The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 11.23.18

Posted on | November 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Reminder – the FMJRA links are due to me by noon Pacific time tomorrow, and Rule 5 Sunday links by midnight.
Going to do my damnedest to get a book post up tonight, and if not tonight, then tomorrow.

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Green Book – A Review
Twitchy: Watch Black Friday Shoppers Swarm A Victoria’s Secret In Chattanooga To Save $55 On Fleece Hoodies
Louder With Crowder: Purple-Haired Antifa Freak Goes Bananas At #HimToo Rally
According To Hoyt: Cutting Through The Cage
Monster Hunter Nation: The 2nd Amendment Is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha
Vox Popoli: No Media, No Alternative Media, No Interviews

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott:  Fathers, Teach Your Sons, also, Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Thanksgiving Edition
American Power: Perpetual War Over Perpetual Culture, also, Blame The “Culture Wars” On 1968
American Thinker: A Reminder That White Liberals Hate Living In Black Neighborhoods, also, Let’s Allow Jihadis To Speak For Themselves
Animal Magnetism: Happy Thanksgiving! also, Rule Five Black Friday News
BattleSwarm: William Shatner PSA On How Not To Immolate Yourself While Frying A Turkey, also, LinkSwarm For November 23
CDR Salamander: Happy Thanksgiving
Da Tech Guy: Those Discriminating Lactating Breasts! also, Collectivism Nearly Doomed The Pilgrims
Don Surber: Britain Meddled In 2016 Election, also, Nationalism Is Patriotism
Dustbury: You Dunderheads Are Supposed To Be Eating, also, Fark Blurb Of The Week
First Street Journal: Yet Still, They Kept Their Mouths Shut
The Geller Report: Another “Refugee” Acquitted Of Rape In France Due To “Different Cultural Norms”, also, Muslims Give Kenyan Family One Day To Return To Islam Or Be Killed
Hogewash: Trump & The 9th Circuit, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
JustOneMinute: Hit The Mall
Legal Insurrection: Laura Loomer Booted From Twitter For Criticizing Congresswoman-Elect Ilhan Omar, also, UC Berkeley Christian Student Senator Harassed For Abstaining From LGBT Vote
Michelle Malkin:
The PanAm Post: In Colombia, Venezuelan Agents Infiltrating Refugee Centers, also, From North To South, The Rise Of A New Strain Of Socialist Ignorance
Power Line: Fake History From The Washington Post, also, Barack Melts Down
Shark Tank: Jeb! Believes DeSantis Owes His Win To Black Moms
Shot In The Dark: It’s Friday
The Political Hat: Happy Thanksgiving For 2018!
This Ain’t Hell: ROK Uncovers Nine Sets Of War Dead Remains During DMZ Mine-Clearing Op, also, Oldest Pearl Harbor Survivor Dies
Victory Girls: Hillary Lectures Europe On Immigration, also, Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving Table Is Not Racist
Volokh Conspiracy: Why The Federal Law Banning Female Genital Mutilation Is Unconstitutional
Weasel Zippers: Seniors Share Thanksgiving Meal With Marines Who Saved Them From Fire, also,  The Greatest Threat To American Journalism Is The Loss Of Neutral Reporting
Mark Steyn: Probe-A-Palooza, also, It’s Open Line Black Friday!


Black Friday Deals
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Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Queer Feminism at DePaul University

Posted on | November 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

They’re all about ‘inclusion.’

The last time I paid attention to DePaul University (annual cost of attendance $54,210, including room and board) was in 2016, when students rioted over Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance on campus and Kayla Johnson, an African and Black Diaspora Studies major, took a swing at the speaker. A nominally Catholic school, DePaul is an overpriced institution providing a second-rate education to third-rate students. No reasonably well-informed Catholic parent would permit their child to attend DePaul, which has become a “social justice” garbage pile of perverse insanity with moral standards even lower than its nearly non-existent intellectual standards. Consider this description of a February 2016 event on the DePaul campus:

The Center for Identity, Inclusion & Social Change, LGBTQ Studies and the LGBTQ Faculty and Staff Network at DePaul University hosted an intergenerational discussion concerning the identity label “lesbian” Feb. 29 at DePaul University’s Student Center.
Faculty members Lourdes Torres (professor of Latin American and Latino Studies) and Ann Russo (associate professor and graduate program director in women’s and gender studies and director of LGBTQ Studies) facilitated the talk.
Also on hand were DePaul University students and staff members Katy Weseman (LGBTQA student services coordinator at the Center for Identity, Inclusion & Social Change), Sara Furr (director, Center for Intercultural Programs) and Suresh Mudragada (assistant director at the Center for Identity, Inclusion & Social Change), among others. . . .
Russo said she identifies as a “lesbian with queer politics and a queer vision.” She noted the work she’s done in the area of lesbian-centered scholarship and activism, including the Battered Lesbian Network (in Boston), Lesbians Against Racism and Dykes Against Oppression.

Isn’t that special? The “inclusion” program at DePaul includes “Social Justice Peer Advocates,”  participating in the Chicago Dyke March, an annual student drag show, Spectrum DePaul, Queer People of Color (QPOC) DePaul, and Act Out DePaul, an “LGBTQIA+ activist organization” that sponsors the annual “Lavender Graduation” for LGBTQIA+ students. Dyke marches, drag queens and social justice — that’s your $54,210-a-year “Catholic” education at DePaul.

‘Social Justice Peer Advocates’ at DePaul University.

Oh, the academic requirements at DePaul are so demanding:

A new course scheduled for the winter quarter at DePaul University will examine how gender plays a role in social media.
“Sex, Gender, and Social Media” (AMS 352) will focus “on the gendered and sex/sexuality content of major social media platforms and networking sites, such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr” to “ground our understanding of social media platforms in the context of established scholarship on social community development, cultural and media studies, and feminist and queer (LGBTQA) studies.”
The course promises to examine scenarios as “multiply-identified,” which means each example and social media platform will be dissected through lenses such as “class, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and ability.”
Sex, Gender, and Social Media aims to “examine how these platforms offer new opportunities for sexual education, sexual and erotic/romantic expression, the negotiation and exploration of sexual and gender identities, and feminist/queer media criticism, social activism, and community.”
It also promotes the idea that “global capitalism” and “neoliberal ideology” are “troubling aspects” of social media. The course will further examine how social media serves as a new outlet through which people can launch “public attacks on women and queer people.”

Basically, it’s a scheme to give academic credit to “social justice” snowflakes for whining about how oppressed they are.

Did I mention that earlier this year, the DePaul Women’s Center held an event with “sex workers” advocating prostitution? One speaker at the event said she is “training to be a professional dominatrix,” and said being a sex worker is “empowering because I’m able to express myself and my sexuality in a way that makes me feel attractive, in a way that makes me feel fun and happy.” Empowering happy whores at DePaul!

Also, DePaul was recognized on the list of “10 worst colleges for free speech” by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.



 

Category: Education, Gays, Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | November 23, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

“It’s just a flesh wound! Come back here & I’ll bite your leg off!”

“Sir, no time for Python. Only by some freak of the geometry that the shockwave left six floors. Obviously no nuke. Maybe a MOAB?”
“Yeah, this means that I can quit working on that stupid budget slide deck!”
“Look: have you got toys in the attic, sir? We need a casualty assessment, comms with HQ, and stand by to carry out emergency destruction procedures.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAH! Destruction? Can’t you see that’s done?”
“OK, Sir. Sit down. Jenkins, see if there’s coffee. I’m assuming command until the CO recovers.”
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Post-Thanksgiving After-Action Report

Posted on | November 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;
Sing praises to His Name, He forgets not His own.

Our family sang that ancient hymn — which originated in 16th-century Holland — before we ate the turkey, which was cooked by my son-in-law. We had 15 adults plus four grandchildren for the family meal, the first time all six of our children had been together this year. It was fun. I also offered a pre-meal reading of the following proclamation:

 

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be, that we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation. . . .
Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.
George Washington

Our holiday joy was made possible by ignoring such insults as this:

 

Notice that this deliberate demonization of white people, as perpetrators of “genocide” (a libel invented by radical activists in the 1960s), is necessary to an assertion of black supremacy — implying that black people are morally superior to whites, and that their Thanksgiving “ritual” is therefore superior to whatever white families do.

What is remarkable to me is not merely that the exercise of identity politics has become so habitual that no one can be allowed to take a day off from it, but that so many white people seem not to care that this kind of hateful nonsense is being promoted in our culture. Dose anyone suppose that anti-white propaganda has no effect? Go read Michael Harriot’s article, “The Caucasian’s Guide to Black Thanksgiving” and notice how many gratuitous anti-white insults he includes, e.g.:

It is about tradition. It is about family. It is the only day of the year where we have a respite from the world around us and we gather to celebrate our delicious blackness without worrying about white people coming around.
Except for that one white girl and her sh–ty tuna casserole.

Was this necessary? Was it humorous? To whom is it funny?

As I say, a joyous holiday requires us to ignore such insults, and Christianity commands us to refrain from answering in kind.  However, now that it’s Friday, I’m back to my usual business of cultural criticism, and I hope intelligent readers will consider what a firestorm of outrage would be generated if any white person did respond to Harriot’s celebration of “delicious blackness” with the level of scorn it deserves.

Here’s a helpful suggestion: Never write anything about race that you would not wish to be read by anyone of any race. I have no problem with Michael Harriot making fun of the kind of “white girl” who would show up at a black family’s Thanksgiving dinner with a tuna casserole, but how many white people might respond to such a joke by saying something genuinely offensive? Among the many things for which we should be thankful this time of year are human decency and courtesy. Amen.

By the way: Be sure to shop Black Friday Deals at Amazon.



 

Category: Family

Was the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Against President Trump a Trans-Atlantic Affair?

Posted on | November 22, 2018 | 2 Comments

 

When Steve Bannon and others began speaking of the “Deep State,” many people dismissed this as a paranoid conspiracy theory, without bothering to investigate what this phrase actually signifies. Let me summarize briefly: During the past 25 years or so, since the end of the Cold War, a general consensus about the shape of the international order has emerged among the policy-making elite, and the bureaucracies of the federal government are staffed with people who share this consensus. On a host of issues from climate change to immigration to trade, this consensus has solidified into a sort of secular religion among government employees, who oppose any attempt to disrupt the existing arrangements (e.g., “Brexit” or revising NAFTA). In 2016, those who share this policy consensus were “all-in” for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, because she was committed to a continuation of the status quo, whereas Donald Trump vowed to disrupt the existing order.

The “Deep State” refers to the fact — and it is a now an established fact, not a paranoid theory — that efforts to prevent Trump’s election were supported by personnel of national-security agencies, including the CIA and the FBI. Anyone who has paid attention to the texts between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Pages can see this. And U.S. allies have also been implicated in the effort to prevent Trump’s election:

MI6 [the British intelligence agency] is locked in a secret battle with US President Donald Trump to persuade him not to disclose documents linked to the Russian election-meddling probe — it has been revealed.
Intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic told the Telegraph that spy bosses in London were frantically appealing to Trump not to make the classified documents public.
The President’s aides have reportedly hit back with questions over why Britain wants the documents to be kept secret.
But authorities in the UK say they have ‘genuine concern’ about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public.
Other sources also said MI6 was concerned the publication of the documents would set a ‘dangerous precedent’ for the release of top secret information, and may dissuade future sources from coming forward.
A US based intelligence source said: ‘I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don’t want to be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA.’
The documents in question concern an FBI request to wiretap former Trump policy adviser Carter Page, submitted a month before the Presidential election in 2016.
Documents show the FBI suspected Page of being lured in by Russian intelligence, and the bureau was given leave to place him under intense surveillance for several months. . . .
Memos describing alleged ties between Trump and Russia compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele are contained in the papers, which may form part of the reason for Britain’s concern.
Steele is most notable for authoring a dossier which claims Russia collected a file of compromising information on Trump.

Whatever policy quarrels Americans might have amongst ourselves, we ought to be able to agree that policy should be determined by elected officials, and not by the “hired help.” Employees of the FBI and the CIA are not independent policy-makers, but must answer to the President and to Congress. If federal employees are permitted to use their offices to interfere in the electoral process — effectively, to choose their own bosses — then the government ceases to be the servant of the people, and becomes the master. The manufactured outrage over “Russian collusion,” claiming that Trump is a Putin puppet, is a distraction from the issue of how the bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government has become a subversive influence in our politics and an obstacle to real reform.

What the alarm in British intelligence agencies shows is that “Deep State” operatives like Peter Strzok had the assistance of “Deep State” operatives in the U.K. in attempting to prevent Trump’s election. The claims by MI6 that declassification of these wiretaps might reveal sensitive counter-terrorism secrets are almost certainly a bogus argument, as what they actually seek to conceal is the extent to which Her Majesty’s government was part of a corrupt project intended to help elect Hillary Clinton.



 

Category: Corruption

Thank God for Liberals

Posted on | November 22, 2018 | Comments Off on Thank God for Liberals

 

If it weren’t for liberals, we might enjoy our turkey in peace:

Around this time every year, coastal media trot out a series of articles “preparing” a very particular set of readers for encounters with opinions unlike their own, which says more about them than the subject of their writing, but anyway…
This year is no different, except for the fact that their attempts to normalize contentious Thanksgiving Dinner conversation are far less veiled than years past. Once upon a time, there was at least a pretense of impartiality. But this is 2018 and everything with which they disagree is abhorrent and at the very least, racist.

Like the Pilgrims, liberals are convinced of their own moral superiority. The rest of us are ignorant savages, in need of enlightenment.

Here’s the thing, though: No actual effort is necessary for the liberal to feel superior to others. All he has to do is to espouse the appropriate belief — and vote Democrat — and he’s better than you. This is why liberalism tends to flourish in fields like academia, journalism and show business, where everything is about words and ideas. Also, liberalism is common among atheists, for whom it functions as a substitute for religion, and is rare among Christians. If you think of yourself as dependent upon God’s grace, you’re not a liberal because (a) liberalism is a godless creed, and (b) the liberal believes everyone is, or should be, dependent on the federal government. Their grim atheist belief system makes liberals humorless and hateful:

Student groups at the University of Oregon are hosting an event on Tuesday to “decolonize” Thanksgiving.
The UO’s Native American Law Students Association and the Native American Student Union are hosting an event, titled, “Thanks But No Thanks-giving: Decolonizing an American Holiday.” The event will focus on how people can continue to give thanks, while at the same time “raising [their] critical consciousness and identifying ways to decolonize the holiday.”
“Millions of families gather together every year to celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States. Many Americans do not grow up thinking much of the history behind the holiday,” the event description states. “The main messages are that of gratitude, food, and family; however, Thanksgiving is, foundationally speaking, a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures across the globe.”
Several departments at the university are sponsoring the event, including the Division of Student Life, University Counseling Center, Division of Equity and Inclusion, and Center for Multicultural Academic Excellence.

So, yes, be thankful for the liberals who show up at your Thanksgiving feast, to remind you how lucky you are to maintain your sanity.



 

Category: Liberals

In The Mailbox: 11.21.18

Posted on | November 21, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.21.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

No linkagery tomorrow on account of Thanksgiving, which I’ll be spending with friends in Utah. Do people want me to double up on the linkagery for Friday, or should I just do a book post along with the usual linkfest? Let me know in the comments.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #446
EBL: Bulgaria Shows How To Treat Old Soviet Statues
Twitchy: Jon Favreau Remembers Obama Being Much More Respectful To SCOTUs, Trips Over Notorious SOTU Speech
Louder With Crowder: Rose McGowan Wants To Meet With Trump On Guns. He Should Take The Meeting

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Tough Guys
American Power: Rains Threaten Northern California’s Burned Areas
American Thinker: When Muslims Rape European White Women, Whose Fault Is It?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: World’s Shortest Rebellion Ends
CDR Salamander: Front Line Nations Can’t Take A Back Seat Against Russian Submarines
Da Tech Guy: The Mysteries Of A Lame Duck Congress
Don Surber: Judge Lifts Ban On Mutilating Girls
Dustbury: That Sagging Back End
First Street Journal: Hold Them Accountable!
The Geller Report: Oz PM Scott Morrison Accuses Muslim Leaders Of Failing Community, also, Asia Bibi’s Family Being Hunted “House To House” In Pakistan
Hogewash: Don’t Know Much Biology, also, Avoid Black Friday
JustOneMinute: More Resistance Porn, also, They Forgot To Repeal The Rule Of Unintended Consequences
Legal Insurrection: Mexican Ambassador To U.S. Says There’s Criminals In The Migrant Caravan, also, Court Allows NRA Lawsuit Against NY Gov Cuomo Over “blacklist” To Proceed
Michelle Malkin: First Step – Pro-Cop, Pro-Borders, Pro-Criminal Justice Reform
The PanAm Post: I Am I And My Circumstances
Power Line: Liberal Racism In Action, also, Orange (County) Is The New Blue
Shark Tank: Trump Bashes Liberal 9th Circuit Court Over Asylum Decision
Shot In The Dark: A Man Needs A Woman Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle
STUMP: Mornings With Meep – Dostoevsky’s The Gambler
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – It’s Time
The Political Hat:
This Ain’t Hell: Vietnam Hero Awarded The Navy Cross, also, Sock Puppet Alert!
Victory Girls: Election Fraud? What Election Fraud?, also, On Thanksgiving, Be Grateful And Ignore The Political
Volokh Conspiracy: FASORP – Pushing Back Against Identity Politics On Campus
Weasel Zippers: After Vicious Broward County School Fight, Student Not Arrested Until Video Goes Viral, also, NJ Gov Doles Out $2 Million For Legal Help To Illegals Facing Deportation
Megan McArdle: The History Of Thanksgiving Dinner Is Proof Of American Greatness
Mark Steyn: The New Face of The Democrats, also, Caravan Of Dreams


Black Friday Deals Week
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Category: Linkagery

The Banality of Liberalism

Posted on | November 21, 2018 | Comments Off on The Banality of Liberalism

 

This photo, showing SS men and female auxiliaries (Helferinnen, “helpers”) is from an album collected during World War II by Karl Hoecker, a top SS officer at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The photo was taken in 1944 at Solahütte, “a little-known resort for the Nazi German guards, administrators, and auxiliary personnel” who worked at Auschwitz and other nearby death camps. This photo was featured in a Nov. 2 Facebook post by Josh Ellis:

This picture always struck me, because unlike so many photos of the time, it’s so relaxed and unposed — just a bunch of coworkers, having fun. But this is a resort called Solahütte. It was built for these people, and it was 18 miles from where they worked, a place called Auschwitz. It was built to give them a break from their very important work.
These smiling, happy people were on their day off from putting Jews in ovens.
A lot of times people will say they look at the faces in photos like these and try to understand. But I don’t need to try. I understand these people thoroughly. . . .
[T]he nice people in this photo were f–king monsters, many of whom ended their war at the end of a rope or in front of a firing squad. And you know what? I bet they did it crying, begging, screaming that it wasn’t fair, that they had a job to do, that’s all, they were given a job and they were expected to do it, and what would you have done in their place?
That, right there, is the most important question you have to ask yourself. It’s one I’ve pondered my entire life. And I know my answer: I would never allow myself to be put in the position of finding out. I’d rather run or die. It’s why I could never have been a cop or a soldier. The lesson I learned from these people was to never put myself in a position where I was required to do evil in the name of following orders. And I have very little sympathy for those who choose otherwise.
There are not good people on both sides. There are party girls and weekend polka players everywhere, people who are kind to their children and bake extra cookies for their neighbors, but some people choose to be the instruments of horror and others do not, and history is rightfully merciless to the former.
So when you tell me that some of the people in America espousing the same madness that these people in this picture committed atrocities for are really not that bad if you get to know them, that there are good people on both sides, I don’t believe you.
Because I do know them. And I do not care.

That post has been shared more than 25,000 times on Facebook and, here’s the thing: It is disastrously and irretrievably wrong, not merely in its cheap conflation of Nazis with American conservatives, but also in the general lesson that Ellis attempts to draw from this bit of history.

Ask yourself this: Why did the Holocaust happen? Or to put it another way, how did Auschwitz come into existence? Why were these Nazi SS men running a concentration camp in Poland? Do you see my point?

Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939. No invasion, no Auschwitz. Tracing back the sequence of events that led up to the invasion of Poland, we go backwards to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939), then to the Munich agreement (September 1938), the Anschluss of Austria (March 1938), the remilitarization of the Rhineland (March 1936) and so on back to the political crisis in Germany (1931-33) that put Hitler in power. You could trace that timeline on backward to Germany’s defeat in World War I (1918), but the point I’m making is that Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in general, can only be understood in a particular historical context. Trying to make the Holocaust an analogy for any contemporary political situation is idiotic. The way Josh Ellis rips this out of context, by saying that Americans whose politics he doesn’t like are comparable to those SS personnel at Solahütte, is not merely an insult to those Americans, but a dangerous misunderstanding of what happened in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

Insofar as there actually are “people in America espousing the same madness” as those German SS men (i.e., serious neo-Nazis), such people are (a) quite few in number, (b) probably under surveillance by federal law enforcement, and (c) unlikely ever to obtain any actual power. You could name the most right-wing members of Congress — perhaps Rep. Steve King or Sen. Rand Paul, depending on what you mean by “right-wing” — and even their fiercest opponents would admit these men don’t contemplate anything remotely like Auschwitz. When you consider how long it takes between the time a court sentences a convicted murderer to death, and the time the death penalty is actually carried out, you see how difficult it would be for our country to become a place where a totalitarian government carries out mass murder in concentration camps.

The implausibility of any “Fourth Reich” scenario in America is one reason why only fools ever become neo-Nazis, and why such fools tend to end up in prison, or dying by suicide, after they’ve committed a desperate crime (e.g., the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter). Because there is zero chance of a neo-Nazi takeover in America, these fools are driven to “lone wolf” attacks by the utter hopelessness of their Nazi fantasies.

Now consider a point Glenn Reynolds has made: “The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.”

In other words, the totalitarian danger — insofar as such a danger is more than deluded fantasy, or a rhetorical bogeyman used to frighten ignorant people — resides in the kind of corruption, incompetence and decadence that preceded Hitler’s rise to power. A prosperous and peaceful society does not suddenly give birth to a Hitler; rather, it is societies bankrupted by bad policy and devastated by bad wars that are at risk. The most recent genocides in world history occurred in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, neither of which enjoyed the combination of economic prosperity and a robust democratic tradition that prevails in the United States. Even after the economic crisis of 2008, Americans never lost faith in the basic constitutional framework of representative government. As fiercely as conservatives opposed President Obama, we still adhered to the path of democracy in expressing that opposition, and expect opponents of Donald Trump to do the same. If we don’t like the results of an election (and obviously the recent midterm results were not to my liking), we can only redouble our efforts to persuade others to come over to our side. Who is advocating a putsch? Certainly not me.

By the way, who is this Josh Ellis, looking at a photo of Nazis and seeing a resemblance to “some of the people in America”? He is a website designer, an editor at a blog for divorced men, a former columnist for a now-defunct “alternative” weekly, Las Vegas CityLife. He’s a musician and is “currently working on a book about surviving climate collapse.” On his personal website, he has a list of “Stuff I Dislike” that includes “Nationalism, Religion . . . George W. Bush” and “Fox News.” Your basic liberal, in other words. But what could he possibly mean by this weird passage from his Facebook post?

I could never have been a cop or a soldier. The lesson I learned from [the Auschwitz camp guards] was to never put myself in a position where I was required to do evil in the name of following orders. And I have very little sympathy for those who choose otherwise.

Really? Police officers and the military are “required to do evil in the name of following orders”? So you are morally superior to them?

Look, I’ve got a pretty strong libertarian streak and am deeply suspicious of power, but it takes a special kind of paranoia to look at a picture of Nazi death-camp guards and interpret it as a condemnation of all organized authority. Because that’s what Josh Ellis is saying, that all policemen and soldiers — every last one of them — are immoral agents of evil, insofar as their callings involve “following orders.” It’s as if Josh Ellis is not even aware that American soldiers fought against the Nazis, and that police officers risk their own lives to protect the innocent.

Do U.S. troops “choose to be the instruments of horror,” as Josh Ellis asserts? The Navy SEALs who took out Osama bin Laden, were they “instruments of horror”? The four cops wounded while trying to take out the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, were they “instruments of horror”?

Perhaps these implications were not intended by Josh Ellis. Maybe he’s just a clumsy writer who unintentionally insulted decent people with a sloppy analogy. And it doesn’t matter, except that his Facebook post was shared 25,000 times, meaning that there are many thousands of people who don’t understand what’s wrong with what he wrote. Also, perhaps, they don’t recognize he’s peddling secondhand ideas.

Ellis has borrowed the theme of “The Banality of Evil” from Hannah Arendt, whose 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem is one of the most widely praised books ever written about the Holocaust. Arendt had been sent to cover Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker and was struck by the fact that the infamous Nazi was so ordinary, so bland, so banal. Eichmann wasn’t a fanatical monster, but an unremarkable bureaucrat who just happened to be assigned the job of annihilating Jews. At the time it was published, Arendt’s work was universally acclaimed for its insight into the nature of human evil, and has since become a classic.

So, is Ellis so ignorant that he’s never heard of Hannah Arendt? Or was he just too lazy to name-check her? The third possibility — deliberate dishonesty, depriving Arendt of the credit she deserves — is one I’d rather not contemplate. Laziness is the most likely explanation, I suspect. Liberalism is so pervasive in our culture that it doesn’t require much intellectual effort to espouse it, and this liberal particular theme — making the Holocaust an analogy for whatever the contemporary Right is doing — has been done so often, for so long that Josh Ellis probably didn’t even pause to think that he was just recycling Hannah Arendt.

What the photo of the SS men and women at Solahütte shows is how evil can be normalized, and it does not occur to Josh Ellis (nor to any of the thousands who shared his post) to think that liberalism may itself be implicated in the normalization of evil. Have these people ever heard of Dr. Bernard Nathanson? But let’s not start that argument now.

More important, I think, is how little most people actually know about how and why Hitler came to power in Germany. The specific historical context from which the Third Reich emerged is seldom explained clearly to students, and depictions of Nazi Germany in popular culture replicate this ahistoricism. Because of this, most Americans don’t realize that Hitler’s Germany was neither the first totalitarian regime in Europe nor the most deadly. By the time Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the Bolsheviks had already slaughtered millions. Indeed, during the same time-frame (1932-33) that the Nazis were rising to power in Germany, Stalin was killing some 4 million people through the terror-famine in the Ukraine (the Holomodor). What Hitler and the Nazis did in Germany was arguably more of an imitation of what Lenin and Stalin had done in Russia than what Mussolini had done in Italy. Hitler viewed his National Socialism as an ideological antidote to the international socialism of the Bolsheviks. Whereas Marxists viewed economic class struggle as the revolutionary force in history, Hitler viewed race as the decisive category. And this was ultimately the only real difference between Nazism and Communism except that (b) Communism killed more people, and (b) Communism is still an idea defended by many liberals in the West.

How many liberals have ever read Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror or The Harvest of Sorrow? For that matter, how many liberals have read anything by Lenin or Trotsky? There is a remarkable lack of curiosity among liberals about what Communism actually was (and is), and while liberals endlessly conjure up Hitler as a bogeyman — Trump is Hitler and all Republicans are Nazis — they seldom mention Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. A liberal like Josh Ellis knows he can evoke an emotional reaction by showing Nazis having a good time at Solahütte, but when was the last time you heard a liberal mention Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov or Lavrentiy Beria, to name three of Stalin’s most murderous henchmen?

The death toll of Communism — estimated between 85 million and 100 million during the 20th century — has disappeared from view, erased by the liberals who control America’s education system, and seldom mentioned nowadays even by conservatives. There is a reason, after all, why Hayek warned against The Road to Serfdom, the slow-motion piecemeal drift toward totalitarianism that was discernible in the West even at the time our troops were fighting to destroy the Nazi menace. Yet if we are not conscious of this danger, if we permit liberals to convince us that all we have to fear is a “right-wing” menace, a latter-day Hitler, we can easily be persuaded to permit our society to continue drifting ever further toward the Left. And this is exactly what is happening:

Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left — counterintuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women’s March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, “I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.” Here hatred was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said the comment was “taken wildly out of context.”)
For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.
For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left — Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind — are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.
How did the American left — conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world — become so given to hate? . . .

Read the rest of that by Shelby Steele. The emergence of hate as a unifying force on the Left is to a great extent the result of the kind of ahistorical belief system that Josh Ellis promotes. If every Republican is a Nazi, then the hatemongers on the Left can congratulate themselves on their own “moral superiority,” as Steele says, and this belief empowers them to tyrannize their enemies in the name of “social justice.”



 

Category: History
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