucharest as WWII begins (her husband teaching EFL for the British Council there), segueing, with the capitulation of the Romanian monarchy, into the need to flee southward to Athens and, as the Nazis advance, ultimately to Cairo—along with the cohort of truly “colorful” characters they meet along the way and the peculiar “adventures” and crises that befall them….
Ultimately, they were very lucky, as is anyone who gets to read her lucid and beautifully-written account.
(I guess the description of their short sojourn in Athens might add something to the descriptions of those others mentioned above…
…And as long as we’re mentioning Greece, there’s always Henry Miller’s rhapsodic masterpiece, “The Colosus of Maroussi”, to reveal the “spiritus loci” (as it were), though the stream of consciousness, with a bit too much of “me! me!”, may be a bit hard going… Still, his love of that country—its beauty, poets, people, spirit, its historo-mythology and topography—is obvious and irresistible…. Aside from that, Canadian poet/novelist Anne Michael’s “Fugitive Pieces” is a seductive evocation. Even Murakami gets into the act, at least partially—if intensively—with “Sputnik Sweetheart”…but then he does get around.)
“Ultimately, they were very lucky”
Apart from the fellow whose British Council lecture kept getting postponed. Been some years since I read these, but seem to recall he went out with a bang.
Must have a look at the Miller thanks.
“…went out with a bang…”
Actually, he went out with cirrhosis of the liver…but indeed, he was quite the character—Marxist spy with all the trimmings (the kind England seemed to excel in producing)—affably cunning and extremely charismatic…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Smith
I was thinking of the Lord Pinkrose character. Had to google around to dig up the name. Apparently his character was based on Lord Dunsany of all people.
Unless my memory is playing tricks there’s a kind of running gag where he was sent out to do a lecture on Byron in Bucharest and it keeps getting postponed for various reasons as they flee on from pillar to post… Eventually he gets to give it in Cairo — at which point some Gyppo Nationalist mistaking him for someone else more important assassinates him on the podium.
Upper middle class single white women were the same before Trump. They felt good about themselves because their votes and support were saving the environment, saving the planet, saving the poor, etc. and they elevated themselves above others in their minds by believing the nasty slanders of racist, sexist, fascist, etc. directed at those who vote differently.
Trump didn’t change that basic dynamic. These women don’t “think” any differently and certainly don’t “feel” any differently. They are still immune from facts and logic.
Barry, nice to see the nod to Henry Miller’s joyful paean to all things Hellenic. There’s a connective web here: He was great buds with Lawrence Durrell, he of The Alexandrian Quartet, that rich literary tapestry, and of superb ‘spirit of place’ evocations of his sojourns on Corfu (‘Prospero’s Cell’), Rhodes (‘Reflections on a Marine Venus’) and also Cyprus (‘Bitter Lemons’), where he once hosted Paddy Fermor for vinous evenings spent singing obscure Greek folk songs. (Fermor’s Cretan derring-do is portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in the movie ‘Ill Met By Moonlight.’) Additional reading delight is available through Durrell’s brother Gerald’s ‘My Family and Other Animals’, which spawned the recent, wildly popular ‘The Durrells of Corfu’ British TV series.
AesopFan quotes Bob Dole
Which reminds me of the Friday night political discussions I had at a local bar with a yellow dog Democrat friend for nearly a decade. He did NOT like jokes about Chicago voter fraud.