“Truth to power”: deconstructing a phrase

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a popular phrase on the left, used here by Dan Rather, of all people (courtesy Roger Simon): “speaking truth to power.”

The expression, which has been around for quite a while, is brilliantly parsimonious. In just four simple words (really only three, since one of them is “to”), it succinctly encapsulates the left’s view–both of itself, and of the way the world works.

First, there’s “truth.” One of the hallmarks of much leftist thought is the idea of their own moral (not just doctrinal or analytic) superiority. The left’s definition of “truth” often seems to be that it consists of whatever they believe to be true. Ergo, whenever they “speak” (word three), it’s “truth” by definition; they certainly don’t need no steenking facts cluttering up their truth (as in the pesky Memogate).

Next, there’s “power.” The left is all about power differentials. Third-world countries or those perceived as powerless are always right (i.e. “truthful”); powerful countries are always wrong. It’s not, of course, just about international relations and countries, it’s also about people and economics: poor people=good (powerless), rich people=bad (powerful).

Want to know the origins of the phrase? I did; it turns out it has to do with Quakers and pacifism, (see this), a subject I plan to tackle some time in the not-too-distant future.

If Rather sees himself and CBS as an example of “truth,” particularly after Memogate, I’m not exactly sure what falsehood would be. The MSM and CBS are certainly also examples of power, too; hasn’t Rather ever heard of the expression “The pen is mightier than the sword?” (I know, I know; CBS doesn’t use pens much any more–or typewriters either, for that matter, unfortunately for CBS. But the expression is metaphorical anyway).

[ADDENDUM: In an attempt to head off possible misunderstanding, I will add that I am not talking about liberals here, I’m talking about the left. And I’m not saying Dan Rather is an example of the left; that’s why I was a bit surprised to read that he’d used the phrase.]

The Holocaust: was it unique?

The New Neo Posted on by

Norman Geras is a man who has thought long and hard about the Holocaust. Recently, he tackled the controversial question of whether the Holocaust was, “in some significant moral sense, singular or unique in the long catalogue of calamities that human beings have inflicted upon one another.”

Norm has anticipated many possible objections to the discussion and responded to them convincingly. He anticipates and deals with the question of whether the Holocaust stands in some mysterious way outside the realm of such inquiry, whether the discussion of singularity is meaningless because all events are unique, whether the Holocaust must have had one absolutely unique feature to be called unique, and whether the question of uniqueness is ill-advised because it places one group of sufferers above all others.

This last question is one that especially interests me. In attempting to deal with it, Geras places the focus squarely on the acts of the perpetrators rather than on the suffering of the victims:

…the consciousness that developed in Nazi-occupied Europe and in the decades after the Second World War that what the Nazis perpetrated was something historically new and exceptional was not based on any historical computation of the suffering of the victims in relation to other groups of victims. It was a judgement about the nature of the crime. So, at any rate, I propose. It was not some particularity of Jewish suffering, or of the suffering of the other targets of Nazi barbarism – gypsies, Russian prisoners of war (of whom some 3 million died in German captivity), gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, Poles, and so on – but a particularity of the Nazi offence, an offence against humanity itself, that stood out.

Norm makes it clear that the Holocaust was not uniquely terrible because it was perpetrated primarily against Jews; it was uniquely terrible for other reasons. He uses the language of Nuremberg to describe the crime as one against humanity. The Holocaust was indeed also a crime against the Jews, but its uniqueness does not lie in its choice of victims, it relies in some qualities inherent in the offenses of the perpetrators.

Norm sees this uniqueness as having three characteristics, all of which acted together in a vile synergy to create an evil that was singular: (1) the industrialization and bureaucratization of death, using the full resources of a modern state; (2) the comprehensiveness of intent, in which the aim was to wipe out an entire people for no practical reason; and (3) spiritual murder, a devotion to destroying the humanity of the victims before killing them, a sort of blanket impulse to sadistically humiliate and dehumanize.

Geras does not suggest that we ignore the fact that the Holocaust targeted Jews, nor the long history of persecution of Jews throughout the millennia. His point is simply that the identity of the victims is not what makes the Holocaust unique.

I’ve been thinking of adding a possible fourth element to these three elements of uniqueness. The fourth is related to the second element on Norm’s list (and perhaps is only a subset of it), comprehensiveness of intent. I would call this fourth element “global scope” or “comprehensiveness of reach.” By that I am referring to the fact that, in any other genocides or mass murders that come to mind, the boundaries of the geography involved were far more limited, either because the people who were targeted lived in a single region, or because the perpetrators only controlled a certain area. The Turks, for example, did not pursue the Armenians around the globe to hunt them down in countries to which they had emigrated.

If the Nazis had rounded up and murdered only the German and Austrian Jews, for example, it would have been a terrible crime indeed, but it would not have been the Holocaust. Instead, the Nazis were geographically expansionist in their genocide, because the Jews were widely scattered throughout Europe. In each country the Germans conquered and occupied, one of their most basic goals was to get the cooperation of the local populace in rounding up its own Jews and helping the Germans to eliminate them from the face of the earth. In this activity, most of Europe was compliant and cooperative, with only a few notable exceptions, among them Denmark and Bulgaria.

So some of the unique horror of the Holocaust is therefore the wide geographic reach of the genocide as well as the international cooperation involved. The Nazis were in charge, but they had many willing and eager collaborators in a large number of countries. The Holocaust was not just a murderous impulse, a question of marching into a country and slaughtering people indiscriminately; it required an intense effort of picking, choosing, and sorting out .

The Nazis lost the war. But they accomplished one of their major goals: the virtual elimination of the Jews of Europe. Before the Holocaust, the majority of the Jews of the world resided there. Afterwards, only a tiny fraction remained. Two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered during the Holocaust, and most of the rest emigrated. This is part of the unique horror of the Holocaust, as well: that it succeeded almost completely in its audacious and seemingly impossible goal of making Europe Judenfrei.

Stalemate: the German elections

The New Neo Posted on by

To Americans, the finer points of parliamentary systems are, quite literally, foreign territory. So the recent German election results, murky and confusing to begin with, seem even murkier and more confusing to us Yanks.

One thing is clear, though: the elections have resulted in at least a temporary hiatus in which there is no real victor, and a jockeying for position in which no viable coalition has yet emerged. Jim Rose (via Willism’s Carnival of Classiness) has as lucid (and entertaining) an explanation of the German situation as I’ve seen. And Will himself offers an analysis of the German equivalent of a Red/Blue split in the election–in this case, a Pink/Pinker split–that clearly follows the old West/East lines of Germany’s literally divided years.

Why does it matter? It doesn’t bode well for the US or Europe if Germany continues to postpone decisions. As Will points out, and as David Frum has written:

German voters have just elected a parliament that will not address the country’s most important problems, that cannot make strong decisions and that will put off until tomorrow actions that desperately need to be taken today. That’s bad news for Germany’s five million unemployed. It’s bad news for Europe as a whole, slumped in economic malaise. And it’s bad news for North Americans, who are facing a future in which the democracies of Europe will matter less and less–and an aggressive and possibly hostile China will matter more and more.

About seventy years ago, the German parliamentary system faced a similar situation in which no party had emerged as leader and coalitions were hard to form. What was the result? Nothing less than the rise of Hitler.

No, I’m not suggesting that a new Hitler is about to emerge from the German stasis. In fact, one of the few encouraging signs in this election was that support for the neo-Nazis (whose strongest support is in the former East Germany, by the way) seems to have shrunk, and it was very small to begin with (I want to note that, in a masterful piece of understatement, the article says that the German far-right has mainly lacked a single charismatic leader since 1945).

Most of the many complex conditions that came together in a dance macabre to bring Hitler to power are–fortunately for us and the world–not present in the current crisis. But one condition definitely is, and that’s an election in which there is no clear winner and shaky coalitions must be formed.

It’s often forgotten that, although Hitler came to power through legal means, he and the Nazis did not do this by receiving over 50% of the votes; they were still a minority party at the time. The Nazis’ ascension to the leadership of Germany was the terrible fruit of an election in which their actual share of the vote was almost exactly that of today’s two leading parties in Germany: 36%.

What appears to my inexpert eyes to be an excellent summary of Hitler’s rise to power can be found here. Knowing what we now know about Hitler, it is a tremendous and bitter frustration to see how lucky he was in being the beneficiary of a number of unlikely events which happened to come together to allow him to grab power, and how unlucky we all are that they did so:

Between 1931 and 1933, vicious power struggles would break out between rival political parties. The power brokers in these struggles were Hindenburg and Schleicher. The problem during this period was that no party even came close to achieving the majority required to elect its leader Chancellor. Coalitions were either impossible to build, or were so transient that they dissolved as quickly as they formed. Ambitious leaders from every party began maneuvering for power, striking deals, double-crossing each other, and trying to find the most advantageous alliances. Hitler himself would ally the Nazis to the Nationalist Party. “The chess game for power begins,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The chief thing is that we remain strong and make no compromises.”

In 1932, hoping to establish a clear government by majority rule, Hindenburg held two presidential elections. Hitler, among others, ran against him. A vote for Hindenburg was a vote to continue the German Republic, while a vote for Hitler was a vote against it. The Nazi party made the most clever use of propaganda, as well as the most extensive use of violence. Bloody street battles erupted between Communists and Nazis thugs, and many political figures were murdered.

In the first election, held on March 13, 1932, Hitler received 30 percent of the vote, losing badly to Hindenburg’s 49.6 percent. But because Hindenburg had just missed an absolute majority, a run-off election was scheduled a month later. On April 10, 1932, Hitler increased his share of the vote to 37 percent, but Hindenburg again won, this time with a decisive 53 percent. A clear majority of the voters had thus declared their preference for a democratic republic.

However, the balance of power in the Reichstag was still unstable, lacking a majority party or coalition to rule the government. All too frequently, Hindenburg had to evoke the dictatorial powers available to him under Article 48 of the constitution to break up the political stalemate. In an attempt to resolve this crisis, he called for more elections. On July 31, 1932, the Nazis won 230 out of 608 seats in the Reichstag, making them its largest party. Still, they did not command the majority needed to elect Hitler Chancellor.

In another election on November 6, 1932, the Nazis lost 34 seats in the Reichstag, reducing their total to 196. And for the first time it looked as if the Nazi threat would fade. This was for several reasons. First, the Nazis’ violence and rhetoric had hardened opposition against Hitler, and it was becoming obvious that he would never achieve power democratically. Even worse, the Nazi party was running very low on money, and it could no longer afford to operate its expensive propaganda machine. Furthermore, the party was beginning to splinter and rebel under the stress of so many elections. Hitler discovered that Gregor Strasser, one of the Nazis’ highest officials, had been disloyal, attempting to negotiate power for himself behind Hitler’s back. The shock was so great that Hitler threatened to shoot himself.

But at the lowest ebb of the Nazis’ fortunes, the backroom deal presented itself as the solution to all their problems. Deal-making, intrigues and double-crosses had been going on for years now. Schleicher, who had managed to make himself the last German Chancellor before Hitler, would eventually say: “I stayed in power only 57 days, and on each of those days I was betrayed 57 times.” It’s not worth tracking the ins and outs of all these schemes, but the one that got Hitler into power is worth noting.

Hitler’s unexpected savior was Franz von Papen, one of the former Chancellors, a remarkably incompetent man who owed his political career to a personal friendship with Hindenburg. He had been thrown out of power by the much more capable Schleicher, who personally replaced him. To get even, Papen approached Hitler and offered to become “co-chancellors,” if only Hitler would join him in a coalition to overthrow Schleicher. Hitler responded that only he could be the head of government, while Papen’s supporters could be given important cabinet positions. The two reached a tentative agreement to pursue such an alliance, even though secretly they were planning to double-cross each other.

Meanwhile Schleicher was failing spectacularly in his attempts to form a coalition government, so Hindenburg forced his resignation. But by now, Hindenburg was exhausted by all the intrigue and crisis, and the prospect of civil war had moved the steely field marshal to tears. As much as he hated to do so, he seemed resigned to offering Hitler a high government position. Many people were urging him to do so: the industrialists who were financing Hitler, the military whose connections Hitler had cultivated, even Hindenburg’s son, whom some historians believe the Nazis had blackmailed. The last straw came when an unfounded rumor swept through Berlin that Schleicher was about to attempt a military coup, arrest Hindenburg, and establish a military dictatorship. Alarmed, Hindenburg wasted no time offering Hitler the Chancellorship, thinking it was a last resort to save the Republic.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor.

It’s too long to quote more here, but please read the whole thing. It is of particular interest today to note the role that terror played in Hitler’s further consolidation of power–basically, he intimidated the opposition into cooperation through violence and the threat of violence.

In the end, when Hitler was trying to get the two-thirds majority he needed to abolish the Reichstag and become dictator under a ruling meant to give a leader increased powers during a national crisis, he used terror tactics quite worthy of today’s “insurgents”:

In attempting to secure the votes, the Nazis made heavy use of terror, blackmail and empty promises. The Social Democrats adamantly refused to vote for the Enabling Act, but Hitler was able to win crucial support from the Catholic Center party, by lying to them about future concessions. On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act came up for a vote. Nazi storm troopers encircled the Reichstag, and legislators had to pass through a ring of tough-looking, black-shirted Nazi thugs to enter the building. While legislators considered the vote, they could hear the storm troopers outside chanting:

“Full powers — or else! We want the bill — or fire and murder!”

To paraphrase Churchill: they were offered a choice between the bill, and fire and murder. They chose the bill, and they got the fire and murder as well.

As did we all.

Lucy and the football: North Korea

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of days ago the news sounded good–or at least what passes for good in the seemingly interminable attempt to talk North Korea out of developing nuclear weapons:

North Korea agreed Monday to stop building nuclear weapons and allow international inspections in exchange for energy aid, economic cooperation and security assurances, in a first step toward disarmament after two years of six-nation talks. The chief U.S. envoy to the talks praised the breakthrough as a “win-win situation” and “good agreement for all of us.”

I’m no North Korea expert. But it didn’t take an expert to have grave reservations on hearing the news, and I had reservations so grave as to amount to total disbelief. The history of North Korea’s dance with disarmament is a timeline to give the most hopeful of optimists pause. It’s a record of so many blatant lies, broken promises, bluster, and bombast as to belong in the realm of the pathological rather than the diplomatic.

There is no rational actor or honest broker in the government of North Korea. There is only, as astute commenter “veryretired” at Austin Bay put it, a government that:

…will say anything, promise anything, agree to anything in order to obtain the aid it needs to continue for a little longer. However, none of the promises or agreements mean the NK regime will actually carry through with whatever they were supposed to do. In time, they will claim that the US violated some aspect of the deal and demand further aid in order to be coaxed back into the negotiation process. The only point worth remembering in this endless courtship dance is that the NK regime is composed of psychopaths who have no shame, no inhibitions about lying, no ethical standards other than remain in power by whatever means for as long as possible.

Unfortunately, I think this states the case succinctly and exactly. North Korea reminds me of nothing so much as Lucy and the football in the venerable “Peanuts” cartoon. Over and over, Lucy persuades dupe Charlie Brown into believing that this time—this time, for sure!–he can trust her. Then, at the eleventh hour, she inevitably foils him once again.

So when North Korea demanded that it be given its reactors first, before any of its nuclear weapons are dismantled, it really was no more a surprise than Lucy’s recurrent excuses to Charlie Brown.

Of course, North Korea (Lucy) is not the only player here. In this case it’s China that appears to really hold the cards–or the football. When the six-nation talks reconvened two years ago it was China, in its role as sponsor of the sessions, that had a stake in not being made to look bad if the talks fell through yet again. But the economic leverage (stopping the flow of oil, for example) that China could exercise to turn the screws on North Korea has not been used, for reasons best known only to China, which no doubt is playing its own very complex game.

How does one negotiate with a psychopath, Kim Jong-il? Very, very carefully, and very, very skeptically. The usual concerns of a leader for the well-being of his/her citizens are absent here, so it’s hard to know what sort of pressure would be likely to reach him. For anyone wishing further elucidation on the personality with which we are dealing in Kim Jong-il, I suggest reading Philip Gourevitch’s powerfully ominous biographical essay “Alone in the Dark”, which appeared two years ago in the New Yorker. Articles such as that one are the reason I have no intention of canceling my subscription any time soon.

Impeachment: in the Technorati top ten

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day as I was driving around my blue-as-blue-can-be town of nearly-disappeared anti-Bush bumper stickers, I glimpsed one of the last holdouts: a Volvo proudly emblazoned with a whole bunch of them. The one that particularly saddened me was a slogan I’d seen many times before, “Bush is not my President.”

It’s one thing to hate Bush, but it’s quite another to declare a personal secession from the Union. As even the Washington Post said today, in an editorial about Reid’s announcement to vote against Roberts’ confirmation: This country has only one President at a time. But just try telling that to the bumper sticker lady.

In a related phenomenon, whenever I’ve ambled over to Technorati lately to check on some topic buzzing around the blogosphere, I’ve noticed that one of the top ten most searched-for subjects there is consistently “impeach Bush.” It moves around in the ranks, sometimes higher and sometimes lower, but it is virtually always somewhere in that top-ten list.

It makes me wonder when impeachment became the preferred remedy for dealing with a Presidency one doesn’t like. Perhaps Watergate, which seems to have been the beginning of so many negative trends in American life. I remember the first Presidential impeachment bumper stickers (Earl Warren doesn’t count) appearing during that era.

Then, by the time Clinton was elected, impeachment had become almost a standard remedy. Clinton’s many enemies seemed to be salivating for it almost from the start of his Presidency. Of course, with his execrable behavior during the Lewinsky affair, he kindly cooperated by giving them nearly enough rope not only to impeach him but to hang him (they thought he actually had given them enough to hang him, but history proved them wrong).

This is certainly not the first era, however, in which impeachment is a political tool. Perhaps it always has been: see this. Despite the early establishment that political differences are not proper grounds for impeachment (the Justice Chase case in 1805; see previous link), it’s been tried before, and probably will be tried again.

But even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War, when LBJ and later Nixon were considered by the left to be war criminals, I don’t recall seeing bumper stickers that took the impeachment line. They were Presidents of us all (hate them though many of us did), right up till the moment the first one bowed out of the 1968 race and the second one was forced to resign in ignominy. Ever since then, so many on both sides have been desperately hoping for a repeat.

Pajamas presents: moi

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that my Pajamas profile is up today–so welcome, Pajamas Media readers and Roger Simon readers.

Since I had no control whatsoever over the editing process, it was interesting to observe just what parts the profile included of a rather lengthy–perhaps half-hour–interview in which I was speaking, not writing. Will you believe me when I say that I was positively flowing with extraordinarily articulate and insightful statements, all of which were left out? No? I guess I wouldn’t, either.

If you are here for the first time, and want to learn what the site is about, I recommend that you take a look at anything on the right sidebar under the heading “Best of neo-neocon.” The heart of this blog, if you have a bit of time to read more, is my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, also found on the right sidebar.

As far as my profile goes, I have a couple of mild corrections to make. The first is: did I really say “shocking” that many times? If so, I find it quite shocking–must correct that tendency. Also, the Howard Johnson’s piece I referenced was historical and nostalgic; HoJo’s is not presently a part of my life. Next: when I’m quoted as saying, “you step outside the circle and you see the emperor’s new clothes” I believe I actually said, “the emperor has no clothes (I know, picky, picky). Lastly, as I state in my FAQs, although I do have training and background as a marriage and family therapist, I am not currently practicing but have plans to open a private practice within the next six months to a year.

There you have it–accuracy in media.

“Second Draft” spotlights Pallywood: watching sausage being made

The New Neo Posted on by

It’ll be like having a look behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.
–Richard Landes, originator of Second Draft, in an interview at Solomonia.

By now you may have heard the buzz about Second Draft, a new media watchdog website (I was originally alerted to its existence by Daniel in Brookline).

Second Draft is a site that needs to be publicized and visited by as many people as possible, and so I’m trying to do my part. It shows what the internet can accomplish in opening up and expanding our ability to get at truth, and evaluating the honesty of what we read in the MSM and elsewhere, a topic I’ve discussed (perhaps ad nauseum) on this site.

Here’s a quote explaining Second Draft’s mission:

This website is devoted to exploring some of the problems and issues that plague modern journalism. In this age of globalization, the media has unprecedented influence on the way we see the world. And yet, whether out of misplaced good intentions, unconscious agendas and predispositions, or unwarranted faith in false information, they can get the story dramatically wrong. Therefore, we want to revisit and critique journalism’s “first draft of history”, and hopefully produce a more accurate second one. In our current investigations we present the story the way the mainstream media initially told it, introduce further evidence, and let you decide what you think really happened.

Right now, founder Landes, a professor of history at Boston University, has been concentrating on the work of what he calls “Pallywood.” It’s an ironic pun on India’s “Bollywood” film industry–but Pallywood, unlike Bollywood, is not for entertainment purposes.

Here is Second Draft’s explanation of Pallywood:

The material we show here constitutes a tiny fragment of a much larger phenomenon, raw footage from Palestinian photographers working for major western media outlets. From this material, our news agencies prepare news reports that shape our perceptions of what is happening in the Middle East Conflict.

We think that a close analysis of this material defies all expectations of what such footage should resemble, and suggest that Palestinian photographers do not at all share the same production and journalistic values espoused by a free press. We leave the experience and the judgment to you…

We feel that the material you are about to see bears witness to a failure of our MSM culture comparable to that of the Emperor and his court when he paraded naked in front of his public. Moreover, that error is kept from us only by our media’s refusal to let the public see their sources. Only the chance circumstances that brought this material to a few people’s attention, and the existence of an open internet where we can post the material, makes it possible for the public to consider this costly media embarrassment.

Future projects are to be announced; the site will not be limited to Pallywood and the Palestinians, or even the Middle East.

How and why did Landes take on this project? His background as a historian seems to be part of it, as well as in interest in the history of communications, and in the ability of experts to be duped by forgeries. Landes, who self-identifies as a leftist in this must-read Solomnia interview, sounds like a thoughtful man who doesn’t mince words when describing his current view of the MSM:

Look, everybody says that journalism is the first draft of history, but in this case, the first draft is so wrong that as a historian I feel like I need to step in and say Hey, wait a minute you guys. Even as a first draft, this stinks! [laughs] As a professor of history, I’ve got to say that if a graduate student wrote a first draft that was as credulous in its use of sources as the media has been in the case of the “second intifada,” then I’d say he wouldn’t make it through the first semester of grad school.

Solomon asks Landes whether, in his opinion, the the press was “duped, or did they play along with it? Were they willing participants?”

Here is Landes’ reply:

We want the web site to raise these questions and let people make their own judgments. Now, we think we have some answers, but we’re post-modern enough to think there isn’t only one answer. So for instance, in answer to your question, if we were to take a pie and slice it up, there would be a slice of journalists just out to make their living by providing their bosses in the West with action footage, another slice of people harboring some sort of bad faith or resentment — some kind of strong anti-Jewish feelings — then you’ve got another chunk of it who are people who really believe they are helping the Palestinians by recycling their propaganda. There’s this great line by Bob Simon [of 60 Minutes], ‘In the Middle East, one image can be worth 1000 weapons.’ I think that there’s a prevalent view in the press that since the Israelis have most of the weapons, the media can “level the playing field” by giving the Palestinians the media victory.

Solomon asks Landes whether he will be considered a conservative for the stance he’s taken on this issue, and Landes replies like an old-fashioned liberal, one of Norman Geras’ “principled leftists”:

No, it’s a liberal issue! Look it’s…the thing people don’t understand is that ‘our’ conservatives – the people like George Bush and Ariel Sharon – are so far to the left when you place them in the framework of say Arab politics that it’s a joke…OK? There’s no Arab leader that would tolerate the kinds of attacks that George Bush has tolerated without making sure that the people who did it were severely punished for their effrontery. The Arab Michael Moore who exposed the lies told by the Palestinian media that Arafat used to dupe the Palestinians into a losing war would never have survived long enough to show it.

Landes understands the potential for the blogosphere to change things. He turned to the internet because the MSM, not too surprisingly, wasn’t especially interested:

I teach the history of communications revolutions. I know the impact that the printing press had on the sort of imbedded manuscript culture that came before it. The internet will be in the 21st century to print media what the print media was to manuscript in the 16th. That’s why I’m going to the web, to the blogosphere. In the mainstream media, busy covering its naked ass, I can’t get the time of day. As one guy at ABC who admitted he was convinced by my material put it — “I’m not sure how much appetite there is for this stuff here.”

So I’m doing my best to show the ABC guy that the appetite is strong for viewing original sources and letting the reader be the judge.

Perhaps the MSM doesn’t understand the force of allowing the reader access to original footage and source material. Or perhaps it does, and that’s the problem. It could be that many in the MSM have the attitude that making news is like making sausage–they fear that if they let you see how it’s actually made, you might lose some of your taste for it.

Honoring Commodore Levy: Jews in the military

The New Neo Posted on by

When I studied history in grade school and high school, it was my least favorite subject. Dry and dull, a parade of disjointed dates and battles, all the juice had been squeezed out of it–which is a shame, because it needn’t be that way. History is not only exciting, it’s essential to know if we are to have even a hope of avoiding a repetition of our mistakes. What’s more, history features real–and usually very fascinating–people.

You wouldn’t think reporters would make the same errors as my old history texts. But sometimes, it seems they do.

Take this, for example, a rather ordinary article I spotted today in the Boston Globe. Originally written for the Washington Post, it’s a serviceable but uninspired piece about the opening of the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. The gist of the story is that although it took quite a while–longer than it should have–now

..Jewish midshipmen finally will have their own place on the campus to express their faith…The 35,000-square-foot center includes the 410-seat chapel, which will be used only for Jewish services, as well as a character learning center and fellowship hall for midshipmen of all faiths…With today’s dedication of the center, the Naval Academy will become the last of the three US military academies to provide Jews with their own worship space.

Later in the story the following sentence appears:

The chapel’s architect, Joseph Boggs, led visitors on a tour Thursday, showing them a pavilion at the chapel’s entrance that was modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello and a nearly 45-foot-high wall that is a replica of the Western Wall of Jerusalem.

Sounds nice; Monticello and the Western Wall. The Western Wall part makes sense–but what about that Monticello reference? That one’s a bit mysterious, is it not? After all, it’s not as though Jefferson had all that much to do with the Navy or with Judaism–although he did champion the cause of religious freedom.

The key to Monticello’s presence in the chapel lies in the background story the Globe/Post article leaves out, that of Commodore Uriah Levy, the man after whom the new building is named. Therein lies a colorful tale; Levy is a character well worth knowing about.

It turns out that Commodore Levy (1792-1862) (“Commodore” being the highest rank in the US Navy at the time Levy held the title) was, among other things, a Jefferson buff, and was responsible for buying and restoring Monticello, which had fallen into disrepair after Jefferson’s death. And, in fact, one of Jefferson’s well-known letters concerning religious freedom was penned to Mordecai Noah, who just happened to have been a cousin of Levy’s (they shared maternal grandfather Jonas Phillips, a Revolutionary War soldier of some renown. The Levy family in general appears to have had a propensity for distinguished military service).

The initial saving and restoration of Monticello was only one of Commodore Levy’s claims to fame. Another was that he was the man most responsible for the Navy’s abandonment of the practice of flogging.

The irrepressible Levy’s life reads like something out of a picaresque novel. One of my favorite details is that he ran away from home at the age of ten to become a cabin boy, returning a few years later to Philadelphia, his home town, for his Bar Mitzvah (when Levy made the traditional declaration “now I am a man” to the congregation, I would imagine they were inclined to agree with him rather more than is usual at a Bar Mitzvah). He shipped out again a few years later and spent most of his life in the Navy, rising up in the ranks in a career not without its setbacks, although he took a few years out to amass a generous fortune in real estate.

Among Levy’s setbacks were what may have been a record number of court-martials for a single person: six. Levy was hot-headed and proud, and some of these court-martials concerned fights, many of them occasioned by insults to his religion (in fact, in one of these duels he killed a man). Whether or not he was a Dreyfus-like figure being persecuted for religious reasons is not entirely clear, although he apparently thought so. At any rate, he had a phoenix-like ability to rise from each court-martial to even greater heights than before, and spearheaded the successful anti-flogging drive.

Here’s one of my favorite incidents in a life loaded with them:

In March of 1825 Levy joined the “Cyane” as the second lieutenant. While on the “Cyane,” Levy became very popular after saving the life of an American who had been impressed into the Brazilian Navy. The Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, was struck by Levy’s courageous act and ordered that no U.S. citizen ever again be impressed into the Brazilian Navy. Pedro then offered him the rank of captain in the Imperial Brazilian Navy. Levy declined, exhibiting his patriotism by stating, “I would rather serve as a cabin boy in the United States Navy than hold the rank of Admiral in any other service in the world.”

Here’s another chapter in an improbable life:

…Levy returned to America, and, with the start of the Civil War, Levy offered his military services as well as his entire fortune to save the Union. Instead, Lincoln installed him on the Court-Martial Board in Washington, despite his six courts-martial.

Six court-martials, and he ends up on the other side of the bench.

Levy’s life is fascinating. But Levy was just one man who served proudly in the US Navy. Levy is not alone, of course. It turns out that Jews have long had a significant presence in the Navy and in the military. You may be surprised (as I was) to find that at times their participation has been slightly higher than their percentage in the US population as a whole:

Block [a 1961 Annapolis graduate] said the Jewish chapel’s presence will correct “the general perception that we don’t serve in the military. People think that all Jewish boys do everything they can to avoid going into the service.” In fact, out of 16.3 million U.S. military personnel who served in World War II, an estimated 550,000 were Jewish. Today, there are about 100 Jews out of 4,000 midshipmen at the academy.

It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate choice than that of Commodore Uriah Levy for the name of the new Annapolis chapel. Levy was dedicated to the Navy, his country, the Jewish faith, and the cause of religious freedom, and this chapel combines them all.

One year* anniversary

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s my one-year blog anniversary. Sort of. Kind of.

Why the asterisk? Although the first day I ever posted on this blog was nominally almost exactly a year ago–September 16, 2004–I wrote very little for the first five months.

To tell the truth, starting the blog wasn’t even my idea. I’d been reading blogs and commenting on them for about two years, and that was more than enough for me. But when my son was up for a visit he suggested I start a blog of my own, since I was already spending so much time writing comments and letters to other blogs.

My first reaction was a vehement “No way.” I craved neither the spotlight nor the amount of work it would take. But my son said it was really easy to set one up; he’d even do it for me. And I didn’t have to ever actually post on it–but it would be there waiting for me, just in case.

He went to Blogger and showed me the templates, and to humor him (and to shut him up) I chose one. It was all done in a minute or two, and when he asked me what I wanted to call it I thought of “neophyte neocon.” But he pronounced that too long (I agreed) and suggested “neo-neocon.” So “neo-neocon” it was.

I didn’t much care. It was all quite irrelevant, since of course it would only be seen by me and by him and perhaps one or two other people on earth.

Here’s my first post, in its entirety: A test to see whether everything’s in order, blogwise. I didn’t post again for twelve days, and in those first few posts I’d not even figured out how to do a link. In September there were a grand total of two posts, in October a whopping four, then one in November and two in December (the election had exhausted me). I had a huge surge in January with six.

Then in February something happened. I’m not sure why, but suddenly I was writing more. I had installed a sitemeter during the last week of January, and it was sobering to see the tiniest of trickles. In late February it occurred to me that if I was doing this anyway, why not experiment and see if I could actually get some readers?

Despite the casualness of my start, I did have an idea for my blog, even from the first. I was determined to tell the story of my political change, the tale that my friends and family didn’t want to hear. I wanted to provide a forum for people who had similar stories to come and compare notes. I wanted to write about whatever else I wanted to write about.

So in late February I sent out a couple of e-mails introducing myself and my blog to a very small group of bloggers I considered simpatico.

I immediately was on the receiving end of kindness and got a couple of links. The traffic started climbing, the links kept coming, and the rest is history, of a sort. There are so many people to thank along the way that it’s probably easier to say thanks to 75% of my blogroll rather than to list them all–but a special thanks to Dr. Sanity, Vietpundit, and Norm Geras, who, whether they know it or not, I consider my original blogmother and blogfathers. Then there are Roger Simon and Austin Bay and and Michael Totten and Clive Davis and Dean Esmay and Dymphna and the Baron and…well, as I said, take a look at my blogroll.

And of course I want to thank all of the readers and commenters here. I’ve been very gratified at the uniformly high caliber of the comments–I think it’s worth coming just for those alone. After all, I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea–for one thing, I tend to specialize in the long essay rather than the short and snappy, and for another thing, well–I’ll just reiterate that I’m not everybody’s cup of tea (or, as one commenter here famously wrote, “one of the most painfully boring blogs of all times”).

Writing this blog has been hard work, but it’s been wonderful.

One of the best things about blogging is seeing readers come here from all over the world. I hadn’t known what tales a sitemeter could tell until I had one of my own, so it was wondrous to me when I first saw sights such as this typical one, representing a random snapshot of the time zones of recent readers :

or this one, of the countries of recent visitors:

So welcome to my blog, and welcome to my first anniversary party. The cake will have to be virtual, but at least it won’t be fattening:

On the kindness of strangers: the aftermath of Katrina

The New Neo Posted on by

I know Bush must have given an excellent speech last night because a liberal friend of mine pronounced it “moving” and “inspiring” in somewhat awed and surprised tones. Something he said, or perhaps the way he said it, touched her as nothing he’d ever done before.

My friend is also a barometer that tells me that the media may have overplayed its Bush-bashing hand on Katrina, big time, because she added that it’s unreasonable to expect Bush could have done much to have changed things; she thinks the local authorities were most at fault. And all this from a women who until now has not had a kind word to say about the man.

So first there was Katrina itself, and then there was the reporting on Katrina. Now there is the initial aftermath of Katrina as the actual facts are becoming more widely known, and the more slowly-evolving secondary aftermath. In these later aftermaths there are some stories that can only be described as heartwarming.

Betsy’s Page led me to this article that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. It is a tale of renewal and hope for three men made homeless by Katrina:

For Henry, Smith and a third evacuee, Vylandrus Dupree, who is now being housed at a resort in Arkansas, the unimaginable disaster has led to an unimaginable gift. Through a series of chance encounters and random decisions made by relief workers, these young African American men find themselves in parts of the country they had never seen before, and each believes there is no going back.

In the Tenessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” set in New Orleans, the character Blanche Du Bois, abused and driven to madness, utters her famous line “I’ve come to rely on the kindness of strangers” as she is taken away to an insane asylum. The line is powerfully ironic in the play, but in post-Katrina reality it is delivered straight:

[Katrina evacuees] just got on a plane only knowing they were going to be taken somewhere for shelter, and they ended up happening to come to Battle Creek,” said Capt. Aaron Jenkins, a spokesman for the Michigan National Guard. “That’s what happened to a lot of people.”

When Henry got off the bus at the base, people were holding signs saying “Welcome” and “I love you.”

Henry said he was glad to have been given a way out of New Orleans. He talked about the violence and drugs that had surrounded him there, the “harassment by police” and “false promises” by politicians.

“The Lord was telling me it was time for a change,” he said. “I am going to take this opportunity to change my life and start a new beginning.”

Henry has found a new life in Michigan, a place to which he’d never been before. Another New Orleans resident, Cash Smith, found himself whisked off to another far-off place he’d never imagined going:

Chad Ladov and two of his friends in Denver had watched the unfolding disaster in New Orleans as had millions of other Americans. One of the friends, Andrew Hudson, worked at Denver-based Frontier Airlines, and asked his company whether it could fly New Orleans evacuees to Denver free. When the company agreed, the trio immediately left for Houston, where thousands of evacuees were being housed at the Astrodome…The three friends canvassed the Astrodome, putting up signs and posters about their Denver proposal. That’s when they came by Cash Smith.

“Hey, dude, do you want to come to Denver?” Smith recalled them asking…

“I have no money,” Smith replied.

The group told him the airline ride to Denver was free. They promised him help in finding a job and getting on his feet.

“Why not give it a try?” Ladov said.

Smith decided to take a chance. After all, he was surrounded by strangers in the stadium; why not trust these three?

“I have lost everything else,” he said he thought to himself. “What do I have to lose?”

Smith and his family will stay in Denver.

And another man who fled New Orleans in the path of Katrina, Vylandrus Dupree, found himself in another unexpected and undreamt-of place:

Volunteers helped Dupree enroll at the University of Arkansas. “It’s a big opportunity,” he said. “I would have been a fool not to take it.”

Dupree said a clergyman he had met at the Red Cross facility had helped him find a job at a Walgreens drugstore.

There was no question of going back to New Orleans, Dupree said. “It’s beautiful up here.”

Some telling statistics: for two-thirds of those people whom Ladov and his friends flew to Denver, it was the very first time they’d ever been on an airplane. And all of those evacuated to northwest Arkansas were given the following choice: stay in that part of Arkansas, move back to New Orleans, or relocate elsewhere. Ninety-five percent chose to stay in Arkansas, an extraordinary percentage.

Sometimes relying on the kindness of strangers seems a good bet.

[ADDENDUM: Apparently these three are hardly the exceptions; many evacuees do not plan to return. Via Captain’s Quarters, the Washington Post reports the following poll results:

Forty-three percent of these evacuees planned to return to New Orleans, the survey found. But just as many — 44 percent — said they will settle somewhere else, while the remainder were unsure. Many of those who were planning to return said they will be looking to buy or rent somewhere other than where they lived. Overall, only one in four said they plan to move back into their old homes, the poll found.]