RIP Robert Conquest

The New Neo Posted on by

Noted historian and poet Robert Conquest has died at the age of 98. In honor of his lengthy and fully-lived life, I’ll repost a piece I wrote about him three years ago, updated to change the tense from present to past.

First, however, I’ll add his brilliant “three laws of politics“:

—Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
—Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
—The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

An interview with Robert Conquest* on the eve of the sort-of millennium makes for some fascinating reading in retrospect.

I call it the “sort-of” millennium because it took place in late December of 1999, whereas the real millennium would have begun with the year 2001. But no matter; Conquest, who wrote the book (actually, several books) on the Soviet and especially Stalinist crimes of the 20th century, had quite a bit to say in the interview:

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’ve seen the ravages committed by the Nazis and Communists in the huge scale. I mean, millions have killed but in this book I’m not so much concerned to present the actual ravages as to how they came about, how people who went in to perform these horrible operations, what motivated them. Where did they pick up these awful ideas?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It is ideas, ideas you are exactly what you blame for these ravages.

ROBERT CONQUEST: With a capital “I” these things not ordinary idea like you and I would have but an overwhelming idea that we’ve got everything right, we know the answers for everything, and we can do anything to enforce it…

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it’s very attractive in some ways. People do want answers; this is natural, but the ordinary man in the street didn’t think he got all full answers. He knew he didn’t – it was the intellectual, creating the single, perfect answer and time and time again this has happened.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You use a term that is — Orwell’s term actually — that I like “the lure of the profound” — what do you mean by that?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, that I use because in the book I’m trying to avoid anything plotted and incomprehensible or referring to things that nobody is going to be interested in. I tried to keep it like in Orwell’s terms, clear, and making the points and illustrating with many examples — not just examples of horror or stupidity but striking ones.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But the lure of the profound is also one of the things that at least from what I’ve observed, drives intellectuals into these totalitarian ideas, right?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Yes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: They want the deepest, most scientific, most modern and most profound idea to be theirs?

ROBERT CONQUEST: I think they think it’s modern, that counts as profound…

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So, do you think that there are still in our intellectual life right now, ideas that are like – or remnants of ideas that are still quite dangerous?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, I think there are ideas that given much more scope and importance than they are willow wisps on a dangerous marsh. I would include the idea of the European Community, for example. I mean, Europe is not really, cannot be a nation state. So it’s a big thing, horrendous bureaucracy. And it can’t hang together. But that’s nothing like the totalitarian ideas, it’s still an idea with a rather small, capital letter, which is distorting European history and the West —

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What else do you see right now that worries you for the next century?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’re nearly there. Russia, of course, is in a terrible state. And we don’t know what’s happening today in Chechnya for one thing, in Moscow. And it doesn’t look very nice, and that could cause real trouble. But I still think that –

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Expand on that, what do you mean?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it could spill over into the caucuses, into Azerbaijan or somewhere. But I still think that real trouble is getting the real unity of the democratic countries which will be able to face the troubles together, based, of course, on American alliance, and be able to cope with the really rogue states. There are states worse than Russia that don’t have much arms, but enough to cause trouble.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You’re talking about —

ROBERT CONQUEST: North Korea. Iraq. There are rogue states which have to be somehow accommodated or prevented from doing — it’s a dangerous situation.

Conquest was a poet as well as historian, which made him a rara avis in my eyes. As recently as 2010 he was still actively writing poems, such as this one entitled “Getting On”:

Into one’s ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain’s
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one’s dreamt, seen, felt, read,
Loathed, loved”¦
. . And on one’s dead.
-Which makes one’s World, one’s Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.

More on Conquest and the intellectuals (and of course he himself was one, but a gadfly to the left rather than a member of it):

[Conquest] accused [left-wing intellectuals] of denying the full scale of the [Stalin-induced] famine, attacking their views as “an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale.” He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: “Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act.”

My favorite anecdote about Conquest is the following (which probably is not about Conquest at all but rather his longtime friend, the writer Kingsley Amis):

After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest’s publisher asked him to expand and revise [his book] The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest’s old friend, Kingsley Amis.

And it comes as no surprise that, like so many illustrious minds on the right who understood the mentality of the left, Conquest was a political changer:

In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford [and got a doctorate in Soviet history], joining both the Carlton Club and, as an ‘open’ member, the Communist Party of Great Britain…

In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, and then to the Allied Control Commission…At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia. Witnessing first-hand the brutal Stalinist takeover in Bulgaria, he became completely disillusioned with communist ideas…

Conquest joined the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created by the Labour government to “collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.”

Conquest kept on doing so for the bulk of his very long and productive life.

[* NOTE: Since I first wrote the piece with the interview excerpts, the link seems to have gone dead and I can’t find an alternate source for it online.]

Alexander Hamilton: on Congress’ treaty power

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From Federalist Paper #75 [emphasis mine]:

However proper or safe it may be in governments where the executive magistrate is an hereditary monarch, to commit to him the entire power of making treaties, it would be utterly unsafe and improper to intrust that power to an elective magistrate of four years’ duration. It has been remarked, upon another occasion, and the remark is unquestionably just, that an hereditary monarch, though often the oppressor of his people, has personally too much stake in the government to be in any material danger of being corrupted by foreign powers. But a man raised from the station of a private citizen to the rank of chief magistrate, possessed of a moderate or slender fortune, and looking forward to a period not very remote when he may probably be obliged to return to the station from which he was taken, might sometimes be under temptations to sacrifice his duty to his interest, which it would require superlative virtue to withstand. An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.

To have intrusted the power of making treaties to the Senate alone, would have been to relinquish the benefits of the constitutional agency of the President in the conduct of foreign negotiations. It is true that the Senate would, in that case, have the option of employing him in this capacity, but they would also have the option of letting it alone, and pique or cabal might induce the latter rather than the former. Besides this, the ministerial servant of the Senate could not be expected to enjoy the confidence and respect of foreign powers in the same degree with the constitutional representatives of the nation, and, of course, would not be able to act with an equal degree of weight or efficacy…It must indeed be clear to a demonstration that the joint possession of the power in question, by the President and Senate, would afford a greater prospect of security, than the separate possession of it by either of them.

The highlighted sentence applies, of course, to Obama and his “legacy.”

But brilliant though he was, and relatively far-sighted as well, Hamilton thought it very likely that people of integrity would continue to fill the office of the presidency:

And whoever has maturely weighed the circumstances which must concur in the appointment of a President, will be satisfied that the office will always bid fair to be filled by men of such characters as to render their concurrence in the formation of treaties peculiarly desirable, as well on the score of wisdom, as on that of integrity.

And that’s mostly been true, to a greater or lesser extent, concerning presidents in terms of foreign policy. But Obama’s “treachery” in the Iran deal isn’t just for the purpose of his own personal “aggrandizement” (something Hamilton did envision as a possibility). It is for some other reason as well, about which many theories have been advanced. I offered my own some years ago, here, and I see no reason to change it now.

[NOTE: It is also to be remembered that at the time Hamilton and the Founders wrote, the plan was that the Senate was to be composed of people elected by the legislators of their respective states rather than elected in a popular vote. See this for the history of the 17th Amendment, which was adopted in 1913 and which made the switch to a directly elected Senate.]

The obligatory post about Cecil the lion

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I’m a little late here, aren’t I? I’m only dealing with this topic because it’s been such an internet cause célé¨bre. That’s an interesting phenomenon in itself, illustrating the way that a meme spreads.

And I’ll get this out of the way at the outset, too: I don’t like big-game trophy hunting. It’s one of the last things on earth I’d ever do, probably even somewhat behind skydiving, and that’s saying a lot. But if a certain country has declared it legal, and people follow the laws, it seems to me that it’s okay, and if you’re really against the practice and really incensed about it then lobby and petition that country to change its laws.

But before you do, read Maetenloch at Ace’s on why killing Cecil helps more lions to survive in Africa rather than hurting them. It’s quite convincing.

The case against Palmer the Hemingwayesque dentist who killed the cuddly Cecil the lion in order to mount his head as a trophy turns on whether the legalities were followed, and by whom, and what Palmer knew when it occurred. That is murky at present, but my guess is that the guides on whom Palmer relied knew what they were doing and knew it was probably illegal, but he didn’t, and that the responsibility is theirs.

What interests me most, however, is the public furor over the incident, when Cecil is one of hundreds of lions hunted recently in Zimbabwe without all that much of a fuss, although a fuss is certainly being raised now:

Cecil the Lion’s killing made him a household name, but he was at least the 23rd lion that scientists from Oxford University have been tracking in Zimbabwe recently only to see its life cut short by illegal hunting.

“Cecil was by no means the first lion to leave Hwange National Park and be shot, or to be killed illegally,” says professor David Macdonald, the director of the 20-year-old Oxford science program that is focused around the sprawling park.

The number of lions being killed across broader Zimbabwe is even more dramatic. Between 1999 and 2009, 800 lions were killed in legal hunts in the country, on top of what was likely an even greater number that were killed illegally.

It’s an interesting article. Zimbabwe, a dangerous place for humans, too, doesn’t seem to be uniquely bad for lions compared to several other African countries. In 2000, when the lion population had fallen in Zimbabwe, the country suspended legal lion-hunting for a few years until the numbers came back up. Trophy-hunting brings in fairly big bucks to the country’s economy as well. But in response to Cecil’s death and the resulting furor, the Zimbabwean authorities have suspended legal lion-hunting for now, and have thrown in a ban on hunting leopards and elephants for good measure.

A fact that might surprise most people is that some conservationists support legal trophy hunting (this also ties into Maetenloch’s post):

Supporters say regulated hunts raise much-needed money for conservation and help manage populations, since game officials typically try to make sure hunters target animals that are no longer able to breed or that might inhibit the reproduction of others around them.

Earlier this year, the Dallas Safari Club auctioned off a permit to shoot a black rhino and used the proceeds for conservation. The club did not have anyone available for comment Wednesday but said in a statement: “Lawful, ethical, vigilant hunters play an important role in public acceptance of sustainable hunting as a vital tool for modern wildlife conservation and management.” Club president Ben Carter previously told National Geographic that regulated trophy hunting is a tool that wildlife managers use to keep animal populations healthy and strong. “By removing counterproductive individuals from a herd, [populations] can actually grow,” Carter said.

The counter-arguments go like this:

Other hunters are taking a closer look at a practice that critics say is prone to corruption, fuels demand for black market wildlife products, and can be too hard to enforce on the ground, leaving lions like Cecil to end up as collateral damage.

I would say that just about anything in Zimbabwe is “prone to corruption,” and the demand for illegal lion hunts will probably not diminish all that much if the legal ones are abolished.

My strong suspicion is that if Palmer had killed some unstoried and unnamed lion we wouldn’t be hearing a whisper about it right now. But he killed Cecil, everybody’s favorite and one of the few lions the public had given a name. What was so special about Cecil? It appears that his fame rested on two factors. The first is that he was very very photogenic, with a classic lion “look,” regal and large. The second and not unrelated fact is that he was unafraid of humans and let them get close enough to him to regularly photograph him in all his leonine splendor.

I don’t mean to libel Cecil, especially now that he’s gone, but doesn’t that trait of being unafraid of humans constitute a potential danger, because even photogenic lions are wild and powerful predators after all, and people shouldn’t feel so comfortable with them that they are relaxed enough to come close to them? That’s not really Cecil’s fault, but isn’t it still the case? (Calling all lion experts.)

For example, in this recent incident in which a lioness killed an American tourist in South Africa (and which attracted some internet attention but not as much as Cecil’s death), the focus of attention seemed mostly to be critical of the woman killed and defensive towards the lion. Her mistake appears to have been the prohibited rolling down of her car window in order to take a photo, and her death underscored the fact that the magnificent beasts are inherently dangerous.

And that’s not just to humans, but to other wildlife. It is part of the natural order of things, of course; “nature red in tooth and claw.” And it’s very good to remember this if you have any intention of being around lions, whatever your species:

“Almost any organism around lions might be a potential prey item, and for people to think that they are an exception is folly,” says Luke Dollar, program director for National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative.

“I would imagine that every other primate that co-exists with big cats is acutely aware of the position they hold relative to the top predators of the world.”

Dollar says danger arises when we allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security in the presence of lions or other carnivores.

And therein lies a clue as to why some people like to hunt lions for trophies. Human weaponry gives mankind a leg up, as it were, on the creatures that otherwise dominate all other animals, and give hunters a chance to assert some dominance of their own. Lions hunt, too, but they hunt for food, and humans hunt lions for other reasons than food.

I wrote that lions hunt for food, and mostly they do (that’s generally true of humans who hunt as well, although not when humans hunt lions these days). But it turns out that lions sometimes resemble humans more than one might think even in this regard, because male lions don’t hunt for food (for example, it is routine for rival male lions to kill the cubs of vanquished or dead previous male leaders).

It is female lions that are the hunters for food; male lions such as Cecil are the protectors of territory:

Males defend their territory, be it open woodland or scrub, through urinating to mark the area, roaring to promote fear and literally chasing off any intruders. Their main competition is spotted hyenas that often go for the same prey as lions. These animals will fight and steal each other’s food. This warfare goes beyond food; it is also the problem of territorial boundaries being crossed. Lions can be extremely aggressive and have been seen hunting hyenas, killing them and not eating their prey. They dominate and promote fear in other animals, such as cheetahs and leopards, so that they do not prey the same time that lions do. Males eat the prey first despite the females usually catching it.

The uproar over Cecil ignores all of this, as uproars often do.

The Iran deal: Schumer’s choice

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Senator Charles (“Chuck”) Schumer of New York faces a tough choice: back Obama’s Iran deal and anger many of his New York Jewish constituents, or oppose the deal and anger Obama and much of the Democratic Party leadership.

Prediction: Schumer will cave to Obama. Or he will take the weaselly option mentioned here, voting to override Obama’s veto of a Congressional bill to continue sanctions and block the Iran deal’s lifting of them, but being careful to not bring along enough people with him to make an override stick. Schumer, as the probable heir apparent to Reid’s position, seems to have quite a bit of influence over his fellow Democratic senators who are likewise hesitating, and therefore his vote is considered a sort of bellweather or linchpin.

Here’s a good discussion of the “is the Iran deal a treaty or not?” question, from back in March. Most people who condemned Corker-Menendez as a surrender of Congress’s power to approve treaties haven’t dealt with the reality that if Obama doesn’t regard it as a treaty there is little Congress could do to effectively challenge that position.

There is no currently no suit on the issue being discussed on Capitol Hill, and it’s far from clear that Republicans would be standing on firm legal ground with such a challenge. The debate, rumbling for decades, has yet to be definitively resolved in case law.

“It is a very interesting question,” said Nicholas Burns, a former senior U.S. diplomat, arguing that it is essentially up to the administration to decide whether it is negotiating an agreement that formally binds the United States to commitments under international law; i.e., a treaty, or a less stringent arrangement.

“interesting question” indeed. It seems obvious that whether an agreement is a treaty or not should not be left solely to the discretion of a president, because that would make the treaty power of the Senate a joke. A president would have carte blanche to make any sort of arrangement he/she wanted and just call it an agreement and not a treaty, and no one could fight that designation. What’s the point of Senate approval or disapproval if a president can, by this simple expedient, negotiate an unpopular treaty and then avoid the need to have the Senate vote on it merely by not having the Senate vote on it? Surely the Senate’s advise and consent power wasn’t meant to just be a rubber stamp?

And yet I am relatively certain that if Republicans tried to bring such a case, SCOTUS would either say they had no standing, or rule in Obama’s favor 5-4 with Kennedy as the deciding vote.

From that same article:

Biden argued Monday [back in March] that this practice is as old as the United States itself.

“Under presidents of both parties, such major shifts in American foreign policy as diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China, the resolution of the Iran hostage crisis, and the conclusion of the Vietnam War were all conducted without congressional approval,” he said in his statement opposing the GOP letter.

But were these so-called “major shifts” disapproved of by a majority of the Senate at the time they happened? No [and see the “NOTE” below about Nixon and China and the differences between that and Obama’s Iran deal]. Were they disapproved of in a bipartisan manner by every single member of the opposition party, plus a significant number of members of the president’s own party? No again. Any previous president who had thought to do anything like what Obama is doing in opposition to Congress would have feared losing his own party members, and even perhaps risked impeachment and conviction. Obama has tested his party and has no such fears.

So, besides Schumer (who actually may have made up his mind already and only be pretending to waver), how many Democrats are wavering over their vote on the deal? I don’t think there will be enough to override, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Here is the sort of unicorn mentality we are dealing with in some of them:

Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., called voting for the Iran nuclear deal “the most important decision we may ever make in our lifetime,” and tantamount to “averting nuclear war.”

“I grew up in the ’60s, and what got me into politics was ”˜give peace a chance, avoid war,’” Farr told reporters. “For the first time in my life, instead of voting on whether we’re gonna invade Iraq or not invade Iraq, or invade this or invade that, or Bosnia, or whatever, for the first time in my life we have a chance to vote on something that will avoid war. And that’s so fundamental, so historical. I can’t see why anybody in their right mind wouldn’t support this.”

I think there’s a lot of blah blah blah among Democrats about how they have reservations about the deal, but that’s just to show they’re not Obama’s puppets and to imply that they are being really really contemplative. But in the end they will not oppose Obama or their leaders. Remember all the wavering on Obamacare before it was passed? In the end, a few people were allowed to vote against it to protect themselves if they came from red or purple areas, but the number of such allowances was limited in order to assure there would be just enough votes to pass Obamacare.

You can bet there will be a great many twisted or even broken arms among Democrats on Capital Hill before this is through.

As for Schumer himself, this Politico piece says he’s still undecided and may vote against Obama, while this from Michael Goodwin in the NY Post says that Schumer’s loyalty as a party man with lots of ambition will overshadow any lingering inclination to be an Israel hawk.

I’m with Goodwin. As I wrote earlier, however, the only way I believe that Schumer would vote against Obama is if he makes sure there are enough votes for Obama to carry the day.

[NOTE: Nixon’s trip to China is not a good analogy with Obama and Iran, although the left is very fond of making it. Among other things, Nixon’s well-known history of anti-Communism defused criticism to a large extent, but Obama has no such hardline history on Iran. Au contraire.

Nixon faced very little criticism from either party in a Democratic-dominated Senate (it was 54/44 D/R and the House was 255 to 180).

This rather obscure piece is the only article I’ve found online so far that deals in any detail with the amount of Congressional or popular opposition Nixon faced. Basically, any serious opposition was limited to William Loeb, who had been the editor of the very conservative Manchester Union Leader, and just a few others. Similarly, the MSM was almost universally approving and optimistic about his overtures, as was most of the public. Taiwan was understandably negative about the US rapprochement with China, but that seemed a minor problem on the US domestic scene.

But the huge differences between Nixon/China and Obama/Iran are hardly limited to the differences in US public opinion, although that’s important. There are large substantive and strategic differences as well. Also important was the fact that Nixon was not negotiating a nuclear arms deal, but rather beginning diplomatic relations and opening trade, a far less controversial process (although at this point we see that it has had major repercussions, some of them negative for the US). But China already was a nuclear power at the time of Nixon’s trip, and had been for several years.]

[NOTE II: You can see in the comments section in threads such as this that many Democrats would see a Schumer vote against Obama as choosing Israel’s interests over that of the US, the old “dual loyalty” accusation. Of course, in this case, we on the right see Israel’s and the US’s interests as the same, and Obama as opposed to both.]

Some more good news…

The New Neo Posted on by

…here:

Three University of Virginia graduates and members of a fraternity profiled in a debunked account of a gang rape in a retracted Rolling Stone magazine story filed a lawsuit against the publication and the article’s author Wednesday, court records show.

The three men, George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler, filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York. They are also suing Rolling Stone’s publisher, Wenner Media.

A lawyer for the men said they suffered “vicious and hurtful attacks” because of inaccuracies in the November 2014 article, which was written by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Also Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, will be leaving the magazine next month. Dana said in a statement to The Times that after 19 years at Rolling Stone, “I have decided that it is time to move on.”

When asked whether Dana’s departure was linked to the retracted story, a spokeswoman for the magazine’s publisher, Jann Wenner, said that “many factors go into a decision like this,” according to the report.

In the lawsuit, the three 2013 graduates said the article “created a simple and direct way to match the alleged attackers” from the alleged gang rape to them based on details provided in the story.

Prediction: Dana will land on his feet, and then some. I make no prediction about whether the students will win their lawsuit, but I suspect they have an excellent case.

This is in addition to the lawsuit filed by UVA’s Dean Eramo back in May:

Dean Eramo, head of UVA’s Sexual Misconduct Board, is suing Rolling Stone, Wenner Media, and reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely for portraying her as the “chief villain” in the now-debunked article. The suit says the article suggests Eramo “did nothing” and tried to suppress “Jackie’s alleged gang rape to protect UVA’s reputation,” when in actuality she quickly arranged a meeting with police, introduced her to sexual assault support groups on campus, and told her to encourage other alleged Phi Kappa Psi rape victims to come forward so the university could take action against the fraternity.

“Rolling Stone and Erdely’s highly defamatory and false statements about Dean Eramo were not the result of an innocent mistake,” says the suit, according to the Washington Post. “They were the result of a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses, and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine, than they were about discovering the truth or actual facts.”

Eramo says the Rolling Stone story damaged her reputation and caused her physical and emotional distress, which contributed to surgical complications she suffered while being treated for breast cancer. She is seeking more than $7.5 million in damages.

That suit, unlike the one filed by the three UVA students, includes journalist Sabrina Erdely as one of the defendants. That seems very fitting to me, although she’s probably the one with the most shallow pockets.

In addition, the accused fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, filed a lawsuit against Rolling Stone last April.

The wheels of justice appear to be grinding, and not so very slowly. But I doubt that any of this will undo the perception of rampant rape on campuses by frat boys, any more than did the unraveling of the Duke case and its aftermath.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and the reductionist theory of everything bad that ever happened to black people

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First, a disclaimer: I have not read T-Nehisi Coates’ new book entitled Between the World and Me. I’ve only read summaries or reviews of it, although I’m familiar with his thought from reading many of his articles for The Atlantic and other periodicals.

Why am I writing about the book? It seems to be an important statement, not only about Coates’ point of view but mostly because it’s been widely praised and is being widely read. Right now it’s number nine on Amazon’s best-seller list as well as number one on the NY Times nonfiction list.

So that’s an influential book with a whole lot of readers. It’s been called “brilliant” by the WaPo, and Coates has been anointed as James Baldwin’s successor by Toni Morrison, who considers the book “revelatory” and “required reading.” That gives you just a small idea of the reception it has gotten.

Reading Scott Johnson’s review of the book in City Journal reveals that at the beating heart of Between the World and Me lies a reductionist rage that collapses everything bad that ever happened to black people in America—and is still happening to black people in America—at the door of white racism. An excerpt from Johnson:

Coates aspires to Baldwin’s literary quality in overwrought prose that makes the book almost unreadable. He is both verbose and repetitious. He must speak of the “breaking” of the black “body” more than 100 times. The text of the book begins on page 5 (“Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body” – a question that remains unanswered at book’s end). By page 12, I felt a bit like a broken man myself. According to Coates, “people who believe themselves to be white” have constructed the concept of race and subjugated blacks from the beginning of American history through the breaking of the black body. “People who believe they are white” are those who see the United States as an exceptional nation and believe in the American Dream. Coates calls them Dreamers and, unlike President Obama’s DREAMers, they are not to be indulged but resisted.

There’s more, much much more; read the whole thing if you’re interested. Johnson also offers several lengthy quotes from Coates, but this one is especially telling:

“Black on black” crime is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the [restrictive property] covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.

The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely on those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.

As this thoughtful and lengthy reader review at Amazon states:

It is as simple as this: [according to Coates] there is literally not a single thing a black person can do wrong that is their fault in a cosmic sense. Every single moral, ethical or legal crime is carried out as a result of the effects of White Supremacy. Some people, including myself, characterize this as true racism. Denying that black people are capable of being agents or partners in their own life or destiny is the ultimate kind of racism and bigotry…

…Mr. Coates seems to think it is OK to insult all white poeple in the gravest of possible ways. All white people exist on a spectrum that has “benign neglect” and “free rider” on one end and “violent torture murderer” and “slave master” on the other end. In Mr. Coates’ world, to wake up white is to wake up a guilty person. All white Americans are guilty, it is only a matter of determining where they fit on the guilt spectrum. This acts as a kind of mirror image of his view of black people which I discussed in the previous point.

…White people are literally lined up around the block to get on “the right side” of this book and its author. They mistakenly and cynically believe that doing so will inoculate them against the charge of being a racist oppressor themselves.

As I wrote just a couple of days ago:

…the promised land – equality of outcome – has not been reached, and doesn’t seem all that close despite the achievements of some black people and the evidence of President Obama’s election. The persistence of inequality of outcome can only be explained by two factors or a combination of those two factors: problems inherent in the black community or black people, or problems inherent in the non-black (white and “other) community’s treatment of black people. Look inward or look outward, or look both ways.

It is much less painful to look outward, however.

Coates appears not to look both ways but to look solely outward: whites are deeply, deeply guilty, and blacks are their “broken” victims. It is his prerogative to believe this and write about it, and I am fairly certain that nothing I could say could ever change his mind. What is especially interesting to me, however, is how many white people (or as Coates would say, “people who believes themselves to be white”) buy it (literally, as well). As the commenter at Amazon puts it, they are “lined up around the block to get on ‘the right side’ of this book and its author. They mistakenly and cynically believe that doing so will inoculate them against the charge of being a racist oppressor themselves.”

I do have a quarrel with the use of the word “cynically” there. I don’t think cynicism is a part of it for the vast majority. I think self-flagellation is, especially for younger people, who have had guilt for the crime of being white drilled into them from their early days in school. The left fosters and uses this guilt as a way to effect societal change, to persuade white people and black alike to give up any idea of Western society as superior or desirable for both races, and to change the power structure (that’s a favorite leftist term) in ways that give the left more power.

Who loses? Both races. In fact, I think black people probably lose more.

This has been reflected in the presidency of Barack Obama. Just as his election seemed to prove how far the nation had come from its earlier more overtly racist days, so it also provided hope of better things. At least it did in the beginning, but those “better things” in the racial sense have most definitely not materialized.

That is not an accident. Obama’s tenure have been marked by a purposeful fanning of the flames of racial division and tension, and the economic situation in the black community has declined further and faster than that of the white community in the years since Obama has become president.

Carly Fiorina’s Reagan Library speech

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: If you watch it and like it, please pass it around via email, Facebook, Twitter, and any other way you can think of. I’d really like to see her poll numbers rise so that she gets the exposure of being in the top 10 debate.]

I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, but I’ve been told by several commenters that it’s excellent and well worth a listen. So I’m posting it.

Yes, I’m a Fiorina fan, much to my surprise. And it’s not because she’s a woman—I couldn’t care less about that, except for the fact that I think a woman would defuse Hillary’s talking points in that regard. That’s assuming Hillary is the nominee, which I’m still assuming.

I do understand that Fiorina has several vulnerabilities that would be exploited and that she would have to turn into pluses. The first is her lack of a history in political office (although there’s something to be said for that). The second is that, in her previous run for office, she lost (somewhat but not entirely mitigated by the fact that it was in bluer-than-blue California, and she did quite well for a Republican there). The third is her tenure and firing at Hewlett-Packard, which she has explained but which is still very susceptible to criticism.

The fourth is that she’s not doing well in the polls up till now.

An ebola vaccine may be in the works

The New Neo Posted on by

This is potentially very good news. Very:

Researchers gave one dose of the new vaccine, developed by the Canadian government, to more than 4,000 people who were contacts of confirmed Ebola cases within 10 days of being identified. In comparison, more than 3,500 contacts of other Ebola cases got the shot after a 10-day delay. In the group that received the vaccine immediately, there were no Ebola cases versus 16 cases in people who got delayed vaccination…

Researchers are still assessing possible side effects; the most serious seemed to be fever and the stress experienced by patients who believe such symptoms were due to Ebola.

“This (vaccine) could be the key that we’ve been missing to end the outbreak,” Neuman said. “I don’t see any reason on humanitarian grounds why it should not be used immediately.”

Sometimes these things turn out to be much less promising than originally described, however. In addition, the epidemic seems to have really died down for now, although the disease will almost certainly rear up again in the future.

In the event of an anti-Iran Deal veto override, Obama could simply ignore Congress

The New Neo Posted on by

And I have little doubt that that’s exactly what he would do if he thought it would work.

Here are several possible scenarios:

First, [Obama] may simply announced that every bank that does business with Iran in accordance with the deal will not face the sanctions in the Menendez-Kirk amendment, as reinstated and strengthened by the Corker deal, as activated by the veto override. So, number one, ignore U.S. statute,” {Brad Sherman, Democrat member of the House] explained.

“Number two, he will tell the rest of the world to follow the deal and do business with Iran as specified in the deal, saying that is the reasonable thing to do.”

Sherman, who is currently undecided on the deal, went further to say that Obama could go to foreign countries and persuade their governments to mandate that their banks do business with Iran even if the banks are scared to do so to the full extent of the deal.

“He might go to foreign countries and say, ”˜Look maybe your banks are reluctant to do business with the Iran, because they fear this Congress will somehow get them maybe they’ll need a little push, so I’ll speak to your parliament.’”

Eventually, Sherman explained, it will become more difficult for the next administration to undo what was just done.

Like many other Democrats, Sherman is undecided (or says he’s undecided and/or wants to appear to be undecided) on how to vote on Corker-Menendez and an Obama veto override:

Democrats appear to be waiting on New York Sen. Chuck Schumer to decide where he stands on the Iran deal, as some think others will follow his lead.

Now, there’s a group of independent thinkers.

My prediction, for what it’s worth (and subject to change as events unroll): the anti-Iran deal measure will pass, but Obama will veto it. Then the override vote will go Obama’s way, but it will be close. It will be close because the Democratic leadership, knowing the public is against the deal, will allow members of Congress in everything but the bluest of blue areas to vote to override, but they will make sure there are still enough votes against an override to keep that override from occurring.

But if by some chance the override does happen, Obama will do exactly what Sherman describes, and more along those lines.

And then Congress will face another decision: whether to impeach and convict. Because if ever such a thing would be deserved by a president, that president would be Barack Obama. The threshold in the Senate for conviction is exactly the same as the threshold for an override, by the way: two-thirds.

Another murder, this time by a legal immigrant

The New Neo Posted on by

The moment I read this story of a horrific murder I wondered a few things:

An 18-year-old Wyoming man accused of robbing and shooting three members of a family after asking for roadside help told investigators he opened fire after one of the victims laughed at him, an FBI agent said in a court filing Thursday.

Jason Shane, 51, and Tana Shane, 47, died in the Wednesday shooting in the small town of Pryor, FBI spokesman Todd Palmer told The Associated Press. Their daughter, 26-year-old Jorah Shane, was shot in the back when she tried to run away, and she is recovering in a Billings hospital, the woman’s aunt, Ada Shane, said.

The statement by Special Agent Larry McGrail II was filed in U.S. District Court seeking a murder warrant for Jesus Deniz, also known as Jesus Deniz Mendoza, of Worland, Wyoming.

Whether or not he really shot them because “one of the victims laughed at him” (and I suspect that wasn’t the reason), did he actually think that reason would sound like a sufficient excuse for a killing?

What was his immigration status? Note that the article doesn’t even mention this as a possible issue; just the usual treatment of him as the resident of a certain state, in this case Montana.

It turns out that Deniz is a legal immigrant from Mexico who came to this country in May of 2013. The article does not explain how he got his legal status, but my very strong suspicion is that he probably was admitted under the rules about family unification (he would have been 16 years old then).

The details of this crime are especially heartrending and even could be called ironic, because the victims were Good Samaritans who had stopped to offer aid to Deniz:

[Lone survivor, 26-year-old] Jorah Shane recounted to her relatives the events leading to the shooting. Her mother, Tana Shane, drove by a young man parked on the side of the road who told her he had run out of fuel, Ada Shane said.

“He’s only 18, and he looked like an innocent boy,” Ada Shane said. “Both my brother and sister-in-law have big hearts.”

Tana Shane went by her house, picked up her husband and daughter, and they drove back to the stranded car, Ada Shane said. The man pulled a gun and held it to the temple of 51-year-old Jason Shane…

Deniz killed Tana and her husband Jason, and shot Jorah in the back but she lived to tell the tale. He also stole their car.

Another detail in this story is that the Shane family seems to be Native American:

The man told the family to start walking. Tana Shane told her daughter in their Native American language to run. Jorah Shane told her aunt that she heard a shot, started running then heard bullets whizzing by her head. She fell, heard another shot, and started running again toward a church just as a car was pulling out.

She ran to the car, and the frightened driver leaped out, Ada Shane said. Jorah Shane jumped in the driver’s seat and drove to her house with the shooter still firing at her, the aunt said.

The outrage sparked by incidents such as this is what Donald Trump is tapping into. Yes, it’s only one incident, but there are others, and each of them is an incident that didn’t have to happen if our immigration policy (in this case, our legal immigration policy) were more stringent.

[NOTE: See my earlier post from today. The discussion there about compassion for immigrants versus a country’s need to keep it’s people safe is relevant to this post as well.

It’s odd, but I’ve noticed many times (and I notice today) how certain days have certain themes, totally unplanned.

Also please see this previous post.]

Antiracism as the new religion

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ace.]

This piece by John McWhorter is well worth reading. A few excerpts:

…Antiracism is now a religion. It is inherent to a religion that one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief. Certain questions are not to be asked, or if asked, only politely””and the answer one gets, despite being somewhat half-cocked, is to be accepted as doing the job…

For example, one is not to ask “Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at much more danger of being killed by one another?” Or, one might ask this, very politely””upon which the answers are flabby but further questions are unwelcome…

To say one is not to question is not to claim that no questions are ever asked. The Right quite readily questions Antiracism’s tenets. Key, however, is that among Antiracism adherents, those questions are tartly dismissed as inappropriate and often, predictably, as racist themselves. The questions are received with indignation that one would even ask them, with a running implication that their having been asked is a symptom of, yes, racism’s persistence.

Racism used to be about behavior, often quite overt behavior. Segregation and Jim Crow laws. Clear discrimination in which there was no equality of opportunity. Lynchings. Going further back in time, slavery.

These things are, fortunately, long gone. But the promised land—equality of outcome—has not been reached, and doesn’t seem all that close despite the achievements of some black people and the evidence of President Obama’s election. The persistence of inequality of outcome can only be explained by two factors or a combination of those two factors: problems inherent in the black community or black people, or problems inherent in the non-black (white and “other) community’s treatment of black people. Look inward or look outward, or look both ways.

It is much less painful to look outward, however. And of course there will always be some truth to the claim that racism exists, especially if you define it as thoughtcrime: there is no way to eradicate all elements of racism from some people’s hearts and minds, and this goes for people of all races.

Lately the Left has gotten around the entire dilemma by the elevation of the doctrine of “disparate impact.” In that way, inequality of outcome is assumed to be evidence of inequality of opportunity resulting from racism, even if it’s such a subtle form of racism it cannot be detected in any other way.