New “change” post

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s official: my next “change” post will appear here, either late tonight or by about noon tomorrow.

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Warning: it’s long. I may have undergone a lot of changes, but I can’t seem to change that aspect of myself.

Whenever I’m writing one of these things, I feel a bit like a boa constrictor who’s swallowed a rather large and unwieldy elephant (or donkey). It seems all but indigestible; impossible to assimilate. But then it’s done and I feel so much better, although I can’t really evaluate the worth of the project. I can only place it up here and hope for the best.

But one thing kept striking me again and again as I struggled with this particular portion of the story. It wasn’t easy to look back and admit my own previous (pre-9/11) lack of interest in things that were so important, my tendency to skim the surface of the events of our time, and my seemingly blind trust in just a few media sources. My interests lay elsewhere, as they do for so many of us.

And that’s probably not such a bad thing. After all, relationships and people, art and music and theater, fiction and movies, food and nature and work and play, all call to us with insistent voices that should not be denied. Who wants to spend so much time reading the fine print of newspapers, or trying to ferret out the elusive truth, when all those other important and life-affirming things beckon?

In that respect I was (and, to some extent, still am) typical of most people. I don’t want to spend my life in front of a computer screen, and I still don’t do so–although I spend a good deal more time there than I used to, and sometimes more than I want to. But only fanatics (on both sides) or experts become utterly obsessed with these things. I think I’ve managed to avoid becoming either, although some of my friends might disagree and rank me among the former.

It would be wonderful (perhaps) if we could all simply sit down with some sort of Krell learning machine and be able to instantaneously absorb reams of information. But we can’t.

My introspective nature combined with my training as a therapist might enable me to describe the process of political change better than some, it’s true. But if you find yourself reading my next “change” post and wondering at my previous (or present!) naivete and/or lack of expertise, just remember that I consider my story valuable for its relative ordinariness, not because I’m some sort of seer or savant.

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But I stand by what I write. It’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell. And if you feel like the wedding guest stopped by Coleridge’s ancient mariner, I apologize.

But please understand that I feel at least partly responsible for the slaying of the albatross. Do you?

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns :
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land ;
I have strange power of speech ;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach.

Joan Baez: Michael Moore groupie

The New Neo Posted on by

You may think them an odd couple. But Joan Baez seems quite taken with Michael Moore.

Clive Davis led me to this recent Guardian interview with Baez, in which she mentions how the existence of Moore somehow keeps her from losing faith (I have to say it doesn’t quite do the same for me):

People say, ‘Oh, Miss Baez, how do you keep up your optimism?’ And I say, ‘I never had any. I was way too smart. I’m a realist.’ And they look shocked and hurt, because they’re depending on me to say something that’ll make them feel better.” She giggles again. “I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ruins. I mean, Michael Moore – where did he come from? This big, floppy, fat, strange man, who makes these unbelievable films saying exactly how it is. You think when you see that, how can anyone possibly vote for Bush? After seeing what a hypocritical, lying bastard he is?”

It seems odd to me (no doubt that’s my optimism and naivete showing) that so many are still taken in by Moore’s lies. And I’m a bit puzzled as to why Baez thinks Moore’s emergence such a mystery. It’s relatively easy to know where Moore comes from—just read up on him at the many websites devoted to the pursuit of Moore lore. If Baez did, maybe even she would come to the conclusion that Moore is less.

But I sometimes underestimate the force of propaganda, of which Moore is a master. It leads to the quoted Orwellian utterance by Ms. Baez, who does not see that “hypocritical, lying bastard” would be an excellent descriptor of her “big, floppy, fat, strange” (her words, not mine) hero.

To be kind to Ms. Baez, I was impressed by the photo accompanying the Guardian article. Unless it’s been airbrushed to the hilt, I have to say the lady looks good, especially considering her stated age: 65.

Baez, sixty-five. It’s sobering–to her, too, apparently. The article quotes Baez during a recent Somerville, Massachusetts performance:

“When did we get so old?” she cried, to huge cheers.

Well, speak for yourself, Joan, I’m nowhere near as old as you. So there!

But on a more serious note, my answer to Joan might be: when we stopped changing and learning. When we got stuck in a 60s mentality that didn’t take into account new information. When we placed on our cars bumper stickers such as yours, reading (according to the Guardian article): Iraq is the Arabic for Vietnam

Ah, Vietnam! Those were the days, my friend, we are determined that they’ll never end. Here’s Joan again:

If they’re honest with themselves, says Baez, veterans of the peace movement, of the war itself or of any great struggle for social change must admit that for all the woes they suffered, there is a terrible anticlimax when it ends. “Afterwards looking back, it is inevitably the high point of your life. You know that from soldiers, who tell their story over and over. I’ve heard that even the Vietnamese were depressed.”

Even the Vietnamese were depressed. But maybe, just maybe, they—unlike you, Joan—were/are depressed not because the glory days are over, but because the Communists won.

Canada: Tories win, but it’s not a conservative country

The New Neo Posted on by

The Canadian election results are in, and the conservatives have won.

Sorta. Kinda.

Or at least we can say that the liberals have lost.

Kinda. Sorta.

The conservatives garnered the largest share, about 36% of the total vote. But in interpreting the results, we have to remember that Canada’s system is different than ours, both in its majority voting (no electoral college), its parliamentary nature, and its party structure. The latter resulted in a split of the liberal vote and opened the door for the conservative victory.

As Vodkapundit Stephen Green points out:

The countries two lefty parties, the Liberals and the NDP, together garnered about 48%. If you think that sounds like a victory for the righty parties, think again. Ten percent of the vote went to Bloc Québécois – a party that doesn’t stand for much other than getting privileges and tax dollars for Quebec. In that, the BQ is a lot like the Mother Country.

So, yeah, Harper will probably be the next PM. But so what? He’ll preside over a shaky coalition or an even-shakier minority government. If Harper steps into the Liberals shoes by allying with BQ, he’ll foster more resentment in the Canadian West. A Conservative-NDP coalition might very well clean up some of the Liberals’ corruption – but wouldn’t change much else. And a Grand Coalition with the Liberals, ala Germany, would mean that only the names had changed.

Publius Pundit has more to say:

Canada remains an ultimately liberal nation in that regard and many certainly take pride in that. This victory was handed to them in large degree because of corruption in the ruling party, so the Conservatives should definitely take the hint and clean up the government and implement other system reforms. Pushing a social agenda that very likely the majority of the country opposes will result in an election loss that will lead to promised reforms being lost.

Publius does see some plusses that are likely to result from this election:

# No more America-hating Prime Minister
# Democratic reform (elected senate?)
# Lower taxes (slightly)
# Not enough Conservative MPs to crack down on gay marriage, dope, etc.
# Funding the military again
# No more gun bans? No more CBC? (never mind”¦)
# No capital gains tax when re-investing sale proceeds

And also the following minuses:

#Health care still on a par with Cuba and North Korea
#Weird concessions to retain power”¦
o Continue the Kyoto madness?
o Stay soft on Iran?
#Another election in a few months (or does this belong in the last grouping?)

Canada has joined the list of nations with post-Iraq-war elections that have ended up favoring the parties who sided with (or probably would have sided with, had they been in power) the US position: Britain, Germany, and Australia (it can be argued that Spain would have been on that list had it not been for its pre-election terrorist attack and the fallout from it).

However, it’s difficult to interpret these Canadian results in terms of US policy, because they seem mostly driven by internal Canadian politics and especially the corruption of the current liberal administration there. The most we can say is that the election may end up resulting in improved US-Canadian relations. Whether or not that was a goal of the Canadian electorate, it may be an unexpected and unintended consequence–a positive one, IMHO.

The “changer” path: looking at political life from both sides now

The New Neo Posted on by

Having studied the stories of so many political “changers” (most recently, Kanan Makiya), it strikes me how similar the paths to such change often seem to be.

Oh, the details vary, of course–different countries of birth, different turning points. But otherwise there is a marked resemblance.

It seems to go like this: an idealistic and intelligent person, who reads a lot and thinks a lot, falls in with leftist beliefs, usually as a university student. But this person never abandons his/her ability to think critically. At some later point the evidence starts challenging his/her worldview.

Because that worldview is so deeply held, the first challenges are successfully resisted. Then, growing experiences add to the doubt, and the pressure builds to the point where it just can’t be denied. The person then makes tentative statements to that effect: initially, perhaps, just among friends; ultimately, in public.

The angry and dismissive reaction on the part of former colleagues and friends is always–always–a surprise; one might even say, a shock. And this experience takes on a life of its own by underlining all the previous doubts. If those colleagues can’t even listen to the questions and doubts of a former friend and fellow-traveler, how open-minded can they be? The essentially closed nature of such a belief system–the heretofore discussed “circle dance”–becomes clear to the changer-in-the-making. And, once that line has been crossed, there does not appear to be any turning back.

As Makiya states, in a tale typical of the genre:

A tension was building up between the way the Middle Eastern world was, to my eyes, and the way our categories described it. The two didn’t match.

I’m very familiar with that disturbing and unsettling sensation of something not matching. That’s the beginning. Usually, it sparks a drive towards further reading, especially of texts from a different (or even opposite) point of view, texts that had been previously untouched and considered unworthy of perusal. Reading such texts–and seeing value in them–are usually crucial to the further development of the change.

Sometimes I think that we changers are a little bit like Tiresias (metaphorically, that is!) He was the character in Greek mythology who had been both a man and a woman, and was therefore able to understand what it was like to be on either side:

Tiresias was the son of Everes and the nymph Chariclo; he was a blind prophet, the most famous soothsayer of ancient Greece.

The most famous account of the origin of his blindness and his prophetic talent is as follows. When Tiresias was walking in the woods one day, he came upon two great serpents copulating; he struck them with his staff, and was thereupon transformed into a woman. Seven years later, she/he passed by the same place and came upon the same two serpents copulating; she/he struck them again with the staff and was turned back into a man. Some time later, Zeus and Hera were arguing over who had more pleasure in sex, the man or the woman: Zeus said it was the woman, while Hera claimed men got more pleasure from the act. To settle the argument, they consulted Tiresias, since he had experienced life as both sexes, and Tiresias sided with Zeus. In her anger, Hera struck Tiresias blind. Since Zeus could not undo the act of another deity, he gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy in compensation.

Well, maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to make that analogy. But I’ve always liked the story of Tiresias, and this seemed as good a time as any to work it in.

In case you didn’t know….

The New Neo Posted on by

…there’s an election going on today in Canada.

It hasn’t gotten a ton of attention. This AP article, for example, didn’t make the front page of the Times, nor have I heard the subject discussed during my (admittedly rather brief) forays into cable news watching.

Austin Bay offers a roundup, with his own perspective on the decline of the Canadian military and how that change has weakened Canada’s position as a world player. Michelle Malkin also takes a comprehensive look at the election.

From the AP article:

The Conservatives are pinning most of their hopes on Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and traditionally a bedrock of Liberal support. They also have a chance to make inroads in Quebec, where they were shut out in June 2004 elections.

The youngest candidate at 46, Harper has toned down the rightist rhetoric that cost him the last election and painted the Liberals as a party of corruption.

Postal worker Tim Armstrong said he is among the many Canadians tired of Liberal scandals.

”I think they lack credibility and integrity,” he said. ”Every time you turn around, there’s another scandal. It just goes on and on and on.”

If the Liberals are finally voted out of power, will it be because of backlash against the scandals? Or would it represent any sort of more basic ideological shift? I can’t answer the question, but I think it’s an important one in assessing what’s going on with our erstwhile ally (and that former military power), Canada.

It also makes me wonder about the possible effects of the Abramoff scandal on the next elections here at home, particularly the fortunes of the heavily-implicated Republican Party.

Another changed mind: Kanan Makiya

The New Neo Posted on by

I had read some of Kanan Makiya’s writings before. But I’d never realized that he was another “changer.” This interview with Makiya, appearing in a recent Democratiya, makes that clear. For anyone interested in “changers,” it’s a fascinating read.

Born in Iraq, Makiya grew up with somewhat of an outsider perspective, realizing at an early age that the Iraqi people were being fed lies by their own media. This was brought home to him for the first time during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when, as a young man, Makiya heard the Arab media claiming victory right up to the point of defeat.

Shortly thereafter, Makiya went to MIT in the US, to study architecture. So he was actually, in some ways, a child of the sixties, like so many of us boomers. He describes what he experienced there:

Soon I had these two lives. I became very active in the [Vietnam] anti-war movement, which was burgeoning in the United States. And I was very active in supporting the emerging Palestinian Resistance Movement. I passed through the Nationalist Palestinian groups and I ended up in the Marxist one. All of this happened very rapidly. Within a span of a year I became a Marxist and was attracted to Trotskyist politics. The great influence on me was Emmanuel Farjoun, a member of the Israeli Socialist Organisation, Matzpen. He was also a student at MIT, much older than I. He had enjoyed a socialist training from day dot having grown up in a left socialist kibbutz. It was a revelation for me to meet an Israeli who was critical of his own society. He explained a) basic socialist principles which, of course, were completely new to me, and b) the nature of Israeli society, which was also a revelation for me. We became very, very close friends, almost brothers, for the next twenty-five years. (We fell out over the Iraq war but that’s another story. That’s sad, very sad.)

(Readers of this blog can no doubt empathize with the “story” encapsulated in that last sentence.)

This was an unusual set of influences, indeed, for an Iraqi–although perhaps not so very unusual for an Iraqi exile. Makiya later lived in England and became a Trotskyite political activist. The war in the 70s in Lebanon gave him pause, and led him to experience a troubling cognitive dissonance, which he “solved” by using a pseudonym to write:

The left insisted [the civil war in Lebanon] was not a sectarian war. That was troubling to me but I had no other set of categories. In fact, the Palestinians were now behaving very badly, like little Mafia’s inside Lebanon. I used to write in the journal called Khamsin, which was a journal of Middle Eastern socialist revolutionaries, edited by Moshe Machover in those days…I used to write articles critical of the Palestinians, even though I was basically working with them. I wrote under a pseudonym, Muhammad Ja’far, in those days. A tension was building up between the way the Middle Eastern world was, to my eyes, and the way our categories described it. The two didn’t match.

Another turning point for Makiya was the Iranian revolution, in which he saw the left’s aims betrayed and shattered as the mullahs took power (this part of his story somewhat resembles that of Azar Nafisi). The Iran-Iraq war was another blow; Makiya saw it as a senseless exercise in slaughter.

By this point his change was almost complete:

I was now totally alienated from my previous world view. I thought it didn’t describe the world I was now in.

Makiya had made political activism the core of his life. So this sort of dislocation was especially profound for him. He threw himself into the writing of a book about the troubles in Iraq under Saddam. As background, he started to read more, and discovered there was a whole world of knowledge out there that had somewhere been neglected during his lengthy education in some of the finest educational institutions of the world:

The writing of what became The Republic of Fear took six years. I had returned to England. It was probably the 6 most wonderful years of my life, in some senses. Nobody knew I was writing this book, except 4 or 5 friends. My parents didn’t know until they discovered by accident, but that’s a long story. I discovered writers I’d never read before, above all Hannah Arendt. Also Isaiah Berlin, John Stuart Mill, Hobbes: very basic texts that I’d never read. I had spent weeks and months studying Capital and Theories of Surplus Value but I had never read John Stuart Mill! This was the lopsided education that we all had. These basic texts I discovered, as I was writing Republic of Fear, became very important to me. They changed my whole way of thinking about politics, though they didn’t change certain underlying values. I discovered liberal politics. Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, in particular, gave me a model of how to understand, for instance, the Ba’ath front organisations.

Makiya’s book, when published, languished in obscurity. Only Iraqi exiles were interested it, and it would have died rather quickly had not Saddam invaded Kuwait.

Suddenly, Makiya was discovered as an expert. He achieved some noteriety by suggesting, in the New York Review of Books, no less (brave man!) that the allies should march all the way to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam. A predictable firestorm ensued among his leftist friends as Makiya stepped out of the circle dance. You probably already know the story:

The previous good wishes that had been passed in my direction from the left ended. I was viewed as a complete traitor. I was called a ‘quisling’. But my position [that the uprisings should be supported and Saddam should be deposed] was a logical continuation of the changes that had taken place in my thinking during the course of the writing of The Republic of Fear. The be-all-and-end-all of politics was removing this dictatorship in Iraq. Abstract considerations””such as the categories ‘imperialism’ and ‘Zionism’””became totally secondary in importance to the removal of dictatorship.

Makiya then settled down to write another book about Saddam’s Iraq and the extreme cruelty of his reign. Entitled Cruelty and Silence, it didn’t quite meet with the reception he expected:

In writing that book, I was naé¯ve. I had thought that I would simulate a debate in the circles I had come from. There was no debate or dialogue. I thought that the weight of the words of the victims would make the case. All you had to do was read the first half of the book. As it turned out, most of these intellectuals only read the second part of the book and the references to themselves. I was naming names, you see. I couldn’t just write general abstractions. I was pitting words against words. Two sets of words had to clash with one another. So I named names. That upset people no end, and there was a huge backlash. The book was blasted by the very people I thought I was opening a dialogue with. I realise now how naive that whole approach was.

This particular passage, describing Makiya’s surprise at the unpersuasiveness of the facts and arguments he offered–including his former friends’ and colleagues’ unwillingness to even listen or hear him out, and the viciousness of the responses of some of them–is of great interest to me. I shared that experience, at least in a very small way, when I first tried to speak to my friends after my “change.” No doubt some of you have shared it, too. But to Makiya it was a central part of his life and work, and the fallout was severe.

Alan Johnson [interviewer]: And there was character assassination. You were personally attacked.

Kanan Makiya: Oh, it was the beginning of a terrible period. After that book came out in 1993 I was actually depressed for a couple of years. I couldn’t write anything. But this hostile reaction was not an Iraqi reaction. I was buoyed up by that fact.

Obviously, Makiya was ultimately able to recover and to write and work again.

I’ve concentrated here on Makiya’s personal story of political change. But the entire interview is well worth reading, although it’s a long one. Here, for example, is Makiya on the topic of whether Islam is capable of reform (a topic discussed recently on this blog, here):

Missing, at the moment, are the clerics who will fight from within and make their argument not in the way I make my argument (from western texts, general texts of human rights or from someone like Hannah Arendt), but from within the religion itself…That this can be done in Islam I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt. The nature of scriptural texts is that they are infinitely malleable.

I sincerely hope Makiya is correct on this point.

Lastly, Makiya has the following to say about the attitude of Europeans in the lead-up to the Iraq War:

…much of the strength of the hostility of the Jihadi movement, and of the forces that have made life so horrible in Iraq, came from the silence of Europe. Europe has a lot to answer for. It’s not even that it was half-hearted. They fell in completely with the language of the non-democratic Arab regimes. They bought their line and they seemed to stand for the same things. They undermined entirely the values of the operation. Europeans knew that the United States was not going to permanently occupy Iraq. Deep down the smarter Europeans must have known it wasn’t just about oil. It was – rightly or wrongly – a way of changing the traditional western attitude towards the Arab Muslim world. It was an end to the support for autocratic and repressive governments….Europe was justifying and supporting the foundations on which these repressive regimes stood.

I’m very much looking forward to Part 2 of the Makiya interview, due to appear in the March/April edition of Democratiya.

Magda Goebbels: heart of darkness (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

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

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!

[ADDENDUM: Last March, Ed Driscoll wrote this review of the movie “Downfall,” and described its portrayal of Magda and the final bunker scenes.]

Magda Goebbels: heart of darkness (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

[This is the first of a two-part series. 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 stepson 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.

[Part II]

Mama said (and so did Momma)

The New Neo Posted on by

Mama said there’d be days like this.

And, you know what? Mama didn’t lie.

Oh, actually, today wasn’t so bad. It’s just that when I was about to start working on today’s post at my computer, the power went out.

I live in a certain amount of fear about the power going out–that is, I would if I ever stopped to think about it, which I don’t but should. Because the truth is I live in a community with an inordinate number of large trees, which seem to come down at the merest whisper of wind and storm, and always onto a power line. And today was truly windy and stormy, so it could easily have been predicted that those lights would flicker and then die.

The moment that happens is always an interesting one, wherein one confronts one’s utter dependence on electricity, and the fact that one usually takes it way too much for granted. What, a power outage? To moi? Can’t be; I’ve got work to do.

The moment of hubris passes, and then comes the taking of the inventory. Oh, right, the toilet will only have one flush in it–I forget why, but something to do with a pump. And in the winter, the cold starts seeping in within minutes, reminding me that lingering around the house would not be a good thing. The computer, the post? Fagettabout it. Time to leave and go about the other business of the day.

Ah yes, time to leave. Leave. And then I remember: that wonderfully convenient electric garage door opener has to be disabled. Now, how do I do that, again? Each time it happens, I have to learn anew–get out the manual and the flashlight (even though the day was young, it was so dark a flashlight was needed to read the diagrams).

Then, out to the garage. Piece of cake. Just pull that red lever dangling from a rope on the ceiling, and then lift the garage door manually, the old-fashioned way. But the red lever is just an inch out of my reach, even when I stand on tiptoe. I can unlock the door to the house, go back to the closet and get out the stepstool. But really, is it necessary? And by now I’m late. So I decide to jump and grab the lever at the top of my jump. I used to be quite the leaper, having been a ballet dancer/teacher not so very long ago (those of you who are new to my blog may be surprised at that little bit of history, but please see this).

Well, I guess it’s been longer than I thought between leaps. Or maybe I’m not used to leaping on a concrete floor. Because somewhere between up and down (it didn’t seem to be on the landing; it seemed to happen in the air) I got a sudden sharpish pain in the ankle that went down the foot.

Expletives undeleted, I hobbled around the garage, and found that I could at least walk, although with pain. So I set off.

The rest of the day I’ll skip, except to say it involved, among other things: getting lost; an umbrella turning inside-out; and being knocked off the treadmill three times when the power at my workout place failed and then started, failed and then started, failed and then started.

So the post I was going to write turned into this one. I may write the other one and post it tonight, or I may wait till tomorrow.

And this may be as good a time as any to say to those who’ve been waiting for my next “change” post that it’s about two-thirds written, and my prediction is that I’ll be posting it some time early next week.

What did I learn today? A lesson I already knew: not only am I not in control of the big things, I’m not even in control of the little things. And in the great vastness of the universe, these are all indeed little things.

And I also learned, to my stupendous surprise (and after some heavy Googling), that in those song lyrics I linked to at the beginning of this piece, it’s not “Momma said” and “Momma didn’t lie,” it’s “Mama said” and “Mama didn’t lie.” After all these years, it’s nice to know.

Spy vs. spy: the problem of the false negative vs. the false positive

The New Neo Posted on by

The excellent Callimachus has expanded on some of the points in this post of mine, about those who think Bush lied concerning WMDs in Iraq.

Callimachus tackles a subset of this group, those who say Bush didn’t lie–well, not exactly, and not precisely–but that he nevertheless consciously and purposely did the next best (worst?) thing: he sifted through the intelligence information and took only that which fit his already-made decision to attack Iraq for other nefarious reasons such as to steal its oil. Or he told confederates and advisors to shape intelligence information to bolster his argument, and to block anything that didn’t.

Callimachus writes, of espionage in general, and the need to evaluate possible threats such as Saddam’s:

There are fundamentally two types of mistake you can make at it: to fail to perceive a threat, or to perceive one that does not exist.

Of the two, the former is more catastrophic — think Pearl Harbor, or Sept. 11 — and so if the two errors represent the Scylla and Charybdis of the system, the conscientious espionage worker will strive to sail between them, but tack slightly closer toward the error of over-assumption.

The intelligence trade has two components: collection and analysis — call them hands and head. Agents in the field will gather a mass of data and information: tips from credible sources, rumors, the gleanings of wiretaps and intercepts, newspaper reports. Among them will be some true facts, and some wrong ones and some good guesses, and some bad guesses, and some deliberate deceptions planted by the other side.

It’s the analysts’ job to try to weed through them and find the best bits of information and use them to construct a coherent picture of what the other fellow is up to. Of course it’s “cherry-picking.” That’s the whole nature of this part of the business. And, again, there likely will be a bias toward seeing something rather than not seeing it.

In fact, Callimachus is describing the age-old scientific problem of the false negative vs. the false positive. They are both bad. But in the case of self defense, the false negative is, as Callimachus points out, a good deal more dangerous, if one is looking at it from the point of view of the need to prevent a threat from becoming a reality.

In the case of the “Bush lied” or “Bush cherry-picked the information” people, however, they seem to act as though a false (or partly-false) positive is far worse than a false negative would be. Is this because they feel this country is so invincible that they don’t believe any threats are real? Or is it because, in their hearts, the most important thing is to keep their own hands clean? Or is it some combination of the two? Sometimes it even seems to me as though they think the function of prewar intelligence was to have acted as defense attorney for Saddam—to make sure he was considered innocent till proven guilty.

Actually, I’m probably being too kind to them–or, at least, to some of them. For a certain number, if in fact Bush’s intelligence-gathering had been guilty of a false negative rather than the false positive that appears to have been the case, they’d be saying the false negative was worse, instead (just look at the 9/11 Commission for examples). The bottom line seems to be, at least for some, that whatever Bush happens to have done is defined as worse–false negative or false positive. And unrealistic perfection is the standard by which he is to be judged.

In this respect, those who act this way are very fortunate to have been out of power during these trying post-9/11 times. As such, they have the wonderful luxury of constant Monday-morning quarterbacking. They get to criticize errors, whether those be of the false negative or the false positive variety. They get to pretend they had nothing to do with the situation that built up to those errors, such as 9/11. They get away with being altogether vague about what they could do differently to prevent such errors, if they were in power. Or, if they are specific, they get the luxury of knowing that, at least for now, their suggestions will not be tried and found wanting in the field of reality (this is always true of a party out of power, by the way).

And, most importantly, they get to enjoy whatever the Bush Administration may have actually done to prevent further attacks on this country, and thus to have preserved their right to speak out in any way they see fit. And this, of course, is as it should be.

Sympathy for the devil: identification with the aggressor

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Sanity has a post that’s well worth reading, on the topic of identification with the aggressor–how it begins as a normal process in childhood, enabling a child to manage threats and anxiety, and how it sometimes morphs into the pathological. She links this latter point to what’s known as “Stockholm Syndrome,” the identification with a kidnapper or hostage-taker by the hostage him/herself.

One of the worst feelings on earth is that of being a vulnerable victim. Humans will go quite far to avoid such a feeling–including, at times, deciding the aggressor is not so bad, after all; maybe even good. Of course, brainwashing can play a role in that transformation, especially if the kidnapping has gone on for a long time. But sometimes it doesn’t take all that much, and overt brainwashing is not a necessary part of the process.

Abused children are among the most vulnerable of humans. Way too early in life, they are faced with the terrible dilemma of dealing with their own powerlessness in the face of an aggressor, sometimes even a family member whose proper role should be to protect. It’s a fact that, although most abused children do not go on to becoming abusive adults, most abusive adults were abused as children.

I’m not offering this as any sort of excuse for such behavior–unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s even an explanation. For we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of the abused do not take identification with the aggressor to the point where they become one. Au contraire.

So, how can we really explain the difference between those who end up becoming what, in childhood, they most hated, and those who go on to become exemplary citizens and parents? Those who identify with the aggressor, and those who don’t? At this point, we really can’t. It’s one of the most important unsolved riddles in the social sciences.

It seems to me that there are two responses for a victim of childhood abuse. The first is to say “Never again.” This child grows up knowing that this is one thing he/she will never do, and perhaps even later joins a profession or group that is involved in preventing, treating, studying, or fighting abuse. The second reaction is to let feelings be the guide. In a certain percentage of people who seem to lack operating moral brakes and who have identified with the aggressor, those feelings lead to a re-enactment of the crime, this time as powerful perpetrator. And thus the torch is passed.

[ADDENDUM: Just to clarify: abused children who grow up to abuse others do not necessarily norm their own abuse and think it was OK.

There are those who do, of course. For example, there are abusing parents who justify their actions in abusing the child by saying they are just “teaching my child about his/her sexuality,” or who offer any number of other twisted but benign reframings, and who say they were not harmed by themselves being abused as children.

However, there are those who hate what the abusive adult did to them when they were a child, and yet they still grow up to abuse children. This is done by some mental mechanism as yet poorly understood, but the best description I can offer is that they are on emotional automatic pilot when they are doing the abusing. The feelings of rage and powerlessness are all there, encapsulated inside the adult, unprocessed and poorly understood. Those feelings now drive the behavior of the abusive adult, who converts the feelings of powerlessness felt as a child into a feeling of power over another child.

The worm turns–the victim becomes powerful by being the vicimizer. But the adult usually does not understand or have any awareness of the process by which this happens.]

Chasing Moby Dick: eliminating the evil inclination?

The New Neo Posted on by

As promised, I’ve got more to say about Moby Dick. Just think of it as that essay I struggled with in high school, redux (and, by the way, I’m still struggling).

I prefer to state the question about the symbolism of the white whale differently, as in: what’s up with Ahab? What is he trying to do, and why? (In the allegorical sense, that is—because without the allegory, Ahab is just a more somber Captain Hook, pursuing the alligator that ran off with his hand.)

In trying to answer the question, this is one of the times I’m with those folks who believe in relative truth: there certainly is no one answer to this question. But the following is an answer—and my answer, at least for now:

Ahab is an absolutist. He sees the whale as the embodiment of whatever is evil and untamable in the universe, and therefore it’s worthy of his monomaniacal quest. Strangely enough, that vision puts him in the company of some other uncompromising (although very different) figures of fiction—Don Quixote, starry-eyed idealist, comes to mind.

The Don is a sort of flip side to Ahab—his pursuit is of the good. But he goes after it with an absolutist vision that’s very out of touch with reality, as does Ahab in his very different pursuit.

Here’s Melville on the subject of Ahab’s attitude towards the whale:

All that most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the lees of things, all truth with malice in it…were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hum the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar (like a cannon thing), he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Talk about extremism and fanaticism, talk about scapegoating! Realists try to jolt people such as Don Q and Ahab out of their narrow and uncompromising visions: the Don has his Sancho Panza as foil; Ahab, his Starbuck. I wish both Sancho and Starbuck luck. The task they’ve chosen is difficult—in fact, well-nigh impossible.

One of Ahab’s biggest troubles is his idea that there is one single thing that embodies all that’s wrong with the world. It’s what gives his quest its intensity and accounts for its gleam of insanity. It’s a simplistic vision of evil, and Ahab’s hubris lies in thinking he can eliminate that evil.

Should we then give up the task of opposing evil, of fighting against it? Absolutely not. I am not suggesting a fatalistic, “que sera, sera” attitude towards the world. Evil must be fought against on many fronts and with many weapons: persuasion, isolation, and force. But there is no one thing that embodies evil, and no way to eliminate it from the world.

To give an example close to home: as a neocon, I oppose tyrannical and cruel regimes that trample on people’s civil liberties, and I applaud the spread of democracy. But I am not so naive—at least, I try not to be—as to think that the process is either easy or perfect. Nor do I think it will eliminate human folly or evil. Not by a longshot.

It seems to me that Ahab not only believes the white whale to be the embodiment of all that’s evil and that he can vanquish it, but he actually thinks that eliminating evil—if it could in fact be done—would be an unequivocally good thing. In this, also, he is an absolutist.

And in this he would seem to be correct, at least at first glance. Eliminating evil—who wouldn’t want that to happen?

But would the elimination of evil—if possible—be unequivocally good? That’s not a trick question, either. I’m not an expert on comparative religion, but you may be surprised to find (as I was) that Judaism answers that question: “no.” In this it has a great deal in common, I believe, with Buddhism.

Here‘s a discussion of the subject I came upon a while back. It offers a parable:

The Jewish definition of “Evil” is a matter much more involved than the definition of “Good.” Here’s my best try: The force within each of us that causes us to act in an aggressive or an acquisitive manner — that is a reflection of the Evil Inclination. Unchecked aggression or acquisitiveness lead to terrible evil. Violence, theft, slander and betrayal are all products of these forces left unrestrained.

That’s the basic equation. It sounds simple. Beware of spiritual ideas that sound simple. They rarely ever are.

Jewish lore tells a tale of a time when Evil was actually captured (B. Tal. Yoma 69b). Now, one might think that if Evil could really be physically contained, the most sensible thing to do with it would be to destroy it right away. So much for sensibility. It turns out that Evil’s captors paused before they acted on their first instincts.

Evil was held captive for three days, during which time its fate was debated. The Talmud does not record many details from that debate. I suppose they decided to leave that part up to our imaginations.

Well, three days passed… And then, someone made a startling realization. During the time of Evil’s imprisonment, all chickens in the land stopped laying eggs. It was as if they had gone on strike.

Had folks looked further, they would have realized that other strange things had been occurring ”“ or more precisely, not occurring, during those three days. No houses were built. People didn’t show up for work. No marriages took place. No homework was done… and I suppose that no lawns were mowed, no leaves were raked, no trash taken out, and no gutters were cleared either.

The reason was obvious. The Evil Inclination is that which causes God’s creations to act aggressively and acquisitively. Building houses, and families, and careers ”“ these are activities that require healthy, yet well controlled, measures of both aggressiveness and acquisitiveness.

Folks realized that the Evil Inclination could not be obliterated. It couldn’t even be held captive forever. For Evil’s own source is also the source of creativity and productivity. The only thing that could be done before setting Evil loose again in the world, would be to wound it. So Evil was blinded, and then set free. Thus, it was placed at a decided disadvantage in its continuous struggle with Good.

And here the idea is stated in a different way, and tied to that illustrious (although much-maligned) father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud:

What gives this idea a Jewish “twist” quite different from the original Zoroastrian teaching is that the evil impulse, in Jewish thought, is not entirely evil. It is not, like the Zarathushtrian “hostile spirit,” completely inimical to goodness. The Jewish “evil impulse” is only evil when it is obeyed and yielded to without restraint. The evil impulse is sinful lust in excess, but in moderation it is necessary in order to prompt people to procreate; it is sinful greed in excess, but in right order, it is the drive behind trade and the pursuit of lawful profit. The Jewish “evil impulse” thus resembles Freud’s concept of the “id,” the amoral motive power behind human actions either for good or evil – and indeed, Freud was inspired by Jewish moral philosophy in his own thinking.

Ahab is an idealist without moderation or judgment, a man who believes he can do away with evil if he only pursues it with enough intensity. As such, he becomes a fanatic, and signs a pact with evil itself. It’s a pact that ends up destroying him, his ship, and his crew—all but Ishmael, who alone survived to tell the tale.