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About admin

I was raised in a small town in a part of the country that ought to be easily enough divined by the casual reader. After quite some years in divers parts of the U.S. and abroad, including service afloat, I chose to come back. I tend to see things through the filter of their opposites, which can both distort and clarify (and generally both at once). Hence the name of this blog.

Sobering Math

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So the Democrats in the House of Representatives (and including several Republican members either so fearful or so unprincipled as to join them) have passed an article of impeachment against the out-going president. It is alleged that he “incited” a “coup,” or “insurrection” against the constitutional processes of electing a successor.

I’m old enough to remember the scenes from inside the Wisconsin state capitol, where for weeks on end the public business was disrupted by people who, unbidden, occupied the building and refused to leave. We were — sneeringly, of course, always with a sneer — told, “This is what democracy looks like.” Apparently democracy no longer looks like that. [15 Jan 21, 1449 CST Update: And here’s the WaPo opinion piece on that little episode.]

I have not seen any specific words of the president quoted in which he encourages anyone to use force to enter the U.S. Capitol and then exercise any sort of violence of any kind, character, or description. And no, you don’t get to claim that merely encouraging his supporters to appear at the Capitol to protest the culmination of a successful theft of a U.S. presidential election is “inciting” a “coup” or an “insurrection” or even a “riot”. In fact, by the commonly accepted definitions of summer 2020 what went down in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, was not even a “riot”; it was at the most a “mostly peaceful protest”.

Whatever. The feller who may well turn out to have been the last pro-American U.S. president will be leaving office on January 20, 2021, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the vast majority of everyone who lives and works in the nation’s capital will be all cock-a-hoop to see him go. He was a threat to their very way of life, and from the supreme court all the way down they weren’t having it. What happened on November 3, 2020, was the Establishment’s very basic reminder to the American people of who is in charge, and who is not (plot spoiler, kiddoes: it’s not the American people).

After contradictory reports of whether soon-to-be-former Senate Majority Leader McConnell of Kentucky did or did not support removing Trump from office, or did or did not support having the impeachment trial before the end of Trump’s term, it now appears that there will be no Senate trial before the Potted Plant struggles through whatever is on the Telepromptr screen in front of him. I understand, however, that the Plan is to “impeach” Trump at some point after he is no longer in office, with the idea of preventing him ever from holding any other federal office (as if Trump is likely to beg someone to appoint him to be postmaster of East Jesus, Arkansas).

The relevant passage from the U.S. Constitution on impeachment is in Article I Section 3, and runs like this: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.”

Notice how the text phrases it” “two thirds of the Members present”. It doesn’t say two-thirds of the senators, but only two-thirds of those “present”.

There are a lot of very contemptible Republican senators right now, people who more or less sold this president down the river whenever they thought it safe to do so. With him out of office, his supporters fired from their jobs, the on-going purge of conservative voices from public spaces, and so forth still going full-bore (cf. the comments of the CEO of Twitter: “We are focused on one account [@realDonaldTrump] right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go beyond the inauguration. We have to expect that, we have to be ready for that. So, the focus is certainly on this account and how it ties to real-world violence. But also, we need to think much longer-term around how these dynamics play out over time. I don’t believe this is going away anytime soon.”), it is now safe to turn on him out in the open.

But many of these Republicans come from states which voted massively in favor of the man they intend to give over unto his oppressors, and if they vote to “convict” a guy no longer in office, then aren’t they risking their own hides? Perhaps, and perhaps not.

Imagine, if Gentle Reader will, our hypothetical craven Establishment Republican. Too frightened to vote to “convict” and too full of vindictiveness not to. But hist! What if one announces, “This whole nonsense is so farcical, so thoroughly contemptible, so plainly unwarranted under the Constitution, that I am not going to dignify it with my presence, for by being present I would necessarily concede the proceedings a legitimacy to which they are in no manner entitled.” Nice, principled stand, isn’t it?

Except our hypothetical Establishment Republican has just reduced the vote necessary to “convict”. If all 100 senators vote, up or down, then it will take 67 — two-thirds of one hundred — senators to “convict”. There are 50 Democrat senators. That means at least seventeen Republicans would have to stand up and cast a vote which they would then have to explain to their — in many cases, heavily Republican — constituencies. But if 25 Republican senators take that “principled” stand, then the 50 Democrat senators “present” will together make up that two-thirds majority. They can (and will) all vote together as a bloc and “convict,” and not a single Republican will have to incur the odium of both participating in this farce (and it will be) and then voting to do down the only president since Reagan who was unequivocally on Our Side of the Fight. The Republicans “present” can all vote “No,” and the 25 or more who aren’t even there can pretend that they stayed away from a wounded sense of constitutional propriety.

All very neat.

And all very, very predictable.

So who will be the 25 who will stay away?

There’s Been a Mistake; or, The Whirlwind Comes for Me

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Over the New Year’s holiday weekend, I watched with my boys a movie starring Emily Watson, namely Within the Whirlwind. It is a film adaptation of the memoirs of Yevgenia Ginzburg, available in English translation in two volumes as Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. [For Gentle Reader’s help, the first volume cuts off about part-way through the period covered by the film.]

Ginzburg was writing her memoirs at roughly the same time that Solzhenitsyn was writing The GuLAG Archipelago. Both Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn had mostly finished their writing in the early 1960s but for both publication had to wait, and in both instances through foreign publication of smuggled manuscripts. Ginzburg appears to have been known to Solzhenitsyn and supplied him with generous access to her manuscript; certainly there are multiple citations to her (at that time as-yet unpublished) memoirs in his larger work.

Yevgenia was born in 1904, making her fourteen years older than Alexandr; he describes himself as being a child of the Revolution, and of course had no personal memory of pre-Revolutionary Russia (about which he wrote in so many settings so feelingly). Yevgenia would have been a fully-aware young woman when All Hell Broke Loose. True, she would have had likely only a child’s understanding and recollection of pre-War Russia, and that would have made a difference. Unless extraordinarily precocious her intellectual quickening would have played out against the backdrop of unspooling disaster for her country and her society. And then of course would have come four years of civil war, Red Terror, and the bait-and-switch of the New Economic Policy.

Still: no matter how calamitous the break with the past, Yevgenia would have been a bright teenager by the time the Bolsheviks seized power. Which is to say that she had not the excuse that children of the Revolution had, namely “we never knew anything different”.

At some point Yevgenia joined the Communist Party, and became a teacher at Kazan University, apparently with a specialty in teaching the history of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Apparently she had was unaware that in the Soviet Union, it was the future that was known, with the past being subject to on-going revision. This was to be the barb in the hook that got her in the throat.

Her (second) husband, Pavel Aksyonov, with whom she had a son (Yevgenia had an older son by her first marriage, and Pavel had a daughter of his own), was a member of the Central Committee of the USSR, which is to say a Pretty Damned Big Fish by any means.

In addition to her day job, so to speak, teaching Party history at the university, and her obligatory agitation on various occasion (among the book’s earliest scenes is her standing on a pile of empty sacks at a factory, reading aloud to a bunch of no-doubt tired, hungry, and profoundly uninterested workers a canned Party announcement of Kirov’s murder on December 1, 1934), she had a more formal side-hustle in the form of working on the editorial staff of a magazine, Red Tartary.

As Gentle Reader will recall, Kirov’s murder, whether taxable to Stalin or not, was used by Stalin as the pretext for the beginnings of what became the Great Purge. And as Gentle Reader will also recall, the Great Purge — or as Robert Conquest styled it in his ground-breaking book, The Great Terror — began as Stalin’s annihilation of the middle and upper reaches of the Party and other major Soviet institutions (such as the Central Committee, the Red Army, and eventually the NKVD itself). True, the killing circle kept expanding its radius and sweeping in people who little or nothing to do with politics, but they were just collateral damage.

The Purge came to Red Tartary.

Apparently an editor with whom Yevgenia worked had written an article touching on, among other things, the theory of “permanent revolution”. It had been published and even included in a major compendium of such tripe published by (and here Gentle Reader must excuse a failure of memory: I cannot remember which central Party organ was the publisher), but the publishing authority was it seems quite a bit more authoritative than Red Tartary . . . a bit like having a Southern Living article re-published in the Kenyon Review or New York Magazine or Smithsonian. There was a problem, however. At some point after the article’s publication, an article was published over Stalin’s by-line, in which was also treated the theory of “permanent revolution”. Gentle Reader must not, by the way, suppose that ol’ Soso, the Georgian seminary drop-out, actually wrote this sort of nonsense himself; rather he had it ghost-written, as with the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course) [N.b. Not having read the book I don’t link to it; it may be obtained through the kind offices of Amazon.com, however.], and then, as often as not, had his ghost-writer(s) shot (as also with one of the principal authors of the Short Course).

“Stalin’s” treatment of the theory of “permanent revolution” was inconsistent with the treatment by Yevgenia’s colleague. In 1935, that was enough to get you fired, expelled, arrested, and shot.

The meat of Yevgenia’s memoir begins to pick up pace upon the denunciation and eventual dismissal of her editorial colleague. Alone among those in his circle of acquaintance and/or colleagues, Yevgenia refused to confess to any sort of doctrinal lapse or Trotskyite wrong-think etc. etc. etc. She lost her license to teach and embarked upon a downward-spiralling cycle of Party accusation, confrontation, discipline, and general squeezing. The accusations against her crept upward from a simple failure to exercise proper political diligence to active collaboration with Trotskyite elements to active participation in a terrorist organization, centered upon her unfortunate colleague, the objective of which was the assassination of senior Soviet officialdom. Naïvely, Yevgenia attempted to fight the accusations, never confessing to the slightest lapse. She filed and prosecuted appeals to Moscow and at one point spent several months there trying to clear her name through the Approved Party Channels. The only thing she accomplished, of course, was that progressive ramping up of the severity of her formal charges.

Eventually of course she was asked to leave her Party card at the desk of whichever functionary she was seeing. From that moment she knew what awaited her.

On April 1, 1937, the expected call came to the apartment where the family lived. Could she please report to the Party office downtown? That day as she left, she saw for the last time her mother, her husband, and her older son. Her husband as a senior Party official was eventually arrested but died before sentencing. Her older son ended up starving to death during the Siege of Leningrad during the war. And her mother died (of causes unspecified at least in the first volume).

Yevgnia was arrested that day and stuck down in the cellars, and her interrogation began. As she notes herself, she was fortunate in that, as of the time of her arrest physical torture had not yet been authorized for those undergoing interrogation. All that her interrogators could manage was screaming and threats.

[Fast forward: Yevgenia’s principal interrogator ended up arrested himself (remember the NKVD went through its own blood-letting), and Yevgenia, then working in the kitchen in a camp, is asked to give an extra crust of bread for a dying man from Kazan, he (the dying man) having heard that a woman from his city is working in the kitchen. Yevgenia asks for his name, and upon being told, gives her own name to the go-between and instructs him to tell the major that it’s from her; it’s her only confessed moment of vindictiveness in the entire book.]

Eventually Yevgenia’s interrogation was finished and her case referred for disposition to a military tribunal in Moscow, where she was incarcerated in Butyrki prison. This apparently was an indication of the seriousness of her case. Most arrestees’ cases were disposed of at much lower levels and locally, some even administratively (it was such an administrative panel in 1945 that sentenced Solzhenitsyn to eight years in the camps). The military tribunals also doled out many more death penalties, I understand, than the other sentencing authorities. Certainly Yevgenia was convinced that she would receive the “Supreme Measure,” as they called it. The trial itself was held in Lefortovo prison, and according to the clock on the wall, visible to Yevgenia, took all of seven minutes from opening to the finishing of reading of her sentence. Ten years of solitary confinement, followed by five years’ deprivation of rights. The predictability with which these tribunals handed out death sentences can be inferred Yevgenia’s observation that the two guards standing behind her, on either side, had joined hands behind her back to catch her as she fainted. After her trial they took her back to Butryki, where by then (August, 1937) torture was routinely used during night-time interrogations. Every night, from 2300 to 0300, the screaming went on uninterrupted.

It’s in the cell at Butryki that Yevgenia begins to be exposed to a wider swathe of what Solzhenitsyn described as the 1937 “wave” of “sewage” flooding into the Soviet Union’s sewer of a penal system. There are the usual Party stalwarts (it’s all a great mistake, my case is) to the denialists (Stalin can’t know what’s going on) to the retreads (the Socialist-Revolutionary who’s an inveterate chain smoker but who, when Yevgenia offers her a pack of smokes, first has to check — via taps on the cell wall in the Tsarist-era prison Morse code — with her S.R. party superior in the next cell over before she can accept . . . and is then instructed to refuse).

It’s at this point that the book begins to become interesting, in that cell in Butryki while she’s waiting for “trial” and afterwards, as she’s waiting to be shipped off to prison. As I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this Humble Blog, what makes for me Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG so intriguing is its study in human character, both inside prison, in the camps, and in the surrounding society (both in the camps’ immediate vicinity and in the country as a whole). More to the point, Solzhenitsyn examines in very unsparing particularity what happens to people when they are exposed to the rack and pressure of a socialist society. Very broadly stated, he concludes that the abuses were not merely an aberration of the Stalinist years; rather they began almost immediately after the October Revolution and continued, nearly unabated, until well after the Twentieth Party Congress “Secret” Speech of 1956. They inhered in the very fabric of the Soviet Union, which Solzhenitsyn viewed as a monstrous assault upon the soul of Holy Mother Russia.

From Moscow she was taken to Yaroslavl, where she spent two years in prison. Frequently described as “solitary confinement,” in point of fact she spent very little time at all in genuine solitary confinement. By reason of over-crowding a second prisoner was housed with her, and so she did have company; mercifully they got on extremely well. Yevgenia was not fated to spend her entire sentence in that cell, though. As she points out, by 1939 even the Leadership had tumbled to the idea that keeping prisoners in prisons was grotesquely inefficient, especially if they were to be kept in any kind of isolation. By way of example, we see that it took no fewer than five individual prison guards to complete an operation so simple as taking Yevgenia from her cell to her walled-in but still outdoor prison walk for her fifteen minutes of fresh air each day, and of course the same five to return her to her cell.

So the sentences of the incarcerated prisoners in Yaroslavl were amended wholesale to forced labor in the camps. Yevgenia and her fellow inmates were herded aboard a train the cars of which were marked on the outside, “Special Equipment”. There then began a month-long hell ride across Siberia, all the way to Vladivostok. In addition to inadequate rations, they were systematically deprived of water. The chapters on the train transport are a bit confusing (at least they were for someone of my limitations) because there are a passel of women with each of a very limited number of names. There are a bunch of Tanyas, several Nadyas, and a few other repeats; it’s difficult in places to figure out which one is being talked about, or is talking. Yevgenia also has a habit of referring to people by (usually diminutive) nicknames, which is endearing in a way, but also confusing if you don’t have background in colloquial Russian (as I do not).

From Vladivostok the principal destination was Magadan, gateway city to Hell on Earth in the shape of the camps of the Kolyma. The route was sea-borne, in ships which for misery, danger, and mortality per day at sea don’t seem to have lagged much behind the ships of the Middle Passage, with the added trauma of systematic terror at the hands of the criminals (“socially friendly elements” in Marxist dogma; cf. the announcement of the Soros-funded district attorney general in San Francisco that “ordinary” crimes of violence against the person and against property will simply not be prosecuted . . . the Bolsheviks are nothing if not consistent and predictable). Yevgenia nearly didn’t survive the voyage; in fact she spent the last few days unconscious and was carried ashore on a stretcher, thence into a receiving hospital where a doctor took mercy on her and nursed her back to something like passable health. [“Passable health” is an expression that should be taken with a shipping container or so of salt; after the prisoner transport across Siberia, one of Yevgenia’s fellow prisoners was “certified” by the camp “doctor” to be eligible for general work . . . four hours before she died of scurvy.] Upon her return from the hospital to the hut where the rest of her fellow prisoners are housed, they tell her that the doctor’s efforts will turn out to be wasted, and Yevgenia will soon enough be right back where she was.

And so it comes to pass.

Yevgenia ends up at a logging sub-camp at Kilometer 7 on the Kolyma Road, where her condition begins to deteriorate even further. It’s spring of 1940 by now, and in the melting snow she discovers a species of cranberry that has lasted through the winter. So fragile they burst if picked, she and her teammate eat them by lying on the ground and sucking them off the stems with their mouths. Yevgenia credits the berries with providing just enough nutrients to keep them going. Eventually a medical inspection team arrives at Kilometer 7. As Yevgenia points out, these sorts of inspections didn’t “just happen”; rather they were a response to mortality unacceptably high even by Kolyma standards.

It’s during this medical inspection that a Gulag Miracle happens. The inspection team consists of a feldscher, a term the Russians took over from the Germans (think a medic or corpsman in the U.S. military) and an actual doctor. The feldscher is fairly typical of the Gulag run of medical care — like the one who certified Yevgenia’s nearly-dead fellow prisoner as eligible for “general work” four hours before she died — but: the doctor knows the uncle with whom Yevgenia’s older son is staying in Leningrad (this is before the siege, of course), and he hooks her up with a three-day medical exemption from work. He also arranges to have her re-assigned as a nurse in his hospital.

The book ends during Yevgenia’s trip southward towards the hospital and salvation.

[By way of plot spoiler: Yevgenia spent a total of 18 years either in prison or in camp. She ended up marrying one of the doctors she worked with in Kolyma. After her release she stayed on in exile in Kolyma, never ceasing to appeal her case. She was completely rehabilitated in 1955.]

It is as well to note that almost all Survivor Literature to have emerged from the Gulag was written by people who spent some portion, or the major portion, of their terms working in hospitals, or in the camp shops, or (in Solzhenitsyn’s case), a sharashka, an “island of paradise” as he calls it, where he worked (fraudulently) as a physicist. In addition to Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn, I’ve also read the memoirs of Alexander Dolgun and Janusz Bardach and some of the short stories of Varlam Shalamov, and every one of them spent large portions of their respective terms working inside the camp (Bardach in fact became after his liberation a surgeon and ended his days teaching at the University of Iowa; he developed what is apparently the standard surgical correction for cleft palate).

The above pattern is no coincidence. Early in his incarceration Solzhenitsyn was specifically warned to do whatever it took not to be assigned to general work. “General work” for any particular camp was the basic industrial activity for which the camp had been established, whether that was coal, copper, gold, uranium, or other mining, the manufacture of brick, logging, digging canals, or whatever. Assignment to general work was by and large a death sentence. Between the labor brigade, the common pot, and the differentiated ration, a prisoner on “general work” could be expected to last a few months at most. Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn characterizes as the spiritual father of Gulag’s slave labor system, is quoted as opining that a prisoner on general work was expected to last three to four months, after which time no further use for him could be looked for.

So much for the narrative of Journey into the Whirlwind. What does it tell us about Yevgenia Ginzburg?

I think that the important thing to remember about Yevgenia is that she was a Party member. And that leads to the first noteworthy thing about at least the first volume of her memoirs [sidebar: I am very much aware that my comments that follow here are made without having read the second volume. On the other hand her memoirs were originally written as a single book, and it strikes me at least as highly odd for a general examination of herself and her premises, of the sort Solzhenitsyn lays out, not even to be hinted at in the first part of her story.]: There is not a single passage in this book in which she questions in the least the very moral premise and structure either of communism as such, or the Party as an institution. Oh sure; she relates the slavishness with which her fellow Party members (and co-workers, some of whom would have been fellow Party members and some who weren’t) rushed to prostrate themselves and “confess” to all manner of doctrinal and political impurities. Nowhere does she pose the question: To what extent does this transparently fraudulent, farcical, yet blood-soaked witches’ circus arise from the moral propositions on which communism, or the Communist Party, or the Soviet Union are based? On the contrary: Remember that Yevgenia refuses to admit her “guilt,” refuses to acknowledge that she has done anything for which she deserved Party discipline (even to the extent of a censure).

Throughout it all Yevgenia claims the mantle of unsullied Party doctrine. Even having witnessed her fellow toads beneath the harrow get swept up, swept away, she is crushed by the experience of having to surrender her Party card. [I am interested to read whether the second volume covers her rehabilitation and whether she eagerly grasped her Party card on rehabilitation.] This experience matches, by the way, with Solzhenitsyn’s description of the True Believers in camp. They are outraged by the physical miseries and indignities visited upon them, but what really cuts them to the bottom of what they are pleased to think of as their moral beings is the loss of that damned Party card. It’s all they want back.

Yevgenia notes with a mixture of sadness and pity the Socialist-Revolutionary cellmate who feels she must ask her comrade in the next cell over before she can accept something so basically human as the offer of cigarettes. And who when she is instructed to reject them meekly submits. To the sight-unseen dictate of someone who is likely headed for a death chamber at some point (Stalin was merciless in his liquidation of all rival leftist parties and factions, from the Old Bolsheviks to the Trotskyites to the S.R.s to the Mensheviks, Stalin had them pretty much all shot) this woman cannot muster the human dignity to assert her own separate existence as a moral agent. Gentle Reader must remember that in those circumstances a proffered smoke, or lump of sugar, or tea, or crust of bread is much, much more than a simple physical object; it is, rather, an extended human bond, a recognition of common humanity. It can be a gesture of self-sacrifice of life itself. But none of this is enough to trump party discipline for this S.R. woman.

There are several passages in Ginzburg’s book where other Party members in her cell or on that prisoner transport take her aside and whisper to her of the need to maintain Party discipline and purity, and not to mix with the political riff-raff and counter-revolutionaries among whom they find themselves. To her credit Ginzburg does not go down that route, the same moral dead-end of her Socialist-Revolutionary cellmate. To her credit. But she does not examine in the slightest the moral foundations of a Party that expects her to behave exactly that way. What kind of claim to any sort of moral pre-eminence does any political party have which demands and expects that its members so divest themselves of ordinary humanity down to that level?

As with the Party, so also with the state and society that the Party has created. In her interrogation Yevgenia is “confronted” by “witnesses” who solemnly attest to her terrorist activities, knowing as they must that it’s all a lie. What kind of a society produces that behavior? What kind of state is produced by that society? Or vice-versa? The whole examination of human character and its assertion of an underlying morality that makes The GuLAG Archipelago so fascinating a read is utterly absent from Journey into the Whirlwind. It’s just not there. One of Yevgenia’s cellmates to whom she became especially close was a young girl who was a Harbinist. Her father had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railroad that branched off the Siberian railroad and ran to Harbin on the coast. The Soviets sold the road to Japan (after its invasion of Manchuria) and called their nationals home, where, Solzhenitsyn reports, those that returned were almost without exception imprisoned and exterminated. This subsequent history would have been known to Ginzburg at the time she wrote, but not a word of it makes it into her narrative, notwithstanding her loving recollections.

I think Gentle Reader is entitled to question: Why this omission? Why does someone who survives eighteen years in this death spasm, the majority of it in the most notorious killing industries in the entire country, not include the slightest comment upon the legitimacy of the entire structure?

I’m going to order and read that second volume. I hope that what Yevgenia has to say in it will render all of my above comments nugatory, in which event I’ll happily update this post to admit my error. But I’m afraid that Yevgenia, simon-pure Party member that she claimed to be no matter what comes her way, will turn out to be little more than one of those True Believers described by Solzhenitsyn. She will be, at bottom, one of those who convinced themselves that in their particular case it was just a big mistake, or was necessary to maintain the Party, or even that it might be attributable to a rogue General Secretary . . . but as to all those other millions? They deserved what they got.

Truth is what the Party requires it to be, Comrade.

This is How You Destroy an Institution

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Within the past several years, the Thought Police have cast an ever-wider-ranging eye over human activity for them to control. The pretext of “hate speech” is among their favorite gambits. When you press on them, however, you find that “hate speech” is a verbal shorthand for “someone saying something that I disagree with”.

The objective of the “hate speech” hawks is to control the public square, by which is meant that societal space where people interact and communicate with each other. In some contexts that is in fact a physical place, such as a college campus. In others it is a purely social construct, such as the internet or the pages of magazines or the media of mass communications. American colleges being both socially and academically dominated by marxists in all but name, the attacks on freedom of expression first gained traction there. Over the past decade or more we’ve seen non-left-extremist groups de-certified, their ability to recruit new members or to disseminate their thinking confined to “free speech zones,” their campus newspapers routinely stolen from the racks, their few supporters among the faculty hounded from employment. It’s all very Bolshevik; you can find much the same tactics and expressions in the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG Archipelago.

But why, Gentle Reader will ask, do the left-extremists want to control the public square? The answer is on two levels, one destructive and the other constructive. In the destructive sense, by controlling the public square, you atomize society. Individual humans are, when you get down to it, pretty vulnerable. Even the fairly wealthy. If you truly, genuinely took the raw physical force that a country of 330-plus million can generate and brought it to bear upon the skin of any individual, however wealthy or otherwise influential he might be, that person’s existence can be destroyed in fairly short order. Up to and including the most literal sense of that word. Among the favored tactics of the totalitarians of all stripes is to create mutual suspicion among all members of society. A society of informers is a society in which there is no trust. And without trust among wide swathes of society there can be no organization to resist the power exercised by the few over the many (which is, as has long been recognized, the very essence of “government”). The second, constructive sense in which leftists want to control the public square is that by doing so they control the groupings into which society will always develop under any system. In Germany under National Socialism, for example, it was called the “Gleichschaltung”; everyone in every field of human activity was herded into groupings that were created, sponsored, and of course controlled by the government. The Soviets did essentially the same thing.

Gentle Reader will of course immediately ask the follow-on question: Why would exactly leftists want to atomize existing society and then control the formation and actions of the groupings into which society develops in place of those now-destroyed relationships? Fair question. The answer likewise has two components. The first has to do with the nature of leftism as a collectivist religion. Its essence is using the physical coercive power of government to compel people to act in ways that they never would choose to act in the absence of that coercion. In this way it is the diametric opposite of the free market. As was recognized as long ago as the 1770s by Adam Smith, the core societal benefit of a free market is that each of us, even acting from our most self-centered, selfish motives, must, in order to advance himself under the conditions of a free market (no one compelled to trade, no one prohibited from trading, no one permitted to defraud or use force against another) act in ways that are beneficial to other humans, because if we don’t, they won’t trade with us. Leftism compels people to act against their own interests, or against the interests of others, to accomplish goals that are not of their own choosing, through courses of action that are not chosen by them. The second level of the answer to why the left-extremists want that degree of control over us is that no government, not even with all the surveillance technology at its disposal now, can penetrate so deeply into the daily existence of its subjects as to control in detail their every action, their every word, their every relationship. By herding its subjects into groups it controls, however, it can leverage the ability of each of us to monitor each other. Government can out-source its totalitarian project to us individual subjects.

The new name for the left-extremists’ project is “cancel culture”. A mob of “woke” agitators converges on a small set of decision-makers in an institution and screeches until whoever it is who dared to say, or even to permit to be said, something they disagree with, collapses under the pressure. It’s a very effective tactic and has claimed some prominent scalps at some very powerful institutions, up to and including The New York Times. Their opinion editor had the temerity to permit a sitting United States Senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, to publish an op-ed (sort of like what one does on the editorial page, yes?). The junior staffers staged a revolt. Instead of summarily firing them all, as should have happened, the Gray Lady canned her opinion editor.

The CEO of Goya Foods was so imprudent as to speak favorably about Donald Trump after a meeting with him (and other business heavy-hitters of Latin American background). The Communist representative from New York City, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC” to both friend and foe . . . how we have fallen; once upon a time titans were known by their initials: FDR, JFK, LBJ, and now we have someone whose principal accomplishment before getting elected was not buggering up a drink order for Table 3 in the back) immediately squawked and shrieked that Goya Foods must be punished. Boycotted. What happened instead is that the company saw its sales increase — according to the CEO’s statement — by 1,000%. So now AOC has been awarded — on a purely honorary basis — as “employee of the month” by the corporation.

Lather, rinse, repeat, across area after area after area.

But refried beans and the recycled Bolshevik tripe pushed by the NYT aren’t really my particular concern.

Watching the destruction of the Rule of Law in my own country is.

Some time ago, the American Bar Association, which long ago abandoned any effort to hide its left-extremist politics, promulgated a proposed new subsection to part of its Model Rules of Professional Conduct. For those fortunate and productive enough not to be lawyers, the ABA’s model rules (commonly known as the “RPC”) are the most widely-adopted system of rules governing the conduct of lawyers, both in and out of the courtroom, both while practicing law and even outside the narrow confines of what counts as practicing law. So far forget yourself as to get caught soliciting sex with underage girls online, and you’re going to lose your law license for a violation of the RPC. Get caught cheating on your own taxes (the Great American Indoor Sport) and you’re likewise going to become a Former Lawyer in a hurry.

When a complaint is made that a lawyer has violated some portion of the RPC, what happens is that state’s disciplinary apparatus swings into action. [Here I should note that the disciplinary forces — at least their in-house staff — of state bars are seldom, very seldom made up of the upper reaches of the talent pool. My own personal experience of my state’s version has been that they are of exceedingly modest mental attainment. In fact, the single most stupid (and himself unethical) lawyer I have ever encountered was a senior disciplinary counsel.] Documents are demanded, tight time lines for responses are required, enormous effort is expended by the respondent lawyer. Many — in fact, most — complaints are dismissed after initial investigation; they tend to be filed by discontented clients who are unhappy about how their representation turned out (full disclosure: that’s pretty much exactly what happened to me on the two occasions I’ve had a complaint filed: both dismissed after initial investigation, although the second time around I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t had about 1,200 pages of e-mails back and forth between myself and my former client, with the benefit of which I was able to prove that almost everything he had to say, other than our names and dates of representation, was an outright lie). Domestic law and personal injury law are very productive of such complaints, and to their credit, the investigators usually figure it out. But that does not save the respondent lawyer a bit of effort, nor does he get his hours upon hours upon hours back, and he still has to respond affirmatively on his malpractice insurance renewals that he has been the subject of a complaint of ethical misconduct. With corresponding effect on the premiums to be paid.

If the complaint is not dismissed but rather goes forward, then there is usually a series of punishments that can be imposed if the lawyer ends up on the losing end of the process. Private admonitions, cautionary letters, public censures, suspension either temporary or indefinite, and of course the ultimate sanction of disbarment. Some states will permit a disbarred lawyer to apply for reinstatement after a period of time; in others, if you so far forget yourself as to be disbarred, then you will never again be a lawyer in that state (or, as a practical matter, any other state, since part of your admission in some hypothetical New State will involve an inquiry with the disciplinary body of the state which disbarred you). Even a punishment which does not involve an interruption of one’s ability to practice law can be devastating to one’s practice, especially in a smaller locale. Who wants to hire the lawyer whose public censure was published in all the local newspapers, after all?

Even winning, however, can be only moderately less devastating than losing. As they say in other contexts: The process is the punishment.

The take-away is that a complaint of a violation of the RPC (or whatever set of rules one’s state uses) is not an issue of minor inconvenience. I am not aware of any other occupation whose governing authorities routinely require the public professional humiliation of its participants for transgressions of whatever set of laws apply to that occupation.

Which is why when the ABA promulgated new Section 8.4(g) of the model RPC, it sent a chill up the spine of every lawyer who cherishes his freedom of expression. The current version of that model rule provides that it is professional misconduct to —

“(g) engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law. This paragraph does not limit the ability of a lawyer to accept, decline or withdraw from a representation in accordance with Rule 1.16. This paragraph does not preclude legitimate advice or advocacy consistent with these Rules.”

The same amendment added official comments (which are invariably treated by state high courts adopting the RPC as having near-controlling authority over the interpretation and application of the RPC), thusly —

“[3] Discrimination and harassment by lawyers in violation of paragraph (g) undermine confidence in the legal profession and the legal system. Such discrimination includes harmful verbal or physical conduct that manifests bias or prejudice towards others. Harassment includes sexual harassment and derogatory or demeaning verbal or physical conduct. Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other unwelcome verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature. The substantive law of antidiscrimination and anti-harassment statutes and case law may guide application of paragraph (g).

[4] Conduct related to the practice of law includes representing clients; interacting with witnesses, coworkers, court personnel, lawyers and others while engaged in the practice of law; operating or managing a law firm or law practice; and participating in bar association, business or social activities in connection with the practice of law. Lawyers may engage in conduct undertaken to promote diversity and inclusion without violating this Rule by, for example, implementing initiatives aimed at recruiting, hiring, retaining and advancing diverse employees or sponsoring diverse law student organizations.”

Notice what is covered: “harmful” “verbal or physical conduct”. that “manifests bias or prejudice towards others”. “Harassment” includes “derogatory or demeaning verbal or physical conduct”. And the lawyer must only “reasonably know” that his “verbal conduct” constitutes such. Notice what is not required to violate the rule: That such “verbal conduct” have actually caused a legally compensable injury to the person who actually, you know, hears the “verbal conduct”. A lawyer observing to an (unbeknownst to him, dissatisfied) employee of his firm that he’s not inclined to sell his parents’ old homeplace to a homosexual couple because granny and grandpa, who are buried on the place, would have been disgusted by it, and consequently he’s hoping that the most flamboyant such couple in the county don’t make an offer . . . has just put his law license in jeopardy. It doesn’t matter that at the moment there is no such offer on the table, or that he’s not actually said that he wouldn’t sell to them. It really doesn’t even matter that he’s not expressed his own animadversion to homosexuality. He’s in the cross-hairs.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court adopted what is in some respects an even more egregious version of the model rule (I can’t tell if the model rule has been changed since that state adopted it):

“(g) in the practice of law, by words or conduct, knowingly manifest bias
or prejudice, or engage in harassment or discrimination, as those terms
are defined in applicable federal, state or local statutes or ordinances,
including but not limited to bias, prejudice, harassment or
discrimination based upon race, sex, gender identity or expression,
religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation,
marital status, or socioeconomic status. This paragraph does not limit
the ability of a lawyer to accept, decline or withdraw from a
representation in accordance with Rule 1.16. This paragraph does not
preclude advice or advocacy consistent with these Rules.”

Thus, if our hypothetical lawyer makes his statement within a city — whether or not he lives or works there — the city council of which has adopted some cock-eyed definition of what is “harassment” or “discrimination,” then he’s placed in jeopardy his ability to house, clothe, and feed his children.

In its defense, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court adopted slightly — at least on the surface — narrower official comments to the rule:

“[3] For the purposes of paragraph (g), conduct in the practice of law
includes participation in activities that are required for a lawyer to
practice law, including but not limited to continuing legal education
seminars, bench bar conferences and bar association activities where
legal education credits are offered.

[4] The substantive law of antidiscrimination and anti-harassment
statutes and case law guide application of paragraph (g) and clarify the
scope of the prohibited conduct.”

Let’s say my hypothetical lawyer is standing around at the break in a continuing legal education seminar, and passes the same hypothetical statement about his family’s homeplace. Reckon he might be overheard by someone with an activist’s axe to grind?

Predictably, a Pennsylvania lawyer who works for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and whose activities regularly involve his speaking publicly, and before crowds, on topics that are, to put it mildly, Not Approved by the “woke” crowd, by the crew that got that NYT opinion editor fired, the mob that has successfully demanded that this, that, or the other professor be disciplined or fired for having pointed out simple truths that offend left-extremist dogmas, saw that rule and realized what he was in for, unless he more or less ceased his present employment. He sued the Pennsylvania bar authorities to enjoin the rule’s enforcement, arguing that it was an unconstitutional restraint on his First Amendment rights. The Pennsylvania bar wallahs defended.

At least for the moment, it’s advantage to the plaintiff. A federal judge granted the lawyer’s motion for a preliminary injunction, and denied the bar’s cross-motion to dismiss. The order is here.

I have to say that the state bar’s arguments that the rule does not capture words (the judge kept impolitely reminding them that the damned rule expressly reaches words), and that the effect of the rule would not chill any reasonable lawyer’s expression in those words, were frivolous bordering on outright dishonest. I only wish the federal judge in question had been enough of a straight-shooter to say exactly that.

The rule is indefensible.

But consider: The highest court in a state adopted this rule. Only one of their judges had the integrity to dissent (may his tribe increase!). The others all joyfully jumped aboard the totalitarian bandwagon. All but one of the most powerful jurists in the State of Pennsylvania knowingly signed on to crush the First Amendment rights of an entire occupational group. And what do we bet that the’re going to have the effrontery, decision after decision hereafter, to lecture the citizens of the State of Pennsylvania about the sanctity of the Constitution, and no doubt about how pointing out their brazen departure from their oath to uphold that Constitution is somehow “an attack on the independence of the judiciary”? Every last one of the judges who signed off on that rule should be impeached and removed from office instanter. They have conclusively demonstrated not only their unfitness for judicial office, but for any other position of public trust, down to and including the folks who swab out the urinals at the state fairgrounds.

I have over the years, in situations like this, reminded my interlocutors that Alexandr Solzhenityn’s final sentence in his monumental GuLAG Archipelago, after three volumes, however many “books,” dozens of chapters, and on and on, beginning with the very oirigins of the Soviet system of extra-judicial killings, the first of the slave labor and extermination camps, and continuing all the way up to the post-Stalin era and the continued use of the camps for oppression, is a brief four words. These four words are his valedictory to the crowning achievement of his life’s work. What are they?

“There is no law.”

In the State of Pennsylvania, with these kinds of judges running the show, there is no law.

A Final Burst of Courage

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Over twenty years ago I ran across an article in The Economist. This was back when it was a serious news magazine; it has now become a sad parody of itself, parrotting whatever the most recent Party-approved far-left talking points happen to be. I even wrote about it once, here.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Way back when I ran across an article in The Economist on that botanical curiosity, the durian. It’s native to Borneo and Sumatra, apparently, although at present the largest exporter is Thailand. What caught my eye in the article was the description of its aroma as having been characterized as “pig shit and turpentine”. Wikipedia has a more complete write-up, so I won’t bore Gentle Reader with all the details. The key detail from the Wikipedia entry may be that of the nine species of the fruit known to be edible, only one is sold on the international market. This may account for the (pardon my getting ahead of myself) discrepancy between the experience as advertised and the experience as lived. In Southeast Asia it seems, many public areas such as transit buses, subways, and hotels go so far as to post signs expressly prohibiting durians on the premises.

Once a month, my father goes to have both eyeballs injected. Bilateral wet-type macular degeneration, or as I call it, macular degeneracy. He tells me it feels almost as good as it sounds, which I find only mildly comforting as it’s highly genetically correlated and both he and his oldest brother have wet-type degeneration, which accounts for only 10% of total cases. While my father is having his injections, I frequently pop down the road a bit and put in a call at my favorite international food market.

This is a very serious international food store. It’s not some place, in other words, where they sell Dos Equis beer, some cheese mass-produced in France, and a jar or two of Italian tomato paste and call it “world market” or some such. Typically I’m one of the six or eight round-eyes in the place. The emphasis is on Asian foods, and most of the major countries are represented. China, of course, but also Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Laos, to my certain knowledge. They’ve also got strong selections from Mexico (and points south), and this past visit I saw food labels in Cyrillic (bought a jar of Baltic sprats from Russia, from which I infer that the FDA has concluded that, thirty years after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the Baltic has finally flushed out enough that they’ll permit fish harvested there to be sold here . . . the last time I was there, underway on a German Bundesmarine tender in August, 1985, about all that could live in those filthy waters was jellyfish). They’ve got a great fresh seafood selection, and if Gentle Reader wants to settle a bet on how many dozen different kinds of rice there are, this store would be a good place to go make the count.

In their fresh fruit section they sell whole jack fruits (free advice: unless you really, really are passionately fond of jack fruit, or are close friends with about 72 people who are, a whole jack fruit is going to work out to be several years’ supply of the article). And durians.

Ever since reading about them all those years ago, I’ve wanted to try a durian. But I never worked up the guts to take the plunge and buy one. Until this past Friday.

According to Wikipedia, the durian grows up to about fifteen inches long. It is covered by very sharp, if short, spines. So Lesson No. 1 in today’s catechism will be: You will need to wear leather gloves while opening up your durian.

The eatin’ part of the durian consists of a number of pods of irregular shape and size. I cannot tell that they are arranged symmetrically, either. You can look at the exterior of the fruit and easily discern the boundaries between the larger pods. Note them well; these interstices will be where you slice.

Having donned my gloves, I removed the stem and rested the fruit on its head. Using a fairly sharp chef’s knife (I would not use anything with a narrower blade; you are likely to experience unsafe levels of flexing as you cut into the rind), I then cut along those boundaries between the larger pods. You’ll need to cut anywhere between a half- and a full inch into the rind to get all the way through. To use a perhaps grisly metaphor, you’ll cut ear-to-ear on it, all the way from near the stem on one side to near the stem on the other. Having cut the rind, you can lay your knife aside, and keeping your gloves on you simply pull the sucker open. If you’ve guessed right you’ll end up with two chunks of durian and at least one or two pods exposed. There will be more pods than visible at this initial cut. You will then slice around (not forgetting to put your gloves back on) to locate and extract the additional pods.

Each pod has one seed, which is perhaps the size of a good-sized peach pit. It is dark brown and smooth on the surface, and you will find it growing at the inner edge of its pod. I discovered that the easiest way to remove the seed is to split the pod along its outer longitudinal axis and peel it back from the seed. [According to the Wikipedia entry the seeds are edible if cooked; I did not test that hypothesis.]

The internet has many recipes for using durian. It is used in curries, in desserts of various sorts, and even in ice cream. I refer Gentle Reader to the kindly offices of Google for assistance in locating the recipes. I did not do anything with my bridal durian other than cut the fruit pods into bite-sized pieces and eat them unadorned. I usually like to begin with a new food by eating it as close to how it comes out of the package as I can take it, on the theory that I’ll know better what to do with it if I know how it tastes all on its own.

One removes the pod from the rind by reaching around the pod (having removed the gloves first) and gently pulling it free (it’s attached along its inner longitudinal axis); if you pull too vigorously the pods come apart in your hand very, very easily, as in fact happened to mine. The texture of the pods varies. At the inner edges, the outside surface of the pods is very slightly fibrous, but it is a fiber that teeth have no difficulty cutting through, so that’s not an issue. Moving away from the interior of the fruit, the exterior surface texture of the pod becomes softer and more even. Inside the pod my durian was very extremely creamy in texture, almost to the point of banana pudding (it was also a slightly more pale, but very similar shade, as banana pudding). As mentioned, I took a knife and just sliced the pods up. Not wanting to eat the entire thing at one sitting, I put the left-overs in a bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and shoved it into the refrigerator. There was no observable change in color, texture, taste, or aroma over the ensuing 48 hours (given that durians are commonly shipped frozen, that wasn’t surprising).

So what about the taste and aroma? We may dispose of the latter first. If you shove your face right into your freshly opened durian, you will notice a scent that is not like anything your are likely to have smelled before. I did not observe it to be either noticeably pleasant (like a freshly peeled tangerine is heaven borne on the breeze) or noticeably unpleasant (on my way to work each morning I drive past a sewer treatment plant that sits way down in a creek valley, and sometimes those boys operating the plant have very obviously cracked open the wrong valve somewhere . . . and my durian smelled nothing like that). But here’s the most important take-away: The aroma was simply not all that pronounced. As mentioned, if you take a face-plant into your durian, you’ll notice the smell. But who, other than a fraternity pledge during Hell Week, makes a point of doing a face-plant into his food? It must be observed that the Wikipedia page linked above points out that not all durians smell the same, either in bouquet or strength. It may be nothing more than that the specific variety shipped internationally just doesn’t smell as bad as the varieties consumed locally. If so, then so be it; I’ll take the trade-off.

The flavor is sweet, but not overpoweringly so. There is no tartness to it, either. The flavor of my durian was also not overwhelming. Stronger than a strawberry; not as powerful as a tangerine or peach. And very different; again, there’s nothing in my experience that it reminded me of to any degree. I can see why it would make the beginnings of a good dessert or flavoring in ice cream. It would doubtless combine with other essences (e.g. coconut) to produce distinctive flavors, but without any over-bearing the other.

The bottom-of-the-page conclusion is this: I will definitely be buying more durians over the years. Having satisfied myself that the unadulterated fruit is thoroughly satisfactory, I will begin the experimentation.

Great Moments in Take That! You Bastards

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[Note:  What follows is a work-up of a Facebook post from a week ago today, which is to say June 21, 2019.]

After the November 11, 1918, armistice, the German High Seas Fleet was interned in the Royal Navy’s northern fleet anchorage of Scapa Flow, off the northern coast of Scotland. It steamed through a double line of British battleships, all of which were at general quarters, with main batteries loaded and trained on the Germans (just in case they had not, in fact, off-loaded their own ammunition).

That evening, the commander of the Grand… Fleet ordered that the German ensign would be lowered at sunset, and would not be raised again except by permission.

in the late spring and early summer of 1919, as the peace conference in Paris dragged on, the mood aboard the German ships got ugly. The sailors were most not happy about having meekly surrendered themselves (the German Army, in contrast, had marched back home under arms), and they really weren’t pleased with the thought that their ships, which were after all their homes as well, were going to be passelled out among the victorious allies to become their playthings.

So on that June morning, 100 years ago today, after the British had left harbor for training exercises, the German admiral, Ludwig von Reuter, hoisted an innocent-looking flag signal. Whereupon the German ships all raised their ensigns (which is to say, without permission), opened their seacocks (they’d already thoroughly compromised their ships’ honeycombed watertight construction to ensure that once the flooding started it couldn’t be stopped), and headed for the lifeboats.

Ashore an American senior officer was sitting with a British counterpart. He looked out and saw an entire harbor of ships gently listing over and settling below the waves. “My God; they’re sinking!” he exclaimed. The Brit looked up briefly, observed, “Aren’t they now,” and returned to his paperwrooork.

A few of the ships got raised, but none in usable condition. Most got chopped up where they sank and sold for scrap over the years. A few are still there, in water too deep for salvage. You can dive them, with a permit.

One week later the Treaty of Versailles was signed, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife got whacked in Sarajevo, starting the whole sorry mess.

By way of interesting sidebar: Those ships still on the bottom are among the very few sources of steel that is not contaminated by post-1945 nuclear fall-out. It’s used in the manufacture of highly sensitive radiation detection equipment, apparently.

By way of even further interesting sidebar:  Those four remaining battleships are privately owned, and are for sale . . . on eBay.  Seriously.  I think the buy-it-now price is about £880,000 or something like that, I think.  Be the first kid on your block to own your own battle squadron.

Coming Full Circle, 1914-1919 (and 2010, Too)

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From the Dept. of We Thought it Was a Good Idea at the Time (Div. of Unintended Consequences):

One Hundred years ago today the Treaty of Versailles was signed. It formally ended the Great War, at least against Germany (there wasn’t an Austria-Hungary left by that time; in any event a separate treaty was signed to end its war). By one of history’s gentler ironies, it was signed five years to the day after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were shot to death in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip.

A recent thorough treatment of the circus that came of the Paris Peace Conference is Paris 1919.

The general terms of the treaty were fairly onerous, but in truth, not more than any country ought to expect which intentionally precipitated a general war in Europe and then so far forgot itself as to lose. Huge loss of territory? Yup, that happens. [N.b.  The world seems to have forgot that point in connection with the efforts of Islam to extinguish the state of Israel.  The land belongs to Israel by right of conquest.  Full stop; end of inquiry.]  Have to confess yourself a bad boy? That too. Pay up for all the destruction you caused in other folks’ back yards? Folks are funny that way, y’know. Give up your implements of destruction? Do you think we’re suckers or what?

[To get an idea of what Germany was up to behind the lines, the two books to read are The Englishman’s Daughter and The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I; the Germans even stole the doorknobs for the brass. All the way down to the doorknobs, fer cryin’ out loud. And they wondered they were expected to buy new.]

[To get an idea of what Germany was up to in the U.S., even before April, 1917, the book to read is The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice.]

So yeah, Germany took it in the shorts. But they had it coming.

The problem turned out to be that they didn’t understand they had it coming, because they were never forced to confess themselves beaten. They signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, not a surrender. Their army marched home under arms. But Germany was well and truly beaten. The Allies kept up the blockade of Germany all the way up until the treaty was signed. Several tens of thousands of German civilians died during those months, of starvation. Countries which are not beaten don’t get done that way.

But on the surface, there was a fundamental mismatch between the end of the war and the terms of the peace.

Looking below the surface, in a very real sense Germany had no choice but to sign the treaty. But the German people didn’t see it that way. Their leaders told them that they didn’t lose the war but were “stabbed in the back,” and the Treaty of Versailles wasn’t what they had coming to them, but rather a sell-out.  Lies, all of it, peddled by mountebanks after no more than power.  The German people enthusiastically embraced the cynics who sold them that bill of goods, and marched off to do it all over again.

Needless to say, a generation later the Allies didn’t repeat the same mistakes. We saw to it that in large areas there wasn’t much more left than would throw a shadow.  We so thoroughly cured Germany of militaristic aggression that today their air force is more or less grounded and their navy rusted to its moorings.

Of course the big alt-historical question is, had the Allies pursued the Kaiser’s disintegrating army all the way back into Germany, had we insisted on a surrender, would German society have responded more along the lines that it did in 1945?

I’m not so sure it would have, in truth.  I don’t think one may doubt that, had German cities and towns been overrun with the detritus of a destroyed army, had German civilians seen with their own eyes the ragged, half-starved, terrified survivors of units which had abandoned their weapons in the mad scramble to do something, anything to get as far from the killing zones as possible; had they seen the endless columns of well-fed, warmly clothed Americans marching across their squares and their farms, the National Socialists and the various nationalistic right-wing parties would have had a much tougher sell than was the actual case.  But as they say in the military:  The enemy gets a vote.

How would German society have responded to crushing defeat in 1918/19?  I don’t think we can ignore the reality that a good part of why German inner resistance crumbled so completely in 1945 was precisely the fact that it was the second lost war in a generation.  After the first one there would be a more-or-less natural human tendency to think in terms of, “Well, next time we’ll know what to do; next time we’ll get it right.”

What I very much do not think is that the Treaty of Versailles, imposed after a genuine, unmistakable German defeat, would have somehow prevented the birth of National Socialism in Germany.  That movement flourished in the manure of the Dolchstoßlegende, it is true.  But the seed sprouted independently.  Let us not forget that fascism first came to prominence and power in Italy, which was on the winning side in the war after all, and which benefitted enormously at Austria-Hungary’s expense at the peace table.  It wasn’t a loser’s movement, in other words.

The nationalistic strain had been present for generations, ever since (at least) the Napoleonic invasions (see, e.g., “Frühlingsgruß an das Vaterland,” by Max von Schenkendorf in 1814, and later set to pretty dramatically rousing music).  And by 1914 the socialists had long been the largest single party represented in the Imperial Reichstag.  There is exactly zero reason to suppose that, looking south over the Alps, it would have occurred to no one to combine those two strains.

Would National Socialism have grown as powerful as it did, though?  I think not.  The German officer corps retained so much of its influence in German society largely as a result of its pretense that the Army had not lost the war.  And it was the Nazis’ successfully winning over the officer corps that ensured them the backing of the conservative element in society.  In this connection it is very much apropos to remind Gentle Reader that National Socialism began and remained very much a left-wing, radical political movement.  The conservative elements in German society, and especially the officers, originally wanted nothing to do with the Nazis; but when the Army came over, it became sortable–hoffähig in German.

William Shirer tells the story very well of Hitler’s testimony at the court-martial of three or four junior officers who were being tried on charges of having disseminated, contrary to regulations, Nazi Party propaganda among their troops.  Hitler testified for the prosecution, and it was his assurance to the senior command that his movement posed no threat to their position in society that won them over.  The liquidation of the SA as an independent power center on June 30, 1934, was another step in that process; Ernst Röhm very much intended for the SA to be a fully-functional army beside (and of course, eventually supplanting) the Reichswehr.  [Side note:  Hitler had no intention of keeping his end of that bargain, and didn’t.  Just like a parasitic wasp eventually sucks dry its host, Hitler progressively emasculated the officer corps, to the extent that they watched supinely as one of their own was baselessly smeared as a sexual pervert and cashiered in 1938.]

Now consider what if everybody and his cousin knew jolly good and well that the generals had lost the last war?  What if they were as discredited in 1918-19 as they were in 1945?  Who would have brought over the wide swathe of German society that wanted nothing more than a return to the stabilities and certainties of the Kaiser’s empire?  The National Socialists would not have enjoyed the mis-branding which support by the Army permitted them to indulge.

So no, I don’t think the National Socialists would have come to power had Germany been physically and undeniably confronted with the fact of its defeat in 1918.

In terms of what it accomplished, the Treaty of Versailles must be said to have turned out to be one of history’s larger misconceptions.  The Allies weren’t willing to fight a total war to a total war’s finish, but they wanted to, and did, impose a peace that could only last if built upon the foundation of that degree of victory.

But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

By way of pettifogging detail . . . Germany’s final payment on its (by then heavily discounted) World War I reparations was made on . . . October 3, 2010. And to close the circle with another irony: October 3 is Reunification Day in Germany, celebrating the final liquidation, in 1990, of the 45 years’ separation that they got to enjoy in consequence of their having believed themselves unbeaten in 1918.