The leaders of Iran…

The New Neo Posted on by

…have spouted the liberal party line in their reply to the GOP senators’ letter, according to John Hinderaker:

Again, note the liberal slant. The reference to “climate change deniers” is significant: Iran, like Russia, which finances the anti-fracking movement in the U.S., wants to shut down America’s oil production so that we will be weaker in foreign affairs, and Iran’s oil”“Iran is fourth in the world in oil production”“will be more valuable…

…Got that? “Class interests and the influence of money and lobby groups” are behind the Cotton letter! I’ve never noticed that the mullahs were Marxists, but they are willing to take up any cudgel that comes to hand. It is interesting that the mullahs believed their most effective counterattack against Republican senators was to adopt talking points that come, generally, from the American left”“in particular, from Democrats.

Ah, but the leaders of the Iranian regime that began in 1979 had made common cause with the left from the start. Then they kicked the left to the curb. The left thought it could control the mullahs and their minions, but it turned out the mullahs had the last laugh.

A little history:

While the [leftist] guerrilla movement [in Iranian during the 1970s] did not lead the revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi regime, four guerrilla organizations ”” the Feda’i, the pro-Tudeh Feda’i Munsh’eb, the Islamic Mujahedin and the Marxist Mujahedin ”” are said to have “delivered the regime its coup de grace,” in the street fighting of February 9-11 1979…

Following the Iranian Revolution most of the groups were successfully suppressed by the Islamic Republic.

After Khomeini came to power, he cracked down because the left’s usefulness to him had expired:

At the same time [1980], erstwhile revolutionary allies of Khomeini ”“ the Islamist modernist guerrilla group People’s Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK) ”“ were being suppressed by Khomeini’s revolutionary organizations. Khomeini attacked the MEK as monafeqin (hypocrites) and kafer (unbelievers). Hezbollahi people attacked meeting places, bookstores, newsstands of Mujahideen and other leftists driving them underground. Universities were closed to purge them of opponents of theocratic rule as a part of the “Cultural Revolution”, and 20,000 teachers and nearly 8,000 military officers deemed too westernized were dismissed.

When leaders of the National Front called for a demonstration in June 1981 in favor of Banisadr [the leftist president of Iran], Khomeini threatened its leaders with the death penalty for apostasy “if they did not repent.” Leaders of the Freedom Movement of Iran were compelled to make and publicly broadcast apologies for supporting the Front’s appeal. Those attending the rally were menaced by Hezbollahi and Revolutionary Guards and intimidated into silence.

The MEK retaliated with a campaign of terror against the IRP. On the June 28, 1981, a bombing of the office of the IRP killed around 70 high-ranking officials, cabinet members and members of parliament, including Mohammad Beheshti, the secretary-general of the party and head of the Islamic Republic’s judicial system. The government responded with thousands of arrests and hundreds of executions. Despite these and other assassinations the hoped-for mass uprising and armed struggle against the Khomeiniists was crushed.

That was pretty much the end of the left—or at least of its overt power—in Iran. But it doesn’t mean the current leadership is the least bit reluctant to use leftist talking points in order to woo the American left into appeasing and enabling them as Obama has done.

Two policemen shot in Ferguson

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Two policemen were shot by someone in a crowd in Ferguson last evening, although according to this report, the shots don’t appear to have come from the protestors, who numbered about fifty. Other reports, however, say the shooters were embedded within the group of protesters. The good news is that the wounded officers have been released from the hospital, although their injuries were reported as serious.

Eric Holder and President Obama mouthed the right words in response—or rather, I don’t think they actually “mouthed” them. Obama appears to have dealt with the incident in a tweet, whereas Holder released a written statement.

The shooting has come after concessions that would ordinarily be thought to damp down the violence rather than fan it, the latest being the resignation of the police chief. But there are many people who have an interest in promoting more turmoil. At some point we may learn who those particular shooters were, since there were witnesses and some suspects may have already been taken into custody.

In the Brown killing and subsequent investigation of Officer Wilson, the local prosecutors could not get a conviction of Wilson because it became clear that the evidence not only didn’t support it but actually exonerated him. But Holder had used the pretext of the Brown killing to launch a civil rights investigation anyway, with the idea that it would open up the entire Ferguson justice system to DOJ scrutiny, and that racism would indeed be found. I’ve written about that process here, and although I could write a book about it, and about the often-spurious social science principle of “disparate impact,” I’ll just say that in the report the DOJ used research on disparate impact* to justify the charge of rampant racism, research that doesn’t hold up even as research, or in a court of law for the most part, either. But by issuing a report, Holder and the DOJ don’t have to subject their research to the usual standards or to peer review, nor do they have to convince a court, they merely have to convince the press (which is already convinced) and the public (which for the most part lacks the skills and special training to evaluate the math or the science in the report).

That is not to say that some members of the Ferguson police force are not racist (we don’t know one way or the other), or that it wouldn’t be a good thing if there were more black police officers in Ferguson, a city that is about 2/3 black but has a police force that is largely white. Such a large imbalance is an obvious recipe for trouble. Months ago I read several articles attempting to explain the reason for it in Ferguson, and although I can’t find them now (and am in a hurry, so I can’t look further at the moment), I seem to recall the reasons given were that the demographics of the city had changed rather rapidly from white to black, and the police force had not caught up, hampered in part by the fact that there had not been many black applicants. My guess is that one reason for the lack of black applicants is the perception of the police force as white and therefore the “other.” That would tend to reinforce and perpetuate the whiteness of the force, whether the higher-ups intended it or not.

When Holder issued his report on the police force, he held a lengthy press conference. He had a great deal to say. Here’s one short clip:

Here’s another brief clip from an interview where Holder agreed that, if necessary, he would “dismantle” the Ferguson police force:

This “dismantling” statement received a wide press at the time, as did the report itself, with headlines that indicated rampant and shocking racism had been found in the entire Ferguson police force. Holder is not responsible for the shooting—the shooters are—but he did nothing to calm things down and used rhetoric, indicating global racism by the Ferguson PD, that could only have fanned the flames rather than calming them.

[* NOTE: Here’s a quick and nontechnical summary of the way disparate impact reasoning works.]

Magda Goebbels, heart of darkness [Part II]

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[This is the second of two parts. Part I can be found here.

This is a two-part series from the early days of my blog, January of 2006. I came across the posts by accident the other day and decided to re-post them. If you want to take a look at the comments to the earlier posts, some of which are quite interesting, see this and this. Because the posts and their comments were imported from my old Blogger blog, the comments somehow got reversed (as did all the comments from all my older posts imported from the original blog). If you want to read them in chronological order you have to go to the bottom and then scroll up.]

Josef Goebbels was an extraordinarily intelligent and even learned man who had earned a doctorate in literature and philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. Here is a description of Josef from Meissner’s biography of Magda:

Goebbels was one of those responsible for the gruesome final solution….His guilt is all the greater in that he did not himself accept the doctrines of anti-Semitism. Even during the war he would read to his family and friends from Naumann’s book In Borrowed Plumes, which he almost knew by heart. He openly admitted that he owed much to the encouragement and stimulation of Jewish literature and science. Nevertheless, a few years later he allowed his own writings in praise of Jewish authors to be burnt in public.

Everything I have ever read about Goebbels agrees about his profound and complete cynicism, his utter lack of belief in anything except the drive for power. He is quoted as having said, towards the end of his life, “We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.” We can only conclude that Goebbels didn’t care all that much which one of the two it happened to be; it was the adjective “greatest” he was aiming for.

Goebbels was able to be charming when he wanted to. He charmed Magda long enough to marry her, and for some time afterwards. Magda was not the only one susceptible to his charms; he was an unrestrained womanizer, and conducted a string of affairs during their marriage. In fact, even before they were married, he had extracted Magda’s permission to stray. It’s a mark of how spellbound she was that she agreed to the deal he offered:

…he should have the right to indulge in extra-marital affairs, undertaking at the same time to love no one but her, always to return to his beloved wife and frankly admit to his misdemeanors. In his cunning way Joseph succeeded in convincing her that such behavior was necessary for a man of his virility now and again, and could not in any way impair his close relationship with his wife.

Nevertheless—quite unsurprisingly—it did impair that relationship, especially as time passed, and as he had some actual love affairs in addition to his more casual liasons. Magda slowly came to realize the depth of the horrors (not just the infidelity) of the man she had married and the regime she had supported—that is, if we are to believe biographer Meissner’s chief informant, Magda’s best friend from early adulthood till the day she died, Ello Quandt.

Ello claims that Magda had confided that Goebbels was telling her details of many horrific and gruesome acts, both personal and state. The suspicion is that Magda was referring to having heard some of the specifics of the Holocaust. By the time the war was drawing to a close, she clearly knew that Germany had been defeated.

Ello quotes her as making the following extraordinary statements as time was running out on the Reich. The two are discussing the fact that the Russians will be coming soon; Magda has just stated that she and Goebbels intend to commit suicide and to kill their six children rather than to have them fall into Russian hands:

We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge…we can’t let them think we are cowards. Everybody else has the right to live. We haven’t got this right—we have forfeited it.

Ello protests, saying that Magda herself has been guilty of nothing. Magda’s reply:

I make myself responsible. I belonged. I believed in Hitler and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels…Suppose I remain alive, I should immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph. If I tell the truth I must reveal what sort of man he was—must describe all that happened behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in disgust…

It would be equally impossible to do the opposite—that is to defend what he has done, to justify him to his enemies, to speak up for him out of true conviction…That would go against my conscience. So you see, Ello, it would be quite impossible for me to go on living.

When asked about the reason the children had to die, too, Magda is reported to have answered:

We will take them with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced. His children would hear that said daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them….You know how I told you at the time quite frankly what the Fuhrer said in the Cafe Anast in Munich when he saw the little Jewish boy, you remember? That he would like to squash him flat like a a bug on the wall…I couldn’t believe it and thought it was just provocative talk. But he really did it later. It was all so unspeakably gruesome…

There is much evidence that the Goebbels children could have been saved and sent to a safe place. And, in fact, Magda was the only Nazi wife (other than the newlywed Eva Braun) to die in the bunker with her husband, and the Goebbels children were the only children so murdered by their parents. There is very little question that this was a choice of Magda’s, an act of monstrosity that seems to have come, strangely enough, at least partly from her sense of guilt.

It also appears to have stemmed from her little-known but lifelong faith in—of all things—Buddhism. This faith had been introduced to her during World War I by her biological father. She was a firm believer in reincarnation, and was convinced that her children, if killed while still innocent and pure, would go on to better lives.

Despite having read so much about Magda, I still can’t say that I understand her, although I think I can see how she ended up—step by step—taking a twisted and terrible road from innocent convent student to Nazi to loving mother to murderer. That journey led into her very own heart of darkness. The fact that she fell under the influence of another does not absolve her of guilt–and it appears that, in the end, she herself understood that.

Magda was apparently unable to distinguish her children’s fate from her own, or to psychologically separate from them enough to give them a chance to live. Her own pathology, at least prior to meeting Goebbels, was of a mild variety. But her blankness and weakness made her fatally susceptible to his much greater pathology, and strangely unable to judge the cause he served. In the end, even her Buddhist religious beliefs only served to lead her down the nightmarish path to this horrific act.

It can be difficult, from the perspective of years, to understand the draw of men such as Goebbels and Hitler. To us, they seem mad; their speeches so much barking and raving. But for too many Germans they wove a spell which didn’t seem diabolical at the time, although it undoubtedly was, and should have been clearly seen as such.

In a way, what happened to Magda happened to the German nation as a whole. World War II and the Third Reich are subjects of endless fascination and commentary, but we are far from understanding them. Perhaps the most profound and appropriate thing we can say, in the words of Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is this: The horror! The horror!

I guess Hillary’s not all that likeable after all

The New Neo Posted on by

I confess that I am puzzled.

I had thought that the press would stand by Hillary Clinton in the same way they’ve stood by Obama through thick and then. There is no question in my mind that Obama has committed acts far worse than Hillary’s, has covered up even more, and has been just as egregious in his lies. And yet he’s still protected by the press. I don’t think Obama has ever been subjected to questions even remotely as difficult as the ones Hillary faced (and answered poorly) yesterday, although the press could have grilled him that way any time he appeared before them.

They chose not to do that, but they chose to ask some real question of Hillary Clinton. Why the differential treatment?

As soon as the email story broke I had noticed that the NY Times was leading the attack (see also this). Originally I thought they wanted to get it over with in a perfunctory way at the outset and let her candidacy continue, or that this was being done at the direction of Obama who wanted another candidate for various reasons. But now I’ve come to think that the first reason isn’t operative (at least, not any more); and that although the second may be true, that’s not all that’s operating.

This thing has gotten bigger than I had thought it would, in part because Clinton has handled it poorly. It may be that that’s why the MSM is piling on; they thought she’d be better at this sort of thing than she is, and they’re panicking that her performance means she will be a bad candidate come 2016. Or perhaps they know of other scandals, and they want her out before the revelations multiply (and end up reflecting poorly on their favorite, Obama, or on liberalism itself?). If they can’t put out this fire they may want to fan the flames so the burning happens more quickly and a new and more viable candidate is chosen, and they can get credit for “objectivity” (for hurting one of their own) into the bargain.

What’s more, it’s becoming clearer to me that they don’t like Hillary. That never meant a whole lot to me because I had no special antipathy to her; I don’t like most politicians, and it’s the exceptions whom I like. I never particularly liked the famously likeable Bill, her husband, and Obama’s likeability is a complete mystery to me because early in the game I saw him as a cold, destructive, narcissistic, ruthless, lying, leftist opportunist.

But Obama—whose business it is to know these things—always knew that Hillary had some problems in the “likeability” arena. Remember this?:

Who’s the more likeable figure in that exchange? I suppose you could answer “neither,” but I know who I’d choose, by a hair. It’s one of those clenched-teeth exchanges in which humor masks testiness; there is clearly no love lost between these two, and it’s astounding that they ever worked together.

In early 2009 Bernard Goldberg wrote a book about Obama and the press entitled A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. That is very descriptive, and although there have been a few tiny bumps in the road (the course of true love never did run completely smooth) that love affair has continued and has benefited Obama mightily. Without it, I don’t think he would have won in 2008, and I am virtually certain he would not have won in 2012.

I don’t think that Obama’s race is the reason for the love affair, although of course it’s part of it: the desire to elect, and then not to criticize, the first black president lest one be accused of racism oneself. And they think that Obama is ideologically one of them, of course. But I think there’s also something else going on, something about Obama himself—his supposed intelligence, coolness, suavity; also a bandwagon effect, and maybe even a fear of what he could do to those who cross him. Hillary doesn’t have that je ne sais quoi, although she has the advantage of being a woman and therefore a member of a favored group whose “time has come” to be president.

It’s not enough—I guess she’s not “likeable enough.” In addition there is some other impediment, a something-else of which I’m still not at all sure. That doesn’t mean I’ve ruled out the idea of her being a candidate, or even of her winning the election. But it’s no longer looking like her nomination is such an inevitability.

The racism of words

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Commenter “janetoo” describes a time when she visited her daughter’s college and attended a dance performance that included one selection featuring three Asian woman. In a conversation with her daughter and her daughter’s friends afterwards, janetoo was asked which dance had been her favorite. The following exchange ensued:

“Oh! That lovely one performed by the oriental girls!” Well, if looks could have killed, I would have been dead on the spot. They all, to a girl and boy, informed me that I was being racist and horrid and that the word I should have used was “asian.” It was a very revealing evening. My daughter had to explain to all of her friends how I had meant no harm, that I had grown up using this word without any bigoted or racist intent. She said they all forgave me (lucky me) but it was a chilling lesson in free speech or the lack there of.

Yes, using the right word for a minority group (even if the wrong word was never previously thought pejorative) seems to have become the marker of being a good (i.e. non-racist) person. A while back, “Oriental” became a banned word and “Asian” a good one. Likewise, when I was growing up, “black” was considered a bad word and “Negro” a good one. I can’t remember when the switch occurred; perhaps in the late 60s when the black power movement got going? To the best of my recollection, the word “colored” went out of favor even earlier, but it survives to this day as a sort of vestigial organ in the name of the NAACP (that’s what the “C” stands for).

It can be hard to keep up, even if one tries. But especially among the young, terminology has become an important marker to show that one’s heart is in the right place regarding racism. It’s a sign of goodwill, and violations are considered almost as bad (or maybe worse?) than overtly racist actions, which are more rare these days than in the mid-twentieth century.

Which brings us back to recent events at the University of Oklahoma. Yesterday I wrote about the constitutional issues involved in the SAE suspension and expulsions and agreed with law professor Eugene Volokh that the two ringleaders on the bus should not have been expelled from the university because their speech, however offensive, came under the heading of protected speech. That is still my point of view.

But despite the very important constitutional issue, and awareness that the remedy was almost certainly wrong (including the fact that apparently members of the group who didn’t even participate in the racist song were punished by having to scramble to find new housing), there are still reasons why the SAE speech was especially offensive, more so than the mere use of a word deemed racist.

Granted, a lot of people have been looking for evidence to implicate fraternities of something bad. Just two words—Duke* and UVA—will suffice to show that. And fraternities being fraternities, one of these days there was little doubt that an offense or offenses would be found. This doesn’t tell us much about most members of fraternities, but it certainly tells us something about some members of this one. And likewise, a lot of people have been looking for evidence of overt white racism, and this video provided that too, although the form it took was of racist speech rather than actions.

But the reason the SAE speech functioned as a particularly egregious example of racist speech is that it referred to actions, and those actions weren’t the least bit benign. The students singing the song weren’t just saying the n-word, they were also vowing to exclude black people from membership, and even worse they added, in an unambiguous reference to lynching, “you can hang them from a tree…”

Were they just joking? Were they just drunk? Perhaps, although it’s likely that actual racism was also involved. But some things aren’t funny (although again, they are constitutionally protected unless a serious threat is issued, which this obviously was not). Imagine, for example, that the song had featured some sort of pejorative word for “Jew,” and an assertion that Jews would never pledge the fraternity, and added “you can burn them in the ovens” or something of the sort. It’s an interesting hypothetical, not the least because it’s something that one can easily imagine, but also because it’s very believable that the university might not have acted with the same vigor to punish the offenders.

Interestingly enough, the SAE n-word song seems to have been of recent vintage. In fact, not all that long ago, the fraternity pledged a black member who was quite happy there:

Jonathon Davis, who is black, says his time with the fraternity from 1998 to 2002 was a positive and proud experience.

“We did embrace diversity, and somewhere along the line, everything went off the rails,” Davis told NBC Denver affiliate KUSA.

He enjoyed his time there so much, he added, that when some of his Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers encouraged him to move to Denver after school, he did.

This article adds that the racist song seems to have come into play just a couple of years ago, according to the SAE Oklahoma Board of Trustees:

The OU SAE Board of Trustees has discovered that a horrible cancer entered into the OU chapter of SAE three to four years ago and was not immediately and totally stopped. It should have been.

So something changed for the worse at that time at SAE. Could it have been a reflection of the fact that more people than not believe that race relation have generally gotten worse in the US in the last few years? Had the entire fraternity become racist? Or was the SAE song the result of a small number of individuals being racist and transgressive smart-asses, and the rest not speaking up against it?

[* NOTE: In the comments section I was reminded that at Duke the accusations were leveled against a lacrosse team.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an excellent new piece on the SAE case by law professor and free speech expert Eugene Volokh. In it, he goes into depth on some questions I asked in this post yesterday, especially question number 4: where do you draw the line? Can’t almost anything be defined as hate speech by some group or other? As Volokh writes:

Moreover, this [remedy of expulsion] surely wouldn’t be limited just to people who use epithets ”” president Boren’s statement speaks generally of the viewpoint of the speech (“racist and exclusionary”) and not just the particular words that were used. Nor would it be limited to things that really are contemptible; as we’ve all seen in past years, “hate speech” and “hostile educational environment” is a label that is cheerfully thrown around, to refer to criticisms of illegal immigration, to people deliberately trampling the Hamas flag, and much more. To quote Justice Jackson in West Va. Bd. of Education v. Barnette (1943), First Amendment law is “designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”

Indeed.]

Magda Goebbels: heart of darkness [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is Part I a two-part series from the early days of my blog, January of 2006. I came across the posts by accident the other day and decided to re-post them. If you want to take a look at the comments to the earlier posts, some of which are quite interesting, see this and this. Because the posts and their comments were imported from my old Blogger blog, the comments somehow got reversed (as did all the comments from all my older posts imported from the original blog). If you want to read them in chronological order you have to go to the bottom and then scroll up.

Part II will appear tomorrow.]

Every now and then I read about a person whose life seems so strangely compelling that I can’t help but write about it. In telling such a story, I’m trying (often vainly) to somehow make sense of the puzzle that particular life presents.

Such is the case with the astounding (and I mean that in many senses of the word) Magda Goebbels. I came across a photo of her recently while doing a quick bit of research on her abominable husband, Josef. The photo looked vaguely familiar; I’d seen it before, somewhere, but never paid much attention.

Perhaps you’ve seen it, too. It’s a family group.

A lovely young mother sits with her brood of six beautiful children, her somewhat blank and vaguely sinister-appearing husband, and a grown son standing in the back row in uniform.* The family photo conveys a sense of brittleness and sharp edges, and there is a hint of desperation in the mother’s smile. But the impeccably-dressed and well-groomed offspring resemble illustrations in a picture book of ideal children, a Dick and Jane reader come to life.

Here is the photo:

Bild 146-1978-086-03

The caption under it tells the reader that, in the final days of the defeated Reich, Magda was instrumental in poisoning all six of her small children before she and her husband committed suicide. A dreadful woman, a dreadful story.

But something about her face—as well as her fate—intrigued me. Something ambiguous and human and vulnerable, something that was not present in her husband’s barren eyes. And then, of course, there were those beautiful children, innocent pawns in a vicious and monstrous game.
–
Reading about Magda’s eventful life, I found that the truth—as it so often is—was actually stranger than any fiction. In fact, if it had been fiction, no one would have believed it.

There was nothing in Magda’s early life that presaged her end. Quite the contrary. (Most of the information in this post is taken from the Hans-Otto Meissner biography, and from this. That last link will take you to a website of the reprehensible David Irving, unfortunately. But it leads to an informative article from the Jerusalem Post that I can’t seem to find elsewhere online.)

Magda’s early life was characterized to an unusual degree by instability and change, making for a shaky and shifting identity. Her ill-matched biological parents briefly married, only to divorce. Her mother then married again, to a Jewish man named Max Friedlander, who became Magda’s stepfather, and whose openly Jewish surname she adopted. All three parents and Magda ended up moving to Belgium, where Magda lived from the ages of five to eighteen, the last eight years spent at a strict Catholic convent for her schooling, despite her Protestant mother and Jewish stepfather. By all accounts she was an extraordinarily beautiful and yet modest and intelligent girl who impressed all who met her.

The entire family, including her biological father, were expelled from Belgium at the beginning of World War I, when the country sent its German nationals away, and spent time in a refugee camp before returning to Germany. During this time, the Friedlanders became friendly with a Jewish family named Arlosoroff, and Magda later had a love affair with the son, Vitaly:

Vitaly became Victor in Germany and under the spell of Zionism emerged as Haim. He was a fiery and passionate orator — as at home with the poetry of Heine and the works of Goethe, as the socialist theories of Syrkin and Borochov. Magda sported a Magen David which he had given her and she attended meetings of Tikvat Zion. She was attracted to Arlosoroff because of his personality and sense of purpose rather than an independent commitment to Zion.

Arlosoroff emigrated to Israel in the 20s after the two had broken up, and became a well-known Zionist figure there. He was murdered mysteriously in 1933 on a Tel Aviv beach, only a few weeks after traveling back to Germany and communicating with Magda, who warned him to get out of the country. By this time, she had married and divorced a German businessman (converting to Protestantism for the purpose of the marriage), and then married Josef Goebbels, another fiery orator of a far different variety in a far different cause. Some speculate that Arlosoroff was killed at Goebbels’s behest.

How does a person go from being closely connected to, raised by, and even in love with, Jews, and wearing a Star of David around her neck; to marrying one of the architects of the Holocaust and becoming known as “The First Lady of the Third Reich?”

There is absolutely no evidence that Magda herself was an anti-Semite at any point in her life, or even an especially political person. She seems to have been drawn to political figures through a deep need to be allied with a powerful man with a cause. Any cause would do, it seems, as long as it was connected with such a man. The beliefs themselves were secondary at best.

In this latter quality, that of the ideas themselves being unimportant to her, Magda was—strangely enough—quite a bit like her final husband, Goebbels. Perhaps it’s part of what drew them together; who knows? In Magda this characteristic appeared as a sort of spacey ignorance and a need, through her own weakness, to follow a strong leader. In Goebbels, it seems to have been a purely sociopathic nihilism, compounded by enormous narcissist drives (the following is taken from the Meissner book):

As far as one could tell, Goebbels had no beliefs at all. People still living [the book was written in 1980], who were part of his immediate circle or his household, agree absolutely about this. To him all human existence was nothing but chaos. He considered himself one of the very few intellects capable of surveying it and mastering it.

In fact, it may be that Goebbels didn’t even particularly hate Jews, at least no more than he hated the entire human race. His interest was in power, self-promotion, and persuasion, and he was a rare genius at all three, willing to do literally anything to further those causes. A short and unattractive man with a crippled leg, he—like Hitler—was a mesmerizing speaker. All evidence is that, though Magda initially went to hear him on a lark, his speech had a life-transforming effect on her. Apolitical before, she joined the Nazi party. From the moment she heard Goebbels, she seemed to come under a kind of evil spell.

When I read this material, I suddenly saw her as resembling one of Charles Manson’s followers. A certain sort of weak, blank, and lost young woman of relative privilege, a searcher trying to fill a void in her life, can find herself transformed by coming under the influence of an unattractive, evil, and yet extremely powerful figure, as though a large gravitational object has trapped her in its orbit. Sadly, she can end up spiraling straight into its surface, crashing in death and destruction, and taking others with her. This, I believe, is what happened to Magda, who nevertheless still bears the responsibility for her own terrible trajectory.

[* NOTE: In the original version of the post, I had mistakenly identified Magda’s grown son, the one in uniform, as her stepson. I had meant it was Josef’s stepson. I have since learned that he was not in the original photo—he was placed there afterwards and the photo retouched.]

[ADDENDUM: Commenter “g6loq” has called to my attention this documentary about Magda Goebbels. I just watched the first part; it has some excellent footage.]

The University of Oklahoma frat song: hate speech, the university, and liberty

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Some drunken frat boys (it’s not clear how many) from the SAE chapter at the University of Oklahoma sang a very racist song while on a chartered bus and were videotaped doing it. So now the national fraternity has banned the chapter and the U. of Oklahoma has closed the house down and expelled the two student ringleaders.

The university’s president David Boren said:

To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you. You are disgraceful. You have violated all that we stand for. You should not have the privilege of calling yourselves “Sooners.” Real Sooners are not racist. Real Sooners are not bigots. Real Sooners believe in equal opportunity. Real Sooners treat all people with respect. Real Sooners love each other and take care of each other like family members…

All of us will redouble our efforts to create the strongest sense of family and community. We vow that we will be an example to the entire country of how to deal with this issue. There must be zero tolerance for racism everywhere in our nation.

Boren is also quoted as having said the following:

Would I be happy if they left voluntarily? Yes. We don’t have room for racists and bigots here…I don’t want them here. I’ll pay the bus fare to get them out. They’re not coming back.

Where to begin?

I guess I’ll start here: the song the brothers sang was racist, bigoted, and deplorable.

But then I go here, to Volokh on the law on the matter:

…[R]acist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions ”” see here for some citations. The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech, racist or otherwise…Likewise, speech doesn’t lose its constitutionally protection just because it refers to violence ”” “You can hang him from a tree,” “the capitalists will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes,” “by any means necessary” with pictures of guns, “apostates from Islam should be killed.”…

To be sure, in specific situations, such speech might fall within a First Amendment exception. One example is if it is likely to be perceived as a “true threat” of violence (e.g., saying “apostates from Islam will be killed” or “we’ll hang you from a tree” to a particular person who will likely perceive it as expressing the speaker’s intention to kill him); but that’s not the situation here, where the speech wouldn’t have been taken by any listener as a threat against him or her…

Under the First Amendment, though, the government ”” including Oklahoma University ”” generally cannot add to this [social] price, whether the offensive speech is racist, religiously bigoted, pro-revolutionary, or expressive of any other viewpoint, however repugnant it might be.

There’s much much more; I suggest you read the whole thing.

If President Boren is aware of the law at all, he probably thinks he’s gotten around it by expelling the two students for the offense of having “created a hostile learning environment for others,” which must be a way of saying it’s not for “mere speech” that they were expelled. How a song on a private bus can do that I don’t know, but if it does then any racist communication (except when talking to oneself, and even then I suppose a person might be overheard) would fit the bill as well.

I find the whole thing chilling. What’s next, thoughtcrime?

These are the questions that come to mind; I’d like to ask them of Boren and the supporters of his actions:

(1) Had it been a black fraternity singing a song hostile to whites, would/should the same remedy have been applied?

(2) Had it been a black or white fraternity singing a song hostile to Jews, Asians, or any other ethnic group, would/should the same remedy have been applied?

(3) If (as is alleged) not all the SAE fraternity members participated in the singing on the bus, why is it okay for Boren to paint them all with the same brush by closing down the entire building and make them all move out immediately, without alternate housing? And by his remarks to seemingly insinuate they all should voluntarily quit the university?

(4) If their speech is intolerable, where do you draw the line? Should any speech that even smacks of racism trigger expulsion? And again, what if the speech is against another group: whites, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, women, men, gays, straights?

My libertarian tendencies come to the fore on this one. I find the SAE song to be vile, but I find it far more chilling that people can be expelled from a state school for hate speech of any kind (other than actual incitement to violence), and that includes hate speech against groups of which I am a member. I also find it chilling that people can be punished for hate speech in which they did not even participate but to which they were merely spectators. If a person is a member of a club and on a group excursion, are they responsible for what every member of that group does? I certainly don’t think so. On the other hand, I have no problem with the national fraternity suspending the Oklahoma chapter, or even with the university suspending the chapter as well. That is their prerogative.

In closing, I’ll add that the statement of President Boren’s that chills me the most is “There must be zero tolerance for racism everywhere in our nation.” I realize that many people would hear my objection as support for racism. Nothing could be further from the truth. My objection is testament to my commitment to free speech, and my understanding that the only way to achieve “zero tolerance for racism everywhere in the nation” would be by a stifling of liberty so Draconian as to amount to tyranny. Those who would curtail liberty always do it “for your own good,” and those convinced of their own righteousness are the most ruthless of all.

If you want to watch Hillary Clinton’s press conference live…

The New Neo Posted on by

…go here. It’s supposed to occur at 2:15 PM.

I won’t be watching, for the simple reason that as usual I prefer to read excerpts or the transcript, and then watch some clips if there’s anything of special interest where I want to see a person’s demeanor.

My prediction: excuses, excuses, plus a lot of assertions about how transparent and above-board she’s been about releasing the emails. Also perhaps some “Jeb did it” accusations thrown in. But of course Jeb Bush was a mere governor, not the Secretary of State with all the special security concerns that position entails.

[UPDATE: Ace summarizes what Clinton said.

More at Politico, including the following:

Clinton said her lawyers had examined all of her emails, about 60,000 in all over four years at Foggy Bottom, and sent every government-related missive ”” about 30,000 ”” to the State Department in the hopes that all would be released to the public on the Web.

Yet in an act of defiance certain to stoke a new round of questioning, Clinton said she had no intention of turning over any of the approximately 30,000 emails she deemed “personal” for the sake of her family’s “privacy” ”“ exchanges she said included planning for daughter Chelsea’s wedding and her mother’s funeral, correspondence with her husband and yoga schedule.

When a reporter asked her if she planned to allow an independent commission to examine all of the emails on her personal she server, she responded with a flat ”“ no way.

“The server contains personal communications from my husband and me,” Clinton said of the system, which was originally set up to handle Bill Clinton’s post-presidential correspondence. “And the server will remain private.”

So, Hillary says that Hillary gets to decide.

It strikes me that, whatever the legality or illegality of her email setup, it could have been a tactical error to mix the private with the governmental if the account is subject to subpoena in the event of an investigation for wrongdoing. Taking that into consideration, if Hillary had wanted to use private email for government business, it might have been wiser of her to have set up a second private email account just for her Secretary of State business.

One big problem with using any sort of private email for public business is the fact that it can be so easily hidden from FOIA accountability (although for Hillary that was probably a feature rather than a bug). The other is, of course, lack of security.]

Obama outdoes himself

The New Neo Posted on by

Get a load of this. When asked to comment on the letter that forty-seven Republican senators sent to Iran saying that a future president could revoke any deal Obama makes, the president said:

“I think it’s somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran. It’s an unusual coalition,” Obama told the reporter.

Common cause? What is he talking about? Well, you see, the Republican letter-writers don’t want the deal to go through as is. And the Iranian hard-liners don’t want the deal to go through as is. So they have a common cause, which is thwarting Obama and the reasonable, friendly Iranians with whom he’s on the verge of agreement. Get it?

But Obama wasn’t finished:

I think what we’re going to focus on right now is actually seeing whether we can get a deal or not. And once we do — if we do — then we’ll be able to make the case to the American people, and I’m confident we’ll be able to implement it.”

Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Trust us, he is saying. Then afterwards—when it’s a fait accomplli and there’s nothing you can do about it—you’ll find out what’s in it.

Fool us once, fool us twice, fool us three times…actually, I’ve lost count.

[NOTE: More about the letter here.]

Can you always tell?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not trying to pick on Annie Lennox.

I think Lennox is great. Great voice, great entertainer, and I must say she looks sensational for her age—or any age.

But Lennox touched on a long-held pet peeve of mine when she observed this:

I go to America, where I see a lot of plastic surgery. I have no problem with plastic surgery, but the issue is, I don’t think it’s done very well because it kind of screams at you from hundreds of yards away. It tells you: Wow, that woman’s had a lot of work, or that man’s had a lot of work. I find it disturbing. If I were going to do some work, which I mean, again, I haven’t done it yet, I might. But if I did, I wouldn’t want to end up with this frozen mask, which is Botox, which is surgery. I think, the day they get it right will be the day that you can’t really tell.

There’s some screwy logic there. If you notice some people with plastic surgery, does that mean you are noticing everyone with plastic surgery? Or even the majority of them? Wouldn’t the hallmark of good plastic surgery be its undetectability? Its naturalness? Wouldn’t you walk past the person with really good plastic surgery and not think a thing except maybe how good that person looks?

The same is true of hairpieces. I always smile when someone swears he/she can always tell when a person is wearing one. Oh, really? Can’t you merely tell the ones you can tell, and wouldn’t the others just pass you by without drawing your attention?

Of course, some plastic surgery looks really awful, and there’s much more that just looks sort of awful. What percentage are they of the whole, though? I haven’t a clue, and neither has Lennox. If she’s just trying to say that she wouldn’t have plastic (or cosmetic) surgery until bad results were so rare we hardly ever see them, that makes perfect sense. But that doesn’t appear to be what she’s saying.

The Clinton emails: it’s the coverup, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

More than any previous scandal, the email controversy seems to be threatening to sink Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. But why?

One reason is that it is being driven from left rather than right. The MSM usually plays the role of Democrat defender, but although there have been some defenses mounted here and there, this scandal has been unusual in that it targeted a leading Democrat but was initially led by liberal newspapers.

That could be because Clinton had thwarted the Freedom of Information Act, which was originally a liberal cause. But I don’t buy that, and to understand why just imagine that it had been Obama instead of Hillary. Do you think for a moment that liberal newspapers wouldn’t be defending him mightily?

And I doubt that this is driven by people being “tired” of Hillary. Why such a sudden sense of fatigue? Until just a short while ago, no one seemed all that tired.

No, it’s being driven by something else, and that something is (IMHO) the Obama administration having given the word that Hillary is persona non grata, either because they have a different successor in mind (Elizabeth Warren?), or because Hillary could expose them in some way (Iran?), or simply because of old animus from 2008.

The original Benghazi incident, the one that sparked the Congressional investigation that sparked the document request that sparked the revelation that Clinton was using private rather than government email, always has been important to the right. It certainly was important to me and to readers of this blog, and extremely frustrating that it appeared to going nowhere. Now it may be bearing fruit in an odd and unexpected way, proving once again the old adage that it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.

The Hillary private email situation is just one big coverup, and a preemptive coverup at that. Clinton established the system at the very beginning of her Secretary of State post, as though she knew there’d be lots to be keep quiet about. There’s something about the scope and timing that makes the coverup intent obvious. Even long-time Clinton apologist Lanny Davis has struggled to come up with a defense. As Chris Wallace said to him towards the end of their interview: “Do you ever get tired of cleaning up Clinton messes?”

Joe Manchin’s dilemma

The New Neo Posted on by

When I saw that the title of this article was “Joe Manchin’s Dilemma,” I thought I knew what his dilemma was: whether to keep disagreeing with Obama and run the risk of following in Bob Menendez’s footsteps to some DOJ criminal charges, or shut up and play ball.

But it’s not about that at all; it’s about whether Manchin should stay in the Senate or run for governor of West Virginia. Of course (even though the article never states this), a governorship would probably get him out of the Obama line of fire, since he would no longer be voting yea or nay in the Senate on pet bills of the president, but would instead be occupied with West Virginia affairs.

At any rate, Manchin is one of the few remaining moderate Democrats, and as with almost any senator, the DOJ could probably find some sort of irregularity for which to cry “corruption!” The cost of crossing Obama appears to be getting higher in these last years of his administration.

Here are some details about the Menendez case. It’s been ongoing for about two years, and the timing of the latest news seems highly suspicious. Menendez’s strong opposition to Obama’s foreign policy is not new; it was already in clear evidence two years ago, when the DOJ started the legal proceedings that seem to be reaching a fever pitch now that Menendez has been so vociferous in criticizing Obama’s Iran policy right in the middle of the president’s efforts to reach a deal with the Iranians.

Of course, Menendez could be guilty as charged, but even the WaPo is suggesting that the case against him is weak:

To convict Menendez under relevant federal corruption laws, prosecutors would be tasked with proving that Menendez acted knowingly in return for personal gifts ”” such as flights on Melgen’s private jet and visits to his resort home in the Dominican Republic. Melgen donated $700,000 to a super PAC supporting Menendez and other Democratic senators in 2012, as Menendez was campaigning for a second full term in the Senate.

“When there’s lengthy friendship, that quid pro quo aspect dissipates,” said Michael L. Koenig, a former Justice Department prosecutor now in private practice as a white-collar criminal defender…

Was he doing things on behalf of Dr. Melgen because he was receiving campaign contributions?” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who works in the area of public corruption. “Or was he doing it because he likes Dr. Melgen, which is not criminal?”…

Complicating the matter for Menendez is that he admitted to not disclosing expensive flights taken on Melgen’s jet in 2010, writing a $58,500 check in early 2013 to reimburse the Florida doctor for the expenses.

Menendez explained the lapse as an oversight and did not seek to report the flights as gifts from a personal friend, as is allowed under Senate rules with a waiver from the body’s Ethics Committee.

Prosecutors could seek to charge Menendez for “knowingly and willfully” filing false disclosure forms, but establishing criminal intent in that case could be difficult…

Another obstacle that Menendez’s lawyers have already throw up in front of prosecutors is the Speech or Debate Clause, the constitutional provision that gives lawmakers immunity from prosecution for legislative acts.

As corruption charges go, these seem like relatively small potatoes, the sort of thing they could dig up on virtually any senator they wanted out of the way. And Menendez is definitely someone the president would dearly love out of the way. Other members of Congress can look at the Menendez case and easily put themselves in his shoes, and the message cannot be lost on them: play along with the president or you could be next.