Are the lights going out all over Europe? Trump warned them

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This ties in somewhat with the post I just published, about China buying US land.]

It was obvious that Europe’s dependence on Russia for energy would be a bad thing. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to the leaders of various European countries who let it happen. It’s also obvious that it was virtue-signaling at its finest, because if the goal – for those who believe in AGW as a grave danger – was to save the planet by reducing the use of fossil fuels, an easier and more self-sufficient way would have been to invest more in nuclear power. Using Russian fuel just changes the source of the fossil fuel, after all.

Donald Trump warned them, but they didn’t listen. Such a stupid clown, and such a puppet of Russia!

Well, now this sort of thing is happening:

Also Spain:

Also please see this.

I mentioned Trump and what he told Europe – especially Germany – about its dependence on Russian fossil fuels. It’s instructive to actually have a look and listen; this is from 2018:

Here was Merkel’s response:

In less blunt language than the US president’s, the German chancellor made the point that she needed no lessons in dealing with authoritarian regimes, recalling she had been brought up in East Germany when it had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

Arriving at Nato headquarters only hours after Trump singled out Germany for criticism, Merkel said: “I have experienced myself how a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union. I am very happy that today we are united in freedom, the Federal Republic of Germany. Because of that we can say that we can make our independent policies and make independent decisions.

And then there was this sort of thing:

Har de har har har.

NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this famous quote:

On 3 August 1914 Sir Edward Grey made his famous quote: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. He was speaking to his friend, the journalist John Alfred Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, in Grey’s room in the Foreign Office. Looking out from his window, across St. James’ Park, it was dusk and the first of the gas lights along the Mall were being lit. The next day Grey would have to face the Cabinet and to persuade them that the time had now come to declare war on Germany.

It’s a little like selling the rope, but it’s selling the land instead

The New Neo Posted on by

It was Lenin (or Stalin, or Marx) who supposedly said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Whoever really said it, it’s one of those pithy witticisms that encapsulate some sort of truth, in this case the fact that under a capitalist system there’s a large risk that some people (or perhaps many) will, in order to make money, do something that ends up undermining the entire system. Either they’re not far-sighted enough, don’t care or would like to actively sabotage the system, or they have decided that the short-term gain is worth the risk.

The decades-long outsourcing to China of so much of what used to constitute the US economy is a good illustration. Trump tried to stop or reverse it, but Trump is no longer president and there were and still are a lot of people set to lose money if it were to happen.

China is still a Communist country in which the ruling and only party is the Communist Party. But it’s not your father’s Communist Party, if your father was Stalin or Mao. It’s this kind of Communist Party:

During the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping directed the CCP away from Maoist orthodoxy and towards a policy of economic liberalization. The official explanation for these reforms was that China is still in the primary stage of socialism, a developmental stage similar to the capitalist mode of production. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CCP has emphasized its relations with the ruling parties of the remaining socialist states, and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties each year.

So China got into the capitalism game, but it’s a capitalism controlled by Communists (kind of like the way we might be headed?). Here’s some news that’s relevant:

One of the most underreported stories in the media right now is the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to buy large areas of land throughout the United States…

Republican senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Tom Cotton of Arkansas are introducing a bill to stop this from going further.

Here’s the bill. From a press release:

“Chinese investments in American farmland put our food security at risk and provide opportunities for Chinese espionage against our military bases and critical infrastructure. Instead of allowing these purchases, the U.S. government must bar the Communist Party from purchasing our land,” said Cotton.

“We cannot continue giving our top adversary a foot in the door to purchase land in the United States and undermine our national security,” said Tuberville. “I hope my colleagues will recognize the importance of our bill and join the effort to prohibit Chinese Communist Party involvement in America’s agriculture industry.”

In the olden days – and not all that long ago – this would have had bipartisan support. Now I believe it has zero chance of passing. I’m not sure it would pass even if Republicans had control of Congress, although it certainly might. But too many people in US government are also compromised by their own ties to Chinese interests and Chinese money.

NOTE: This post made me think of the first line of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” It’s far from my favorite poem of his and I don’t think it’s one of his best, but I like that first line:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Even if you remember Frost reciting that poem at JFK’s inauguration, as I do, you may not realize this:

Robert Frost was the first poet to speak at the inauguration of a president, reciting from memory “The Gift Outright,” when the glare of the sun prevented him from reading “Dedication,” a poem he had written specially for the occasion.

Looking at the text of that poem today, I’d say it’s not the least bit memorable, just a bit of verse tossed off to order and nothing like Frost’s great, great works, of which there are so many I’d be hard-pressed to choose my favorites. I do know the list would be long.

And then there’s the increased funding for the IRS

The New Neo Posted on by

One less-discussed part of the new spending bill about to be passed is the money being appropriated for the IRS to go after taxpayers with greater vigor. The following is from a WSJ editorial:

The $80 billion [proposed funding for the IRS] is more than six times the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion. The money will be ladled out over nine years and comes with few strings attached. The main Democratic command is for the tax agency to bring the hammer down on taxpayers.

The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for “enforcement,” including “litigation,” “criminal investigations,” “investigative technology,” “digital asset monitoring” and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals.

The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000.

And of course you probably recall how, during the Obama administration, the IRS became a tool of the Democrats and went after political groups on the right. Looking for a link for that assertion just now, I came across this ABC article from 2013, and I thought I’d reproduce some of it because it’s such a fine example of what “journalism” has come down to [comments in brackets are mine]:

Conservative groups have rejected an Internal Revenue Service apology for unjustifiably scrutinizing tax-exempt conservative groups during the 2012 election cycle. The IRS apology has seemingly validated conservatives’ fears of politically motivated regulation.[What is this “seemingly” business? It obviously validated, not their fears, but their realistic fact-based assessment of what actually occurred.]

House Republican leaders, meanwhile, have vowed to investigate.[Mean old Republicans pounce!]

Lois Lerner, the director the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations, said that organizations had been given additional scrutiny if their applications included the words “Tea Party” or “patriot.” [Does this not resonate with the recent FBI targeting of things such as the Betsy Ross flag and the Gadsden flag? Why yes, yes it does. Fancy that!] The practice originated with “low-level” employees in Cincinnati, according to an Associated Press report. [Those “Sergeant Schultz” higher-ups again.]

…”They didn’t do it because of any political bias,” Lerner said, adding that singling out groups with specific names was an ill-thought-out organizational “shortcut.” [This remark of Lerner’s would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and so typical of the denials we hear from government higher-ups almost every day.]

“It was an error in judgment and it wasn’t appropriate but that’s what they did,” she said. [And strangely enough, none of the higher-ups had a clue, right? Hey, what do those upper-level agency people do, anyway – when they’re not fabricating charges against Donald Trump, I mean?]

“We’ve now corrected these issues, and we don’t expect that any of these will be repeated going forward.”[Not exactly and precisely the same things in the same way – but other things in other ways.]

Despite the apology, conservative groups are now seizing on the news [Republicans pounce and seize!], which they say proves their long-standing complaints of mistreatment by the IRS. [They say, but what do they know? After all, Lois Lerner has denied it was purposeful.]

“President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again,” said Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots.[This represents an interesting example of the naivete of someone like Martin. The thought that an apology from Obama would matter if it were issued, and that he’d actually try to stop the persecution of right-wing groups, is absurd.]

But let’s return to the current bill and that recent WSJ editorial:

The federal government isn’t starving for revenue. Congress wants more tax revenue because it can’t control its appetite for spending. That’s why it wants a tax agency in beast mode.

True, but I think it’s more than that. It’s purposeful targeting of the middle class, although many people in that group won’t realize it. And because the IRS has become a political tool for the Democrats, giving the IRS more power and resources makes perfect sense for the Democrat goals of not just defeating the right but crushing it.

Sinema joins Manchin in fighting inflation with inflation

The New Neo Posted on by

Or something like that.

Sinema has agreed to this bill, and as far as I know that means the Democrats have the 50 Senate votes – plus the tie-breaker vote of Harris – to pass this by reconciliation. The only remaining question, as far as I can see, is whether the CBO will score it as acceptable, and since the bill-writers know how to game the system, that will probably happen as well. Then there’s also the Senate parliamentarian, and if I’m not mistaken, even if there’s an objection there the Senate majority does whatever it wants.

The act will help people save money on prescription drugs and health premiums, Biden said in a statement on Thursday.

“It will make our tax system more fair by making corporations pay a minimum tax,” he said.

And I’m quite sure the corporations involved will never, never ever, pass the charge on to the consumer.

Sinema said she had reached an agreement with other Democrats to remove a provision that would impose new taxes on carried interest. Without the provision, private equity and hedge fund financiers can continue to pay the lower capital gains tax rate on much of their income, instead of the higher income tax rate paid by wage-earners.

She cautioned that her agreement to “move forward” was subject to the review of the Senate parliamentarian. The parliamentarian has to approve the contents of the bill to allow it to move forward through the “reconciliation” process that Democrats plan to use to bypass the chamber’s normal rules requiring 60 Senators to agree to advance most legislation.

About the bill’s effect on inflation:

A letter sent to House and Senate leadership from 230 economists argues that the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to contribute to skyrocketing inflation and will burden the U.S. economy, contrary to President Biden and Democrats’ claims.

The economists wrote in the letter first obtained by Fox News Digital that the U.S. economy is at a “dangerous crossroads” and the “inaptly named ‘Inflation Reduction Act of 2022’ would do nothing of the sort and instead would perpetuate the same fiscal policy errors that have helped precipitate the current troubling economic climate.”…

The economic experts point to the $433 billion in proposed government spending, which they argue “would create immediate inflationary pressures by boosting demand, while the supply-side tax hikes would constrain supply by discouraging investment and draining the private sector of much-needed resources.”

“Inaptly named”? The economist authors need to brush up on their Orwell. The bill is very aptly named.

This is from yesterday:

Last week, Graham asked CBO about the current fragile state of our nation’s economy and the potential impact of this latest Reckless Tax and Spend bill.

“When it comes to the Manchin-Schumer so-called ‘inflation reduction’ proposal, another shoe has just dropped. According to CBO analysis, the proposal’s effect on inflation is negligible at best. The estimate ranges from reducing inflation by 0.1 percent to increasing it by 0.1 percent in the near term. The idea that this tax and spend proposal is going to blunt inflation is yet again rejected, this time by CBO. Democratic statements about the proposal are quite frankly wrong and misleading.

“Further, CBO indicates that the Obamacare subsidies can go to a family of four earning $304,000 a year. This is, by any reasonable definition, people who are doing well and not in need of subsidies from the government. Also, CBO confirmed my suspicion that the way the 15 percent corporate minimum tax is constructed would hurt economic growth.

“So what have we learned today from CBO? The bill does not lower inflation, it hurts economic growth and the Obamacare subsidies are absurd.

Par for the course. It will pass.

Commenter “PA Cat” calls our attention to this; it’s not just about inflation or no inflation:

This week news broke that congressional Democrats had finally reached a deal on the largest piece of climate legislation in American history. The bill is a tax-and-spend cornucopia of some $369 billion for wind, solar, geothermal, battery, and other industries over the next decade, along with generous subsidies for electric vehicles and incentives to keep nuclear plants open and capture emissions from industrial plants. . . . Understand that the Senate bill isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. Climate activists and ideologues are working at the highest levels to transform not just the global food supply, but the nature of private property and property rights, all in the name of saving the planet. What Rutte and his government are doing to Dutch farmers, Schumer and Biden are planning to do to American farmers and American industries. So pay attention to the roadside fires and blocked highways and mass civic unrest in places like the Netherlands and Sri Lanka. America is next.

One thing I’m very much in favor of from that list is keeping nuclear plants open. And I have nothing against other alternative sources of power – except that many are unrealistic and don’t do what they’re cracked up to do.

NOTE: Here’s some speculation as to what Manchin might think he’ll get from acquiescing to the bill. I’ve not seen much about what Sinema thinks she’ll get, except that the removal of the carried interest provision (eliminated at her insistence) will curry favor with groups that have contributed quite a bit of money to her in the past.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a good jobs report for July, much better than expected. What does it mean? Your guess is as good as – probably even better than – mine. But don’t jobs often go up in the summer because of summer jobs? And isn’t hiring going on in a sort of rebound effect from the COVID drop?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total nonfarm employment has increased by 22 million from its low in April 2020 and has fully recovered to return to its pre-pandemic level…

“The July employment report was an absolute knock-out, a major upside surprise relative to my expectations and indeed much of the labor market data released up to this point,” Renaissance Macro Research Head of U.S. Economics Neil Dutta said in a note. “Talk of recession and a monetary policy pivot is premature.”

“That said, this jobs report is consistent with an inflationary boom,” Dutta added. “The Fed has a lot more work to do and in an odd way, that the Fed needs to get more aggressive in pushing up rates, makes the hard-landing scenario more likely.”…

Markets reacted negatively to the report, which served as affirmation to investors the U.S. central bank is likely to stay on track with aggressive rate hikes.

One thing I do know from personal observation is that a lot of restaurants and stores where I live are seeking workers and having trouble finding them.

Head of the FBI Wray testifies in the usual manner

The New Neo Posted on by

Not that these sorts of hearings generally matter, but Ted Cruz had quite an exchange today with current FBI director Christoper Wray:

If you want some clarification on the Gadsden flag, see this, which also describes the leftist reaction to the fact that Florida now has a Gadsden flag variant available, proceeds from the sale of which will go to benefit veterans.

More from Cruz and Wray:

By the way, Wray’s retort to Cruz, beginning at 00:48, that the Michigan case “is now pending a retrial” is quite misleading. The first reason is that it’s only two out of four defendants who are being retried, because the jury in the original trial was hung for two of them and acquitted two others outright. Both the original trial and the retrial were federal cases, and so it’s the federal government that made the decision to keep going after the two defendants – the same federal government that entrapped them in the first place. The acquittals and the hung jury were a great embarrassment to the federal government and the FBI – as Wray certainly knows despite his Sergeant Schultz impersonation – and the feds refuse to drop the case because they are determined to redeem themselves even though the evidence remains lousy. Who knows, they may even get their convictions. If they don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.

Trying to iron out the meaning of that confusing Kansas amendment vote on abortion

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a little more background on the confusion.

In 2019 the Kansas Supreme Court had ruled that the state constitution includes a right to abortion, based on reasoning such as this:

The decision, in which one of the seven justices dissented, cites in its first sentence the first section of the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The decision continues: “We are now asked: ‘Is this declaration of rights more than an idealized aspiration? And, if so, do the substantive rights include a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, including the decision whether to continue her pregnancy? We answer these questions, ‘Yes.’ ”

The court continued that “this right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life — decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy.”

“The State may only infringe upon the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy,” the ruling continued, “if the State has a compelling interest and has narrowly tailored its actions to that interest.”

That was in the Roe days, of course. Obviously, the state constitution is not explicit in protecting a right to abortion; this was something the judiciary decided, as a sort of “penumbra” (they didn’t use that word) of some fairly standard American rights language.

On Tuesday, the voters of Kansas had this to ponder:

[The] Legislative Power to Regulate Abortion Amendment was on the ballot in Kansas as a legislatively referred constitutional amendment on August 2, 2022…

A “yes” vote supported amending the Kansas Constitution to:

–state that nothing in the state constitution creates a right to abortion or requires government funding for abortion and
–state that the legislature has the authority to pass laws regarding abortion.

A “no” vote opposed amending the Kansas Constitution, thereby maintaining the legal precedent established in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt (2019) that the Kansas Bill of Rights provides a right to abortion.

I doubt that most people are even aware that the language in the state constitution which the Kansas Supreme Court said provided a right to abortion was the same general language in the US Declaration of Independence, which says nothing about abortion rights. I certainly wasn’t aware of it until I did the research for this post; a lot of articles just mentioned language in the Kansas state constitution that establishes a right to abortion, and I assumed that language was explicit. But it is not. So the new amendment had to do with clarifying that there was no such language, contrary to what the Kansas Supreme Court had ruled in 2019.

Right now, Kansas law allows for abortion under the following circumstances:

Kansas’ abortion restrictions already include limiting abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy to cases where the pregnant person’s life is in danger. The state also requires an ultrasound before a procedure.

There’s a lot of propaganda being written about what the Tuesday vote meant or didn’t mean. Plus, I doubt it’s fully understood by most people, and the MSM (including that link in NPR) doesn’t even try to make it clear. But as far as I can tell, what was actually being voted on was whether the previous decision by the judiciary that the state constitution should be interpreted as establishing a right to abortion ought to remain as is. The new amendment – which was defeated – was an attempt to clarify that the constitution of the state actually does not grant such a right.

In that sense, at least for now – as a result of both the earlier Kansas Supreme Court decision plus this week’s vote – the state can’t ban abortion entirely. That doesn’t mean Kansans couldn’t amend the state constitution in the future to specifically say that abortion could be banned entirely. Then, after that, the legislature could pass such a banning law if it saw fit (I doubt it would do that, but it then at least could do it). Then the Kansas Supreme Court could revisit the question, if necessary, if there was a case that challenged the new legislation. Or, even without such as amendment and new legislation, the Kansas Supreme Court could take on a new case if one arose, and re-interpret the present wording of the state constitution differently than it did in 2019, effectively reversing itself.

However, I believe that even now the state could restrict abortion somewhat more than it does right now, for example to a shorter gestation period than 22 weeks, or make other changes – if the state has a “compelling interest and has narrowly tailored its actions to that interest.”

DeSantis makes a bold move…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and fires a state prosecutor who pledged to defy the law.

What a novel idea – that state prosecutors cannot overrule the legislature and act as the judiciary, thus rolling all three branches of government into the executive branch!

This is what happened:

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis announced Thursday the suspension of rogue Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, who pledged not to enforce a number of state laws including a 15-week abortion ban and prohibitions on sex changes for minors.

“Today we are suspending state attorney Andrew Warren effective immediately,” DeSantis declared.

Warren was one of 83 prosecutors nationwide who in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade signed a letter promising not to prosecute those who perform, abet, or seek abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

“This 15-week ban is an unconstitutional law. The Legislature is hoping courts ignore the Florida constitution. But I’m upholding the law and protecting the fundamental rights of all Floridians,” Warren said in a statement provided to the Tampa Bay Times.

The DeSantis administration has argued that the governor has the authority to suspend a state officer under Article IV, Section 7 of the Florida Constitution, according to a press release. Susan Lopez has been appointed as interim State Attorney during the period of the suspension.

By that provision, the governor can suspend from office a county officer for “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension.” At any time before removal, the governor may reinstate the suspended officer…

“If the law conflicts with your idiosyncratic vision of social justice,” that doesn’t mean you have veto power over the law, he asserted.

The suspension came after DeSantis’s office conducted a survey of how certain laws are being received by district attorneys in Florida. Warren’s actions, he determined, are “beyond exercising discretion when you make an individual case and decide it shouldn’t be prosecuted.”

“Where it goes across the line is when it’s being used to effectively nullify what the legislature has done,” he said.

He’s absolutely correct. The proper action for Warren himself, by the way, ought to have been to resign, if his conscience troublee him about enforcing laws with which he disagreed, and then to campaign for the repeal of those laws.

My guess is that Warren didn’t think that DeSantis would have the cojones to do such a thing. Or that, if he did, the blowback against DeSantis would be fierce. I am virtually certain the left will excoriate DeSantis for this, but they do that every day that ends with a “y.”

I also wonder whether any other governor will follow suit.

ADDENDUM: In line with whether any other governor will follow suit, I’ll add that, as far as suspending state prosecutors goes, I think DeSantis was in a fairly unique position. He’s a conservative governor in a reddish state, and the prosecutor was a state prosecutor refusing to prosecute duly passed laws. Most of these progressive prosecutors are in blue states with Democrat governors, and in counties and not the whole state. So there’s no real conflict there, and until DeSantis and this prosecutor in Florida there wasn’t really a situation where a suspension like this could happen.

The only exception I can think of offhand is in Texas, with this:

Travis County District Attorney José Garza on Monday denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s move to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision and reiterated his promise that his office will not prosecute people under the Texas law that will make it illegal to perform abortions.

The latest opposition to the ruling by an Austin public official comes days after City Council members pledged to vote on a resolution that calls on Austin police to make abortion investigations their lowest-priority cases.

Garza is one of several district attorneys across Texas to make the same promise, including John Creuzot in Dallas, Joe Gonzales in Bexar County, Brian Middleton in Fort Bend County and Mark Gonzalez in Nueces County.

However, legal experts said moves at the local level aren’t likely to give clinics enough reassurance to reopen their doors and begin performing abortions again. Officials at the state level could still enforce civil penalties against abortion providers and revoke licenses.

So I’m not sure whether Abbott could suspend Garza or the others, since they function at a country and not a state level. Perhaps he could, but I don’t know whether he’d bother to do so, because it may not matter much since the state can take over if it wishes, as described in that last sentence of the quote above.

A vanished world

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this post is taken from the title of a book of photographs by Roman Vishniac, of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Here is the story of how the photos were taken:

…[B]etween 1934 and 1939. Vishniac walked across Poland, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania with his camera, preserving for posterity images of a Jewish way of life fated soon to be destroyed. Of the 16,000 photographs he managed to take — secretly and under dangerous circumstances — he was able to rescue only about 2,000. Some he sewed into his clothing when he came to the United States in 1940, most he left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. A Vanished World brings together nearly 200 of these images…

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the photos and the situation. This is indeed a world that will soon vanish – not just vanish but be violently, cruelly, and purposely obliterated, with great suffering to its inhabitants.

And yet they’ve not all vanished. In fact, some of the former inhabitants of that vanished world are still around, although they are very elderly and won’t be here for much longer. This is an article about a recent get-together of 56 of them, and some of their reminiscences:

“You come home from Auschwitz like you fell from the sky,” [Auschwitz survivor Einhorn] recalled. He had “no parents, no siblings, no nothing.” He worked in the Tel Aviv port, but there was a time when he had to sleep in a public park. He had no living connections to the rest of the world and no one to guide him, just people who seemed eager to evade what he’d been through and what it might represent. For decades, no one asked Einhorn about the numbers on his arm, or seemed to care very much about them.

In New York, Einhorn worked at a kosher butcher shop on the Lower East side and raised a family. Most of a century later, the horrors of the Holocaust are still recent enough to be able to cause nightmares in the people who experienced them, Einhorn included. “You know, I still dream of Auschwitz,” he said. “My mind is still in Auschwitz … I’m still crying. I cry in the night, I cry in the day. I’m still not finished from there.”

It is indecent, not to mention inaccurate, to imply any neat ending to the survivors’ stories, as if living through the Holocaust were a fair price to pay for getting to spend the rest of one’s life in the United States making womens’ belts or selling kosher meat. If one insists on extracting any hope from the experience of the war and the subsequent decades, it shouldn’t come from the inevitable need to salvage meaning from evil, or from the psychological impulse to vulgarize tragedy in order to make it comprehensible, but from forces beyond the merely human, far outside our meager range of understanding.

If you’ve never read Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, or its less-well-known sequel The Reawakening, about Levi’s return to the post-Holocaust world, I highly recommend both. In my opinion they are the most brilliant things ever written on the subject.

I wrote a lengthy previous post discussing Levi – and his probable suicide. It contained this quote from Survival in Auschwitz, which gives you a flavor of his work:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.