For the Fourth: he’s a Yankee Doodle Dandy

The New Neo Posted on by

For the Fourth of July, courtesy commenter “mezzrow”:

I saw that film on TV maybe 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney—whom I already knew as a tough old gangster—could dance. His dancing fascinated me because it was so non-balletic and idiosyncratic—the strutting, graceful/ungraceful, artful/artless uniqueness of his movement. In particular I recall the wall-climbing part at the end, which delighted me and still does.

Cagney wasn’t just an actor and hoofer, although he certainly was both. He was also a political conservative and changer. Excerpts from his Wiki page:

He was sickly as a young child””so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty his family had to endure…The red-haired, blue-eyed Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918, and attended Columbia College of Columbia University where he intended to major in art…

Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, “It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him.”

He started tap dancing as a boy (a skill that eventually contributed to his Academy Award) and was nicknamed “Cellar-Door Cagney” after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors. He was a good street fighter, defending his older brother Harry, a medical student, when necessary. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for the New York State lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it…

In his autobiography, Cagney said that as a young man, he had no political views, since he was more concerned with where the next meal was coming from. However the emerging labor movement of the twenties and thirties soon forced him to take sides…e supported political activist and labor leader Thomas Mooney’s defense fund, but was repelled by the behavior of some of Mooney’s supporters at a rally. Around the same time, he gave money for a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, which he put down to being “a soft touch.”…He also became involved in a “liberal group…with a leftist slant,” along with Ronald Reagan. However, when he and Reagan saw the direction the group was heading in, they resigned on the same night…

Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1934, and again in 1940. The accusation in 1934 stemmed from a letter police found from a local Communist official that alleged that Cagney would bring other Hollywood stars to meetings. Cagney denied this, and Lincoln Steffens, husband of the letter’s writer, backed up this denial, asserting that the accusation stemmed solely from Cagney’s donation to striking cotton workers in the San Joaquin Valley. William Cagney claimed this donation was the root of the charges in 1940. Cagney was cleared…

After [WWII], Cagney’s politics started to change. He had worked on Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns…However, by the time of the 1948 election, he had become disillusioned with Harry S. Truman, and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, his first non-Democratic vote. By 1980, Cagney was contributing financially to the Republican Party, supporting his friend Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency…As he got older, he became more and more conservative, referring to himself in his autobiography as “arch-conservative.” He regarded his move away from liberal politics as “…a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system… Those functionless creatures, the hippies … just didn’t appear out of a vacuum.”

Cagney: hoofer, political changer. An original all the way.

Happy Fourth to you all!

Salt water taffy

The New Neo Posted on by

To get your mind off the death of the republic (for a moment, anyway) and into some Fourth of July Americana fun, visit the Goldenrod in York Beach, Maine.

Do you like to watch taffy being made? It sure beats watching sausage.

This is what you can see if you walk by the window of the Goldenrod some time between Memorial Day and Labor Day:

My very favorite part is here. It has a hypnotic effect:

And if you go inside, you can eat the stuff. It’s really, really good, too. The best. If you suck on it for just a little while first to soften it a bit, you won’t even pull out your fillings or crowns when you begin the satisfying process of chomping on it.

Happy Fourth!

Now, here’s a comment…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on the Iran negotiations. I found it in the comments section here.

It amused me, in a bleak sort of way:

We have nothing to offer them. They have nothing to offer us. I do not believe a thing they say, they do not believe a thing we say…. The last time I got into bed with someone and had all of those differences between us… She was HOT!!!!

Khomeini [sic: Khamenei] isn’t. Why are we there?

Obergefell was a close decision, replete with warnings

The New Neo Posted on by

Peggy Noonan observes:

Not fully acknowledged in the past days of celebration on one side, and profound reservation on the other, is that the court in Obergefell v. Hodges was split 5-4 on same-sex marriage, and that the dissenting opinions were truly remarkable. They were fiery and in some cases colorful, but they also showed a court divided on the essentials of the Constitution. Most strikingly, some of them included ominous warnings.

“The truth is that today’s decision rests on nothing more than the majority’s own conviction that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry because they want to,” the chief justice argues. “The Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?”

That grandiosity endangers the Court’s very legitimacy, which rests on public respect that “flows from the perception””and the reality””that we exercise humility and restraint in deciding cases according to the Constitution and the law.”

…And the decision raises serious questions about religious liberty. Every state that has adopted same-sex marriage democratically has, “out of respect for sincere religious conviction,” included accommodations for religious practice. There are none in this decision.

Will Obergefell end up increasing animus against gay marriage rather than decreasing it? After all, opinion was already changing, and quite quickly at that. Gay marriage was becoming the law of the land, state by state. But a significant number of people who support gay marriage itself—or at least have no objection to it, if a state’s citizens want to legalize it—are against the overreach embodied in Obergefell, both for what it declares about federalism and for the way the decision stretches and distorts the Constitution.

Mark Steyn has some related things to say:

…[T]he US Supreme Court decision was a twofer for the left. As I said the other day, even if one disagrees, one can respect the process in Dublin (gay marriage by referendum) or London (gay marriage legislated by the people’s representatives in parliament). But the American left preferred to go the Supreme Court route – because, if you’re hardcore about these things, to divine a right to gay marriage in an 18th century parchment or to insist that “established by the State” refers not primarily to states but to the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a totalitarian act that destroys both law and language by rendering them meaningless: what’s not to like?…[T]he justices’ total capitulation to the zeitgeist is all but complete. Modifying Wonderland’s Queen, the Supreme Court of Wonderland seems to work on the principle of “Verdict first – reasoning afterwards, if at all.”

He’s right, but there’s even more.

It is no accident this was not done through the state courts or by referendum, state by state. The common wisdom is that supporters of same-sex marriage didn’t want to wait for such a slow process, because although public opinion was changing in their favor it was not changing as universally or as quickly as they wanted. No doubt that was true.

But there were several other, more basic reasons to do it the SCOTUS way. The first is that if it had been done merely in those first two ways, law or referendum, state by state, it would continue to be subject to repeal in those states or to a new referendum outlawing it in those states. Too easy to accomplish a reversal, if people changed their minds after the law was passed and they decided they didn’t like it for some reason.

The second is that people could opt out of servicing same-sex marriages (the florist/baker crowd), because the states usually were passing provisions to protect the rights of the religious to refuse to participate. The proper analogy is not to refusing to serve a black person in your business. Gay people are served by those very same bakers and florists all the time. The proper analogy is to not serving a black person (or any person, actually) who wanted a cake for some sort of ceremony that violated that person’s religious beliefs. That’s not discriminating against the black person because of race, but it’s instead a very specific refusal to participate in a certain activity.

But the SCOTUS decision changes all of that (at least for Christians; I continue to think there will be no lawsuits against Muslims). It establishes a right to same-sex marriage marriage and to either impose participation on others or make them give up their livelihood if they refuse. This is very different from the passage of legislation allowing same-sex marriage. It’s a much better way to accuse people of bigotry and to punish them if they don’t get with the program.

Laws passed on a state-by-state basis can be repealed by that state. Even federal laws can be repealed by Congress (or, if you’re President Obama, by failing to have the DOJ enforce the law). But with a SCOTUS decision such as Obergefell the only way to overturn it is by a later SCOTUS ruling overruling it. I suppose there could instead be a constitutional amendment undoing it (not that that would ever happen; it’s already too popular for that), but would such an amendment be itself unconstitutional? This is not an idle question, either, although it might sound that way. Here’s a discussion of the issue (see also this).

I repeat, it is no accident whatsoever that same-sex marriage activists wanted this case before SCOTUS, and not just because they were impatient. They wanted to cement the institution of same-sex marriage in a way that would be nearly impossible to undo.

George Takei is an expert on what makes a person a real black versus a fake one

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the latest example of the tedious, ignorant, offensive and yet often-effective mindset of the left. Actor George Takei, a gay man who recently married his longtime partner, and who played Sulu on the original Star Trek, has said some very ugly things about Justice Clarence Thomas.

First, here are the words of Thomas in his Obergefell dissent, of which Takei was so very critical:

Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon whicthis Nation was built.

The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

Pretty standard stuff, one would think, and especially appropriate for the Fourth of July, Independence Day. But the concept of God-given rights and therefore basic human dignity, so integral to this country, has fallen by the wayside. I wonder whether Takei even knows the reference, because he doesn’t appear to. I also wonder whether he knows much about Thomas’ own history as a young black man growing up in the Jim Crow South.

Nevertheless, Takei felt the need to say this about Thomas:

TAKEI: He is a clown in black face sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn’t belong there. And for him to say, slaves have dignity. I mean, doesn’t he know that slaves were in chains? That they were whipped on the back. If he saw the movie 12 Years a Slave, you know, they were raped. And he says they had dignity as slaves or ”“ My parents lost everything that they worked for, in the middle of their lives, in their 30s [he is referring here to the WWII Japanese American internment camps]. His business, my father’s business, our home, our freedom and we’re supposed to call that dignified? Marched out of our homes at gun point. I mean, this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America.

There is so much food for thought in there I hardly know where to start. Most people have focused on the phrase “clown in black face,” but that’s really just a small part of it.

I’m discussing this issue not because of George Takei himself (the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, really), but because what he says is emblematic of the approach of the left to argument and to the presence of black conservatives, who are considered a special affront worthy of particular contempt. This is certainly not the first time Clarence Thomas has endured insults of a specifically racist nature.

Here are some of the elements that Takei’s attack illustrate:
(1) A misunderstanding of our country’s history and most fundamental principles, including those of the Declaration of Independence…
(2) that is either through ignorance or through purposeful misrepresentation…
(3) expressed in a manner that pits one oppression against another, saying in effect that “my oppression is greater than yours”…
(4) and concluding that the other person is not a “real” exemplar of his very own race or ethnic origin, because he/she does not march in lockstep with the politics deemed suitable for that race.

Less important, but still of interest, is the fact that Takei thinks Clarence Thomas should learn about slavery (as Sulu seems to have done) through the movies, and then he’d really know about it in a more authentic way. I don’t think Takei is alone in his study of history via movies, either, or his recommendation that Thomas could learn from them.

Thomas, that is, whose actual (i.e. real life) history is as follows:

Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the American Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of American slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas’ earliest-known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy who were born around the end of the 18th century and owned by wealthy Liberty County, Georgia planter Josiah Wilson. M.C. left his family when Thomas was two years old. Thomas’ mother worked hard but was sometimes paid only pennies per day. She had difficulty putting food on the table and was forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to live with his mother’s parents in Savannah, Georgia. Thomas was seven when the family moved in with his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, and Anderson’s wife, Christine (née Hargrove), in Savannah.

Living with his grandparents, Thomas enjoyed amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time in his life. His grandfather Myers Anderson had little formal education, but had built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas calls his grandfather “the greatest man I have ever known.” When Thomas was 10, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. His grandfather believed in hard work and self-reliance; he would counsel Thomas to “never let the sun catch you in bed.” Thomas’ grandfather also impressed upon his grandsons the importance of getting a good education.

Thomas was the only black person at his high school in Savannah, where he was an honor student. He was raised Roman Catholic. He considered entering the priesthood at the age of 16, and became the first black student to attend St. John Vianney’s Minor Seminary (Savannah) on the Isle of Hope. He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri. No one in Thomas’s family had attended college. Thomas has said that during his first year in seminary, he was one of only “three or four” blacks attending the school. In a number of interviews, Thomas stated that he left the seminary in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had overheard another student say after the shooting, “Good, I hope the son of a bitch died.” He did not think the church did enough to combat racism.

At a nun’s suggestion, Thomas attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. While there, Thomas helped found the Black Student Union. Once he walked out after an incident in which black students were punished while white students went undisciplined for committing the same violation, and some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to re-enter the school.

Having spoken the Gullah language as a child, Thomas realized in college that he still sounded unpolished despite having been drilled in grammar at school, and he chose to major in English literature “to conquer the language”.

That’s the man Takei is lecturing about oppression, slavery, and indignity. But hey, because Thomas is a conservative—and because he didn’t think a right to gay marriage is enshrined in the Constitution—it’s open season on him and he’s not a real black man, just a clown in black face. Just as Sarah Palin wasn’t a real woman. And George Takei is just the one to inform him about his blackness.

Why did Orwell remain a socialist?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Recently I came across an old post of mine on Orwell and decided to repeat it in edited form, because I think it’s still interesting and timely. So here it is.]

Commenter “Nick” wrote this about Orwell and Animal Farm:

Orwell was a socialist. His problem with the pigs was that they became no different from the neighboring farmers; his problem with Soviet Marxism was that it acted just like capitalism

Orwell self-identified as a socialist, and “Nick” makes a thought-provoking point, but I disagree with it. Animal Farm isn’t about Orwell’s own complicated and contradictory political stance. It’s a parable that was meant to illustrate some of the evils inherent in Communism. Yes, economic exploitation by those in power towards the workers (all in the name of a false “equality”) was part of it. But the focus was on totalitarianism, lack of liberty, and statist control – problems he located in the left, not in capitalism.

That said, it is also true that Orwell was very much against income inequality. In fact, that’s the main reason he identified as a socialist. His socialism was a strange beast, however, and he himself recognized the inherent contradictions and difficulties of adherence to it:

As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”

Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world.

Animal Farm is a critique of Stalinism/Communism, and although capitalism as an exploitative system plays a role at the beginning of the book, by the end the astute reader sees Communism as at least as bad or even worse. Orwell was also aware of the strong possibility that liberty and socialism of any sort (not just Communist Stalinism) could not be reconciled, as the above quotes from him indicate. It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.

More:

Socialists have also raised some interesting questions about what Orwell seems to be saying about Lenin and the rise of Stalinism. In fact, Orwell has suggested elsewhere that Trotsky and Lenin are partly responsible for the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and that Bolshevism itself contained elements of authoritarianism. Molyneux, the British socialist, has written a compelling article with a very close reading of the plot and characters of Animal Farm, and concludes that Orwell equates Lenin with Stalin (morphed into the single Napoleon character). Molyneux argues that Orwell gives no way to understand the reasons for the revolution’s failure except human nature (as opposed to insufficient material conditions). All this leaves the book with the reactionary message at the heart of it – that all revolutions fail.

…Even in his best political writing, and his sharp exposés of aspects of capitalism, Orwell was never sure whether a real alternative was possible. Whatever Orwell’s intentions, his most famous books undoubtedly reflect these frustrations and despair. Writing as an isolated intellectual removed from day-to-day struggle, (with the notable exception of his participation in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell never regained the hope for workers’ power he experienced while in Spain.

And that’s coming from a pro-socialist, writing in a socialist periodical.

Daniel Greenfield writes the definitive essay on the left

The New Neo Posted on by

The left? They’re about power. Everything else is just a pretense.

Please read it.

Oh, and by the way, the left wants you to give up in weariness and despair.

A similar idea to Greenfield’s, but expressed in a much milder way, is offered by Jonah Goldberg.

And by “the left” we mean the left—as in “activist left; hard left.” The left often pretends to be something it’s not—liberals, “progressives” (the former is somewhat different, the latter merely a euphemism). But the left is the left, and you know it when you see it.

Liberals are not the left, as I’ve written on this blog before, although they are allied with the left and used by the left to gain power. Greenfield indicates as much early in the essay when he writes, “Liberals have a long history of being the left’s useful idiots.” In my experience, some liberals can awaken to the facts of the left and how they’ve been duped by it, if they can be persuaded to pay attention and not shut their ears and shout you down. And every now and then a leftist turns (i.e. David Horowitz, some of the older neocons), and although it’s rarer, when one of them turns they tend to become very vocal and effective in talking about it. That’s because they were activists to begin with, and because they are such experts on the left and know all the tricks of the trade.

[NOTE: This other article by Greenfield (Sultan Knish)—which I confess I haven’t read but only skimmed—looks interesting too.]

The candidacy and punishment of Donald Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

You can’t say Trump isn’t getting press. That’s his thing, in addition to making money: attention-getting.

Why is he #2 on the Republican candidate list? Because a lot of people like his big, brash mouth, and because there are so many other candidates competing. I don’t think Trump has a chance of actually winning the nomination, but he will draw from the “I’m sick of the Republican Party” crew and get a certain not-so-small percentage of Republicans to favor him.

Which brings us to the fallout from his immigration remarks. Let’s look at what he actually said:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

“And some I assume are good people,” he added.

But it’s not just Mexico that’s dumping all of it’s problems in the U.S., Trump continued. “It’s coming from all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. We don’t know.”

Was Trump’s main problem hyperbole, the failure to say it the other way around, as in: “Most of the people coming here are good people, but many are bringing their problems with them—drugs, crime, rape”? Would that have gotten any attention at all?

I don’t know. But Trump is defending his rape remarks as true, and there certainly is some evidence to back him up (see this, this, this from HuffPo, and this from Amnesty International).

I guess it’s okay to say when they’re the ones saying it. From Amnesty:

Kidnapping for ransom isn’t the only risk. Health professionals report that as many as six in ten migrant women and girls are raped on the journey. And activists repeatedly raise concerns that abducted women and girls are vulnerable to trafficking.

From HuffPo:

But while many of these girls are fleeing their homes because of fears of being sexually assaulted, according to the UNHCR, they are still meeting that same fate on their journey to freedom.

Rape can be perpetrated by anyone along the way, including guides, fellow migrants, bandits or government officials, according to Fusion. Sometimes sex is used as a form of payment, when women and girls don’t have money to pay bribes.

The assaults are so common that many women and girls take contraceptives beforehand as preventative measures.

So it’s not only coyotes doing the raping; fellow-migrants are involved as well.

The media and liberals are hyper-concerned with campus rapes whose high numbers are largely a myth. But they seem to show little concern for these women—as long as its Trump bringing it up.

As for drugs, there’s this, from a 2006 House Committee on Homeland Security report:

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that the Mexican drug syndicates operating today along our Nation’s Southwest border are far more sophisticated and dangerous than any of the other organized criminal groups in America’s law enforcement history. Indeed, these powerful drug cartels, and the human smuggling networks and gangs they leverage, have immense control over the routes into the United States and continue to pose formidable challenges to our efforts to secure the Southwest border. ”¦ The cartels operate along the border with military grade weapons, technology and intelligence and their own respective paramilitary enforcers. ”¦ This new breed of cartel is not only more violent, powerful and well financed, it is also deeply engaged in intelligence collection on both sides of the border.

You can read more general statistics on illegal immigrants and crime here. And, as Ann Coulter’s recent book indicates, the problem is hardly limited to illegal immigrants; many legal immigrants are a problem, too, because the type of screening process that used to be in place no longer is.

Coulter points out that we have “a media determined to cover up immigrants’ crimes.” The reaction to Donald Trump is an indication of that, but it’s not just the media. It’s businesses who are boycotting him, because anyone who says the sorts of things Trump has said—which, although hyperbolic, are based on a core of truth, a truth that cannot be told—must be shunned. American now no longer cares what’s actually happening to the country, as long as we talk about it in a politically correct manner.

The narrative—it’s everything. And you wonder why politicians get so mealy-mouthed?

The Grand Inquisitor redux

The New Neo Posted on by

Several times before I’ve posted excerpts from Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” part of the book The Brothers Karamazov. Unfortunately, the passages seem to always bear repeating, now more than ever.

So here it is again, a slightly longer quote. The Grand Inquisitor is here addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Alhough the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is free will. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it.

I’ll probably be referring back to this in the near-future. I’ve divided it into paragraphs that are not there in the original, the better to clarify what’s being said:

Command that these stones be made bread–and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone– was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee…

Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…

…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!

The Brothers Karamazov first appeared in 1880, and Dostoevsky died just a few months later. That sounds like a long time ago, but it’s really not that long in the scheme of things (for example, three of my four grandparents were born before then).

I first encountered “The Grand Inquisitor” in the 60s, when we read it in high school. I didn’t fully understand it at the time (not that I fully understand it even now), but it gripped me with a memorable power, and I understood it well enough to be frightened by it, to get the gist of it, and to consider it important.

A lot of years have passed since then, and it only seems more important.

The ugly truth is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that most of us don’t floss.

I happen to be one of the world’s champion flossers. Perhaps that’s because I have a pretty complex dental situation. I have two congenitally missing teeth—a canine and a bicuspid—as well as a root canal that failed, and have had various sorts of reconstructions since I was in my early teens. That includes a veritable treasure trove of dental techniques: various crowns, implants, some sort of veneer (I forget what it’s called), a cantilevered bridge, all replacing an older removable bridge.

You name it, I’ve got it. If I don’t take good care of my teeth I’m in trouble.

I have actually received compliments from dental hygienists on my flossing. So there.

Compare and contrast: coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails

The New Neo Posted on by

Glancing at today’s memeorandum page, I noticed two stories towards the top that deal with Hillary Clinton’s emails, one right under the other.

The first is from Britain’s Daily Mail, and this is what you see on the memeorandum page:

Daily Mail:
Email bombshells from Hillary’s secret account show she didn’t know when cabinet meetings were held, was dumbfounded by a fax machine and emailed aides to fetch her iced tea ”” State Department published a massive tranche of Hillary Clinton’s emails Tuesday night from her days as secretary of state…

The second is from the NY Times, and it goes like this:

New York Times
New trove of Hillary Clinton’s emails highlights workaday tasks at the State Department…

Bombshells versus big yawn.

[ADDENDUM: More on the emails here.]

More on forgiveness: the trial of Oskar Groening

The New Neo Posted on by

In line with our recent discussions on forgiveness, what it means and how and when it should be given, I came across this story today:

A former SS officer known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” and a woman who survived the Nazi death camp delivered wrenching testimony in a German courtroom Wednesday as his historic trial neared a verdict.

German national Oskar Groening, 94, stands accused of 300,000 counts of “accessory to murder” in the cases of deported Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers between May and July 1944…

Groening served as a bookkeeper, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed, collecting cash in different currencies from across Europe and shipping it back to his Nazi bosses in Berlin.

So that’s what Groening did. As for how much guilt he thinks he bears, this is what he said at his trial [emphasis mine]:

[Groening] has acknowledged “moral guilt” but denied any legal culpability since the trial in the northern city of Lueneburg near Hamburg opened in April.

In a statement to the court read out by one of his attorneys Wednesday, Groening expressed his “humility and guilt before the survivors and victims’ families”.

He also stressed that he bore “shared guilt for the Holocaust, although my part was small”. But he “expressly” stopped short of asking for “forgiveness for my guilt”.

“In view of the scale of the crimes committed in Auschwitz and in other places, I do not believe I am entitled to make such a request,” he said. “I can only ask my Lord God for forgiveness.”

So (to refer back to yesterday’s post, in which I discuss three Jewish terms for “forgiveness” that describe three different types of forgiveness), Groening is asking only for kapparah, which is forgiveness from God. He minimizes his part in the Holocaust by saying it was “small,” but from the description in the article it hardly sounds small at all.

Why is he reluctant to ask for forgiveness from survivors such as Irene Weiss, a former Auschwitz inmate who testified against him at his trial? He says that despite his small role, the magnitude of the crimes was so great that he does not feel “entitled” to ask for forgiveness (I assume in that context he means a form of mekhilah or of selikhah) from them. He is implying that some crimes are too great to be forgiven.

It seems that Irene Weiss agrees:

Showing two photographs of her family as they arrived at Auschwitz that were recovered 25 years after the Holocaust, Weiss said her mother, three younger siblings, and older brother were all murdered soon after in the gas chambers.

Her father was forced to work as a Sonderkommando, removing corpses from the gas chambers and cremating them, until the SS shot him.

Weiss said she was unable to forgive Groening.

“He has said that he does not consider himself a perpetrator but merely a small cog in the machine,” she said.

“But if he were sitting here today wearing his SS uniform, I would tremble and all the horror that I experienced as a 13-year-old would return to me.

“Any person who wore that uniform in that place represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink, regardless of what function they performed.”

By not asking her forgiveness, Groening is emphasizing his awareness of the magnitude of the harm done (as opposed to what he considers his small role), and refusing to put any pressure on her to forgive him. Would some Christians say she should do so anyway? To me, that seems wrong—but then again, as I’ve said before, I’m not a Christian.

Would she receive some psychological relief from forgiving him? Perhaps, but not necessarily, and at what price? I’m not sure it would be possible, or even desirable, for most people who had gone through something like Weiss endured to forgive the perpetrators of the crimes. She lives with an almost unimaginable history, and perhaps the best thing she can do for herself is exactly what she’s doing now: to bear witness in a court of law.

[NOTE: The state of unawareness that Groening describes himself as having had is extraordinary. Either he is lying, misremembering, or is a master of protective denial. Perhaps all three:

In Wednesday’s statement, Groening said he had known at the time about the “mass murder” at Auschwitz but was unaware until his trial about the horror endured by the victims while they were still alive.

“For example I had no idea about the terrible conditions during the deportations — that shocked me,” he said.

“It also became clear to me how much Auschwitz and the Holocaust influenced the lives of the witnesses I heard here. They have obviously suffered their whole lives from their experiences in Auschwitz and the loss of so many loved ones.”

I’ll accept that he may not have known directly about the conditions during the deportations. Maybe he also didn’t know the extent of the torments perpetrated on those who weren’t gassed immediately at the camps. But under what conditions did he think people were deported? In first-class railway carriages? Or didn’t he think about it at all? And what effect did he think having one’s whole family murdered would have on a person? Did he expect them to just shrug and go on?]