David Frum…

The New Neo Posted on by

…gives Obama a searing history lesson.

I’ve rarely seen Frum so angry.

And Andrew Sullivan (known far and wide for his own calm rationality) is nonplussed at what he calls Frum’s hyperventilation:

No, this was quite obviously a speechwriter’s fault, or “an ignorant error,” as David concedes. And yet when you read his piece, it is brimming with outrage, spluttering, and vituperation, as if some deliberate harm had been wantonly done. No one “slaps” someone “in the face” by accident. Look: I can understand why Poles are deeply upset about this. But it was a mistake, it seems to me, an error of cultural insensitivity – in a bid to honor someone – not a deliberate act of animus, for goodness’ sake. Blowing it up into the greatest insult ever committed by an American president is bizarre.

What Sullivan fails to appreciate is the fact that a president shouldn’t just read the words of a speechwriter aloud—he should also vet them beforehand. The error was egregious and ignorant, and should have been caught. It is also in line with a whole lot of other insults Obama has flung Poland’s way, and so it is congruent with his previous behavior towards that country. Therefore it behooves Obama to issue an apology himself rather than through surrogates.

And even that probably won’t repair the rift with the Poles, because it started long before this remark. First there was Obama’s snubbing the Sept. 1st ceremonies at Gdansk in 2009, marking the 70th anniversary of the German invasion. Then there was the scrapping of the missile shield negotiated by his predecessor, George Bush. Obama also managed to not let the funeral of the Polish president and nearly a hundred other Polish officials who died in a plane crash in 2010 interrupt his golf game (to be fair, he couldn’t get to the funeral because of the Icelandic volcano eruption; but he also failed to visit the Polish embassy in DC to offer his condolences). Obama’s actions towards Poland have been so dreadful prior to his “Polish death camp” statement that Lech Walesa decided to snub him a year ago, saying, “I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me.”

Would that Obama’s “Polish death camp” statement were a “deliberate act of animus.” At least then it would show some knowledge of history on Obama’s part, and some attention to little details like the words in his own speeches.

[ADDENDUM: I’m beginning to think that, even if the original insult wasn’t intentional, Obama has a real yen to insult Poland once more. From Allahpundit:

I said last night that, at the least, Tusk and foreign minister Radek Sikorski could expect groveling phone calls from Obama. But I was wrong: To my amazement, Jay Carney told the White House press corps this afternoon that he’s not aware of any plans by Obama to phone either. Can that possibly be true? Calling them “Polish death camps” is profoundly stupid but can be explained away as an accidental lapse in thought. Refusing to call and apologize for the error is much more of a deliberate slight. What’s the hold up, champ?

And the following is a seismic event—Michael Tomasky, who’s heretofore been just about the staunchest Obamaphile on the face of the earth, writes:

I have to say I’m in wholehearted agreement with David Frum on this one. For Obama to refer to a “Polish death camp” is just ghastly. How in the world could that happen? Some callow kid in the speechwriting office didn’t know the difference? His or her boss also didn’t know? And what of Obama? I will assume that he does know better. But he said the words.

Assuming he knew it was wrong when it was coming out of his mouth, why didn’t he just stop and say: “You know, Mr. Karski, it says here ‘Polish death camp,’ so that’s what I said, but I want to correct that. We all know that these were German camps.” That’s all. Easy peasy. He really should have just taken charge of the moment there and shown some honesty and candor…

Yes–it’s the first time he’s ever embarrassed me as president. He came kinda-sorta close when he called the Cambridge police “stupid,” but that was more of a political thing, not a sin against history. This was just shameful; a shameful thing for a president to say.

You have to be familiar with Tomasky’s usual columns to understand what a departure this is for him.

And by the way, Tomasky makes quite an error here himself. He doesn’t seem to be aware that the president was awarding the medal posthumously to Jan Karski, so had Obama followed Tomasky’s suggestions and said, “You know, Mr. Karski, it says here ‘Polish death camp,’ so that’s what I said…,” it would have been another exceedingly odd and ignorant gaffe, although not one that insulted an entire nation.]

Speaking of Obama and Jews…

The New Neo Posted on by

…(and we were, at least sort of) did you know that some of his best friends are? And that he thinks he knows more about Judaism than any past president, because he read about it?

By the way, at the ceremony where Obama honored Jan Karski and made his controversial error, he also gave the same award—the Presidential Medal of Freedom—to many others, including Toni Morrison, John Glenn, Madeleine Albright, and Shimon Peres.

And to Bob Dylan, who got a lot of press coverage for wearing his shades for the occasion:

Ouch, Dylan’s looking—there’s really no other word for it—old. He’s only 71, but I guess he’s packed a lot of living into those years, and I suppose he never was what you’d call robust.

But why the Medal of Freedom? I dunno. Dylan did write a song called “Chimes of Freedom” back in 1964, but that doesn’t seem quite enough.

The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind…

However, a somewhat lesser-known effort of Dylan’s ties into the Jewish and the political, which after all is the theme of this post. Are you familiar with the lyrics of Dylan’s 1983 “Neighborhood Bully,” which seems to be on the topic of Israel? Here it is:

Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He’s the neighborhood bully

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He’s the neighborhood bully

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He’s wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He’s always on trial for just being born
He’s the neighborhood bully

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He’s the neighborhood bully

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
He’s the neighborhood bully

He got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side
He’s the neighborhood bully

Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
He’s the neighborhood bully

Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, under no one’s command
He’s the neighborhood bully

Now his holiest books have been trampled upon
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health
He’s the neighborhood bully

What’s anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin’, they say. He just likes to cause war
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed
He’s the neighborhood bully

What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully

[ADDENDUM: As for why the sunglasses, so far Dylan has been mum. Ann Althouse and her husband speculate here that it’s because Dylan felt emotional and doesn’t like scrutiny.

But being the intrepid researcher and truth-seeker that I am, I offer Dylan’s own words from this 1978 interview with Playboy that might shed some light (ahem) on the situation:

PLAYBOY: Would you say you still have a rebellious, or punk, quality toward the rest of the world?

DYLAN: Punk quality?

PLAYBOY: Well, you’re still wearing dark sunglasses, right?

DYLAN: Yeah.

PLAYBOY: Is that so people won’t see your eyes?

DYLAN: Actually, it’s just habit-forming after a while, I still do wear dark sunglasses. There is no profound reason for it, I guess. Some kind of insecurity, I don’t know: I like dark sunglasses. Have I had these on through every interview session?

PLAYBOY: Yes. We haven’t seen your eyes yet.

DYLAN: Well, Monday for sure. [The day that PLAYBOY photos were to be taken for the opening page]

And you can order your Dylan sunglasses from Sears. Who knew?]

Those Polish death camps

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you probably know that Obama has committed another huge boo-boo: he has managed to outrage the Poles by referring to a Nazi death camp in Poland as a “Polish death camp.”

The occasion was some scripted remarks during a ceremony posthumously honoring Jan Karski, a Pole who led at least nine lives (all of them heroic) during and after World War II: as a Polish cavalry officer, escaped prisoner of war, resistance member, survivor of torture, observer of the Warsaw Ghetto in its death throes, visitor (in disguise) to a concentration camp, reporter on the Holocaust to London and Washington DC, beloved professor at Georgetown, and American citizen.

It is especially ironic that Obama made his error while honoring Karski, because Karski spent a fair amount of energy combating the notion that Poles all cooperated with the Germans in killing the Jews. And he was hardly the only one who tried to save the Jews of Poland, as the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial acknowledges in its Righteous Among the Nations awards: Poland has the highest number of recipients.

I’ve written before about the Poles who saved Jews during WWII, here and here. Here are a few relevant excerpts:

…The camps in Germany were labor camps. Although conditions in labor camps were dreadful, and death was a common and expected occurrence in them, the main purpose of these camps was not to exterminate directly, but rather to harshly extract the full measure of hard labor out of the inmates with the least cost. If they happened to die from the conditions there, then so be it—and die they did, in droves. The death camps, however, existed solely for the purpose of efficiently killing virtually all their inmates shortly after arrival.

A related distinction is also not ordinarily understood: none of the death camps was located in Germany. Rather, all six were in Poland. Why was this? Poland had a large Jewish population, and therefore the camps were located near the source and less transport would be needed. But it seems that the Nazi leadership may also have wanted to protect the German population from exact and precise knowledge of what was happening, by placing the death camps far away…

Anyone who knows Holocaust history knows that Poland was its center. The Polish people have often been condemned for their participation in the death of their Jews–but…it turns out that the situation was far more complex than that. Not only were there also a great many rescuers in Poland…but the Poles had a great deal more to lose than most from saving Jews. Not to minimize the accomplishments of the Danes or the Bulgarians, but to be a hero in Poland was a lot more meaningful than to be one in Denmark or Bulgaria–or even, as it turns out, in Germany.

Why? Because Poland was the only Nazi-occupied country in which helping Jews would officially get you the death penalty. Here are the horrific facts (read them and ask yourself if you would have been as brave as the many Poles who did shelter and save Jews):

Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.

…Poland itself has a mixed history regarding the Jews (as does Germany, by the way). Why were so many there in the first place? Because Poland was originally one of the most welcoming and tolerant nations in Europe for the Jews. The history of Poland’s long and relatively intimate relationship with its Jewish population includes a golden age in which the Jewish community there flourished.

The varied motivations [of Polish rescuers of Jews during WWII] are delineated in a remarkable book entitled When Light Pierced the Darkness, by Nechama Tec. Some did it for money, some out of political or religious conviction, and some for personal reasons related to the good relations they had previously enjoyed with their Jewish neighbors and friends.

When I write that these people risked their lives, I don’t think the phrase conveys exactly what that meant. But I’ll add an anecdote that might illustrate the situation more graphically (unfortunately, I can’t find a link to it, nor can I recall the source). When the Nazis entered a Polish village and caught someone who had sheltered or aided Jews, they called a meeting of the town. It was compulsory to attend, and villagers were treated to a spectacle guaranteed to discourage further such assistance: a public execution of the offender and his or her family and relatives, including the children.

Effective, no? I would challenge all of you to ask yourselves how brave and noble you would have been in the face of such a threat; I’m by no means absolutely certain of my own answer.

And yet, even under such circumstances, quite a few Poles considered it their duty to help the Jews who had been part of the fabric of their lives.

One of them, of course, was Jan Karski, who worked on a larger scale than most.

It is often asked why the US and other Allies didn’t do more to hamper the Nazi effort to kill the Jews. There have been books written on just that question, and I certainly do not have the definitive answer. But in researching Karski, I came across a 1995 interview where he attempted to explain why bombing the train tracks that led to the death camps would not have been practical:

…[To] bomb a narrow railroad, the planes would have to fly low, they would have many losses, the precision of the bombs is not good,for narrow railroads, would have to drop ten times as many bombs. And where will the bombs fall? They will fall on Polish peasants. And what will be the reaction of the Poles to the bombing without any reason?” To destroy from the air railroads would be very costly. And the Germans having slave labor to repair the railroads, they can do it in no time.

Here is Karski’s explanation for why he tried to save the Jews. It shows, among other things, the tremendous humility of this exceptionally heroic man:

Religious people, for many of them, they did see what was happening. They felt simply human. I am human. In my case, not so much, simply I was in the underground. The authorities told me — two Jews learned about your trip and want you to carry a message for them. I couldn’t say I didn’t want to do it. Now, at my old age, I can say that Jews did not have good luck. They did not choose me, I had my own separate mission. For their mission, they needed someone bigger or stronger. I was unknown, a nobody. I couldn’t talk on an equal basis. My job was to report. Yes, it was very important. They wouldn’t interrupt. And I couldn’t tell them to interrupt me. The Jews did not have much luck. I was too little for the enormity of what I brought to the West.

So, to get back to Obama (yes, let’s by all means do that): what’s up with all these errors in Obama’s scripted remarks? It seems that his speechwriters know almost nothing of history, and since Obama doesn’t seem to know a whole lot more, nobody makes the corrections (that is, if we assume the errors are actually mistakes rather than strategic decisions). I wrote about this phenomenon at some length back in July of 2008. Apparently, the problem has persisted.

And by the way, although it’s perhaps a small point, calling the death camp “Polish” was not Obama’s only error. Actually, the camp Karski visited was not technically a death camp (note the distinction I explain earlier in this post), although Karski himself initially thought it was. However, it was most likely a sorting and transit camp, as Karski later came to believe.

This is a relatively minor error which will probably offend no one—unlike Obama’s other error, which was very offensive to the Poles. But it’s another example of the sloppiness of Obama and his speechwriters. It doesn’t take much effort (really, just a cursory reading of Karski’s history), to find the facts. But they don’t seem to want to bother.

Artur Davis, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Last October I wrote a post about former Congressman Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, which ended with this sentence:

If Davis keeps paying attention, he may discover a lot more out there that’s chilling””and a large proportion of his cold shudder will be engendered by the actions of his own party.

I guess he did keep paying attention, because yesterday Davis announced that might run for Congress from a district in Virginia some day as a member of the Republican Party.

Davis explains what happened to him:

…[C]utting ties with an Alabama Democratic Party that has weakened and lost faith with more and more Alabamians every year is one thing; leaving a national party that has been the home for my political values for two decades is quite another. My personal library is still full of books on John and Robert Kennedy, and I have rarely talked about politics without trying to capture the noble things they stood for. I have also not forgotten that in my early thirties, the Democratic Party managed to engineer the last run of robust growth and expanded social mobility that we have enjoyed; and when the party was doing that work, it felt inclusive, vibrant, and open-minded.

But parties change. As I told a reporter last week, this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party (and he knows that even if he can’t say it). If you have read this blog, and taken the time to look for a theme in the thousands of words (or free opposition research) contained in it, you see the imperfect musings of a voter who describes growth as a deeper problem than exaggerated inequality; who wants to radically reform the way we educate our children; who despises identity politics and the practice of speaking for groups and not one national interest; who knows that our current course on entitlements will eventually break our solvency and cause us to break promises to our most vulnerable””that is, if we don’t start the hard work of fixing it.

On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country. You have also seen me write that faith institutions should not be compelled to violate their teachings because faith is a freedom, too. You’ve read that in my view, the law can’t continue to favor one race over another in offering hard-earned slots in colleges: America has changed, and we are now diverse enough that we don’t need to accommodate a racial spoils system. And you know from these pages that I still think the way we have gone about mending the flaws in our healthcare system is the wrong way””it goes further than we need and costs more than we can bear.

Taken together, these are hardly the enthusiasms of a Democrat circa 2012, and they wouldn’t be defensible in a Democratic primary. But they are the thoughts and values of ten years of learning, and seeing things I once thought were true fall into disarray. So, if I were to leave the sidelines, it would be as a member of the Republican Party that is fighting the drift in this country in a way that comes closest to my way of thinking: wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities.

Davis actually left the Democratic Party back in December, but he became an Independent at that time. Like Barack Obama, Davis is a graduate of Harvard Law School as well as an African-American. However, he was the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to vote against the HCR bill in 2010.

You may—in fact, you probably will—consider that Davis is still deluded about the Democratic Party 20 years ago, under Clinton. You may even think he’s wrong about at least some of the things John and Robert Kennedy stood for. But the change journey can be a long and humbling process.

Has Etan Patz’s murderer been found?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to go on record here as saying that I think this will turn out to be a false confession.

Unfortunately—because it would be a good thing if this terrible and tragic mystery of over three-decades duration were to be solved. But the phenomenon of false confessions rears its ugly head as a distinct possibility here:

(1) the confessor, Pedro Hernandez, has (according to his defense lawyer) a history of schizophrenia and bipolar disease, as well as hallucinations. Of course, that does not mean he couldn’t be the murderer, but it also fits the profile of a mentally ill false confessor.

(2) there is so little evidence in this case that the usual methods of determining the veracity of a confession—does the alleged perpetrator have facts in his/her possession that fit the crime but are not in the public domain?—will be more than ordinarily problematic to apply.

(3) Hernandez confessed to the Patz murder shortly after there was a lot of publicity about the crime in the papers.

The phenomenon of false confessions is a surprisingly common and poorly understood one. Most often, false confessions occur as a reaction to the pressures of police interrogation, but that was not the case for Hernandez, whose confession was spontaneous. Such confessions are usually prompted by any or all of the following: desire for fame, feelings of generalized guilt, confusion about reality vs. fantasy.

Most of us have trouble even imagining such a thing, but nevertheless it happens with great frequency, especially in high-profile crimes. For example, over 200 people falsely confessed to the Lindbergh kidnapping back in the 30s, an even more notorious case than that of Etan Patz. In the Lindbergh situation, at least the authorities had a lot more evidence to match to the confessions to try to eliminate the false ones. The Patz investigators have almost nothing to go on.

[NOTE: I wrote “murderer” in the post title because I am also convinced that Etan Patz was murdered, probably within a short time of his kidnapping. But I admit that there is a remote possibility that he is still alive.]

Dmitri Volkogonov, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Like yesterday’s post, this rumination was sparked by Martin Amis’ book Koba the Dread.]

Here’s a tragic quote about political change, from Dmitri Volkogonov, a man who wrote biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky:

“Perhaps the only thing I achieved in this life,” he wrote (when his life was ending), “was to break with the faith I had held for so long.”

That faith was in communism.

Volkogonov died at the age of 67. What happened to change his mind after a lifetime of toiling for the glory of the USSR? It happened in stages:

Long known in Western military circles as one of the hardest of hardliners, Volkogonov began, by the middle of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, to have serious doubts about the Soviet regime. At first, these concerned only Joseph Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of both of Volkogonov’s parents. He spent nearly twenty years compiling a revisionist (by Soviet standards) biography. He forthrightly described Stalin’s alleged crimes but remained an admirer of Vladimir Lenin and (following the Nikita Khrushchev line) believed that Stalinism was a perversion of true Leninism. (His views on Lenin changed after he went back into the archives to do his biography of Lenin. It was then that he read that Lenin too had murdered thousands of his opponents.)

Volkogonov’s wife also begged him not to publish the book and he did hold it back for a time, fearful of the consequences. Once the book was published, these consequences were not slow in coming. He was fired in 1991 from his job as director of the Institute of Military History at the Ministry of Defense of the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Once the Soviet Union’s collapse was complete, Volkogonov combined his historical work with political activity in the newly established Russian state. Following the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991, Volkogonov was appointed Defense Advisor to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. By then, he was already afflicted with the cancer that would kill him in 1995. Before he died, he contributed much to the so-called “liberal” strain of Russian thought that was condemned during the Soviet period.

Why was Volkogonov able to change when so many could not? I’m not sure, and really don’t know enough to say, but apparently the turning point involved his going back into the archives to read in great depth the letters and other private papers of Lenin and Trotsky, and finding so many smoking guns (of the rhetorical type) that he could no longer deny the nature and goals of both men.

It must have been an astounding and especially dramatic change experience. But not everyone would have reacted the way Volkogonov did. Some would have shored up and defended their previous views and life work, making excuses and rationalizing away what they had found, in order to preserve their view of the world and their own place in it.

This obituary (Volkogonov died in 1995) from the LA Times offers a bit more information. His death occurred just weeks after he finished his magnum opus Seven Leaders, which ties a great many threads together, examining “every Soviet ruler from Lenin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev–from details of their quirky obsessions to analyses of their momentous decisions.”

The English title of the book seems to actually be Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime. The following is from the Publisher’s Weekly review of the book:

Volkogonov cogently argues for a seamless connection between Lenin’s absolutism and Stalin’s merciless dictatorship. Drawing on new material, including declassified documents from state and Party archives, he reveals Lenin’s paranoia toward foreigners as well as Stalin’s pivotal role in egging on his puppet in North Korea, Kim Il-sung, to start a war with the South in 1950. Khrushchev, though he repudiated the Stalinist cult of personality, was out of touch with the masses, in Volkogonov’s estimate, while indecisive, mediocre, suave Brezhnev mistook economic and social stagnation for stability. Both Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were “political pygmies” who strived to preserve a sclerotic system. Bristling with startling revelations, this scathing panorama of seven decades of Soviet rule brims with much treachery, intrigue, reversals of fortune and personal idiosyncrasies.

As I said, I know very little about Volkogonov. In fact, I’d never heard of him until I encountered his name in Amis’ book. But I have little doubt that a goodly part of what gave Volkogonov the motivation to write this final book—and even, perhaps, the strength to live long enough to finish it—was his remorse at his own nearly-lifelong complicity in the myth of Communism, and his outrage at those who made it possible.

Revolutions betrayed

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been wading through Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a book about Soviet Russia and its crimes and betrayals. The reason I’m reading that particular book is that one of Amis’s goals in writing it was to explain how it was that so many intellectuals on the left became apologists for and dupes of a regime so (to use Reagan’s word) evil.

At some future date I plan to write a post on that subject. But right now—because Memorial Day has got me thinking about the subject of liberty—it was this paragraph of Maxim Gorky’s, reproduced by Amis in his book, that caught my attention. It was written by Gorky, who had been a supporter of the 1917 October Revolution, only two weeks later:

Lenin and Trotsky do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.

I quote this for several reasons. One is to show how smart and creative people such as Gorky are used and then betrayed by revolutions such as the Communist one (or the recent one in Egypt, which has been on my mind lately). Another is to show how early the character of the Russian Revolution was apparent; no one who was paying attention to the events of 1917 had any real excuses for thinking that its results would be any different, or any better, than what they eventually were. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but Gorky had foresight. Unfortunately for him and so very many others (twenty million? more?) his foresight came too late, and there were too few who shared it.

Gorky’s own story is a dark and terrible one indeed. But that’s not the point of this post, which is to reflect on how uncommon it is that revolutions are not betrayed, and why.

Revolutions tend to attract an alliance—usually quite temporary—of different groups with very different psychological and political makeups and motives. First there are the idealists, the ones who see human nature as infinitely malleable, and who believe their own rhetoric and that of others who would manipulate their naivete to get what they want. Then there are those on the bottom—let’s call them the proletariat, although the group has had other names in other times—who in a society such as czarist Russia had a lot to complain about, and who wanted things to get materially better for themselves. Then there are also those who love liberty, and who see the revolution as a way to further that cause. These groups are not mutually exclusive, but there’s not necessarily a great deal of overlap.

And then there are the leaders who are adept at taking power and whose rhetoric inflames and inspires the others to action. They are the most interesting of all. In the American Revolution we were fortunate enough to have leaders who cared deeply about liberty, and who had thought long and hard about the seduction of power and how to draw up institutions to resist it and the tyranny that could follow. This is rare, because such character traits are antithetical to those that ordinarily animate revolutionaries.

People who are attracted to that line of work tend to be extremists in their cause, “ends justifies the means” folk. That is, if they believe in their cause at all; some are nihilists. But my guess is that many or even most of them do believe, at least initially, but that overarching it all there’s almost always a driving personality trait: the desire for and love of power for its own sake. That is antithetical to considerations of liberty. Revolutionaries so often have as their goal liberty for me (the leaders themselves) but not for thee, and anyone who gets in the way of the glorious enterprise is fair game.

Successful revolutionary leaders must be adept at wielding power not only within their countries, against the regime they wish to overthrow, but within their own revolutionary cadres. That’s how they get to be leaders in the first place. After the success of the revolution, when they come to control the government, they continue to use those skills to fight to stay on top, and that ordinarily requires a strong dose of ruthlessness. They are generally quite up to the task. Stalin, for example, was a master at it—his solution, like that of so many others, was to kill the opposition.

Over time he killed almost all his old colleagues. But you know, there was that wonderful omelet he was making—although I think that goal became subsumed quite early to the other goal of Stalin’s, which was total control.

Yes, Stalin was just about the worst of the offenders against liberty. But those who would separate him out as qualitatively different from the others such as Lenin and Trotsky are sadly mistaken. The seeds of Stalinism were present from the very beginning, and they were inherent in the entire project, which was to go against human nature. How could that be accomplished except by brute force? Here’s Trotsky way back in December of 1917, as quoted by Amis:

In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.

He accepted and even embraced the prospect.

Here in the United States we were very, very lucky. We had leaders who rejected the “great” French Revolution and its “remarkable invention,” and therefore we were able—not perfectly, but to an extent greater than in any other revolution—to preserve liberty in its aftermath. So on this Memorial Day, as we honor the fallen in wars that had as one of their goals to preserve that liberty both at home and abroad, let us also mourn the fallen in so many revolutions betrayed.

[ADDENDUM: Some people have pointed out in the comments section here that the French Revolution came after the American one. My reply is that yes, I’m well aware that the French revolution came shortly afterward. But the French solution – to murder the opposition, and to establish a Reign of Terror – was always present as an alternative, and was actually quite an obvious one, even without the French Revolution having happened. It was the way it had been done since time immemorial, really. The Founding Fathers in the US rejected not the guillotine itself, but something like it. A rope or firing squad or ax would have done just as well; the guillotine was only used by the French because it was thought to be more humane, so it’s not the instrument I’m talking about, it’s the idea of killing off the opposition without legal niceties being involved. But I admit I should have phrased it more clearly in the original post.]

A song for Memorial Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve posted this song before, but I think it bears repeating, especially on Memorial Day.

It’s Tim McGraw’s extraordinarily moving song “If You’re Reading This:”

If you’re readin’ this
My momma’s sittin’ there
Looks like I only got a one way ticket over here.
I sure wish I could give you one more kiss
War was just a game we played when we were kids
Well I’m layin’ down my gun
I’m hanging up my boots
I’m up here with God and we’re both watchin’ over you

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
Is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you’re readin’ this I’m already home.

If you’re readin’ this
Half way around the world
I won’t be there to see the birth of our little girl
I hope she looks like you
I hope she fights like me
And stands up for the innocent and the weak
I’m layin’ down my gun,
I’m hanging up my boots
Tell dad I don’t regret that I followed in his shoes

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
is where my momma always prayed that it would go
If you’re readin’ this, I’m already hoooommmmmeeee

If you’re readin’ this,
There’s gonna come a day
You move on and find someone else and that’s okay
Just remember this
I’m in a better place
Soldiers live in peace and angels sing amazing grace

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul is where my momma always prayed that it would go
If you’re readin’ this
If you’re readin’ this
I’m already home

Obama & Sons

The New Neo Posted on by

That is, Daughters. Obama’s slip of the tongue—saying “my sons” when he has daughters—seems very odd indeed.

Does he have sons we don’t know about? Or perhaps he always wanted sons, and this is in the nature of a Freudian slip?

Or is the more pedestrian explanation the fact that the error isn’t quite as bad as it looks, because the substitution isn’t of “sons” for “daughters,” but of “my” for “your.” The original line was this:

I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my daughters to have the same opportunities as your sons.

Obama said “my sons” instead, getting stuck in an echo of the phrase “my daughters” and making it symmetrical (“my daughters/my sons”) rather than oppositional (“my daughters/your sons”).

If anything, I think the slip is more a symptom of his increasing tension as a candidate than anything else. So I cut Obama some slack here—although something tells me I’m going to get a lot of disagreement on this one.