Author Archives: Countrylawyer

Now This is ‘Twixt Wind and Water

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For me, at least.  Dear Jno. Gruber, the fellow who brought us “it’s a good thing American voters are so stupid; otherwise we’d never have passed the ACA,” apparently in April, 2010 mooted the prospect of directly taxing fat people according to their body weight.  This occurred in a short (two-page) essay he published in the magazine of the National Institute for Healthcare Management.

Gruber places the idea of a direct tax on being a lard-ass in the context of a sin tax, such as cigarettes and alcohol.  Being Gruber, of course, he generously concedes that taxing the things that “cause obesity” is trickier than tobacco or booze taxes, because “while every cigarette is bad for you, clearly some food consumption is good for you!”  Wonder if that insight was part of his dissertation.  And — gotta love how this ol’ boy is awash in empathy for his fellow (if hopelessly stoopid) Americans — “A simple tax on calories could do more harm than good by deterring low-income people from getting enough nutrition. Likewise, the very complicated relationship between different types of food consumption and health poses significant challenges.”  You mean that something as complicated as human nutrition in a heterogeneous society, in which there are vast variations in what people eat, how they eat it, when they eat is, what effect it has on their bodies, and what they’re doing with the bodies they have so bewilderingly fed is actually — one’s heart bleeds for poor Jno. — beyond him?  Forsooth!

But don’t worry; Jno’s got it figured out.  You just directly tax the lard-asses.  “Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight.”  It’s touching, really, to see once again the left’s instinctive reaction to anything they don’t like: tax it.  Sort of like The Economist’s recent cover story.  The cover displays a man bounding down a mountain of oil barrels.  The lead editorial is to the effect that we should “Seize the Day” of low energy prices to . . . tax energy.  Really, that’s what their notions of how to “rationalize energy policy” boil down to.  Let’s take a momentary (and it is momentary, as recent spikes in pump prices of $0.10/gallon or more in less than two days have shown) downward price deviation in one of the most unforgivingly expensive items the typical American has to buy a great deal of, and make it artificially even more expensive.  You’d think that a publication that calls itself The Economist would be familiar with the old Wall Street saw “never mistake trend for destiny.”  Gasoline at $1.72 a gallon (around here) is a brief let-up; those taxes will be there forever, even when it’s back up to $3.25 a gallon.

Think that having to fork over a chunk of change to the government, to do with as it pleases, based on what your bathroom scale says (actually, it would have to be government scales, and how frequently would you have to weigh in?), is perhaps a bit . . . intrusive?  Don’t worry, so Gruber:  It’s already happening “indirectly” in how employers are allowed to charge back health insurance premiums for their deep-draft workers.  “Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI. The new health reform legislation increases this differential to 30 percent, with the possibility of rising to 50 percent.”  Let’s disregard for the moment the fact that BMI has been pretty thoroughly de-bunked as a useful measurement of health risk; many professional athletes have high BMI and would therefore be treated — and taxed — the same way as your ‘umble correspondent here, who is (just keep repeating: “honesty is the best policy”) a fat body.

What Jno. is disregarding here is the distinction between a price and a tax.  The one is a bargained-for term of voluntary exchange which captures each side’s needs and limitations.  The other is an involuntary exaction the amount of which has no bearing on either side’s requirements, and which is determined wholly without reference to the subject matter of the transaction.  To illustrate:  Requiring everyone who receives more than a certain amount of “income” (as defined) during a year to pay over $0.40 of each dollar above that arbitrary limit has zero to do with whether being able to retain only $0.60 of each dollar is appropriate to the circumstances under which that dollar of “income” was generated.  Your only alternative to paying $0.40 is not to receive the income at all.  Charging me $3.25 a gallon for gasoline leaves me with any of several alternatives: I can so arrange my transportation needs as to minimize the amount of driving I must do; I can, within limits, change my mode of transportation (getting rid of my F-350 for an F-150, for example); I can switch from gasoline to diesel, and hope to compensate for an even higher per-gallon price by increased miles per gallon; I can shop around for someone who will charge me only $3.19 per gallon.  As Thos. Sowell pointed out, for decades Alcoa controlled almost the entire American market for aluminum.  Yet during that period the price of aluminum fell by something like 95%; why?  Because there were many substitutes for it.

Insurance premiums for the seriously obese should be higher.  “Insurance” is a contractually-agreed allocation of risk between an insurer and an insured.  The laws of large numbers enable an insurer to calculate, with a varying degree of exactitude, precisely how much of Event X it may expect over a given Population N of insureds who are exposed to the risk of Event X.  It can therefore, for a fairly small price relative to the cost of each Event X, promise to take some portion of that risk off an individual insured’s hands.  It’s math, pure and simple.  Math being rather merciless, however, when there is more of Event X to be expected among Population N or for any specific member of Population N, the aggregate risk that must be apportioned increases, and if you don’t want to break your insurer, so that now, ex-post and after they’ve already parted with the money they thought would relieve them of some or all of that risk, the risk of Event X gets re-allocated back onto the individual members of Population N, then you’ve got to recover that aggregate cost of Event X from Population N.  Period.  You cannot change the math of it.

The Grubers of the world see no moral or functional distinction between a price and a tax.

As Hayek and others pointed out long ago, prices and their movements allow the free flow of incredibly complicated information among enormous groups of people almost none of whom can be in direct communication with each other.  I have no idea what it takes to plant, tend, harvest, and process a tree, anywhere in the world.  I can see, however, what that 2×4 down at Lowe’s costs me, and I can decide whether to build that garbage can enclosure or not.  I can tell my contractor that I’ll forego finishing my basement just now because those 2x4s just cost too much, for me, right now, and with the specific other demands on my earning capacity as of right now and as I can foretell them.  Prices in a free market allow the development and flourishing of what Hayek called an “extended order” of voluntary cooperation.

Taxes are the antithesis of prices.  Taxes are not imposed based on millions of individual decisions taken by mutually independent actors.  They are centrally determined, in kind and amount and purposes to which put, and then they are imposed outward and downward.  Taxes communicate nothing; in fact, being involuntary they cannot communicate anything.  They are an exercise in coercion pure and simple, whereby one group seizes the property of another group to use it for purposes determined utterly without reference to the needs or desires of the group from whom seized.  The “sin tax” on lard-asses like me would generate revenue streams for the government that would be used for purposes utterly unrelated to the ostensible reason the tax was collected.  Just like “sin taxes” on booze and tobacco aren’t used to reduce drunkenness or nicotine consumption, or to make better any of the conditions caused by either.  Those moneys get plowed into re-paving roads every four years whether they need it or not, or building hilarities like a “land port” in a downtown area, to sit vacant and all-but-abandoned for several decades.  Or they get put into “higher education,” which these days means hiring more administrators, “diversity coordinators,” and sundry grievance-mongers, rather than improving the library system or putting more or better professors in front of classrooms.  Or they will fund the travel and entertainment budgets of agencies like the IRS, with their $50,000 demonstrations of painting (seriously, that happened, at the same time the IRS was targeting taxpayers based on their political views).

Gruber’s equating prices and taxes is more than a little bit of a Freudian slip.  We must always, always bear in mind that leftism is inherently coercive and irreconcilable with human liberty.  You cannot be a leftist and at the same time be a friend of human liberty.  Cannot be done.  You may believe that you have identified values which rank higher on whatever scale you choose than human liberty, and we can have a good-faith debate on whether you are right.  But you cannot pretend to be for both.  Gruber is a leftist.  As his now-revealed comments about the design and passage of the “Affordable” Care Act show quite plainly, he relishes the notion of sticking it to John Q. Public without the latter’s even realizing what’s being done to him.

When a leftist like Gruber tells you that a price is the moral or functional equivalent of a tax, he is doing neither more nor less than projecting his own desire for coercive power onto the participants in one of Hayek’s extended orders.

But, as I mentioned at the top of this post, I’m a lard-ass, and as such I have problems with proposing to tax my ass (literally) so that the University of Blank can hire another “counselor” for the “victims” of “microagressions” like being told that the intricacies of differential equations do not vary by the skin color of the student.

Mr. Lincoln’s Calf’s Leg

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I have a book which I was given many years ago from my late grandfather.  He was born and grew up in a tiny little town in the Midwest which to this day does not have a traffic light, and only a half-dozen or so stop signs.  He grew up, went to Northwestern, where he interrupted his studies to serve as a medic in the Great War.  He returned, finished his degree, and went to Harvard Law School.  I have his diploma, signed by Roscoe Pound, at the house somewhere.  That was back in the day when a farmer’s kid from nowhere could manage to go to an Ivy League law skool in the days before student loans.

In any event the book is Abe Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories, and was published in 1901 by Alexander K. McClure.  The stories were harvested from people who’d actually known Lincoln back in the day.  Among my favorites is the one where he was in a heated discussion with some people and the proposition was made along the lines of, “Well, why don’t we just call it so-and-so?”  The astute reader will recognize in this an early murmuring of what has since become accepted political dogma.  In a world in which there is no truth, only competing narratives, it genuinely does not matter what something is, or is not (e.g. “homosexual marriage”), but rather and only what you call it.

Lincoln’s response was to pose the question of how many legs a calf would have if you called its tail a leg.  “Five!” the answers piped up.  No, Lincoln pointed out, the calf would still have only four, because “calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”

Which brings me, by logical transition so smooth as to be scarcely noticeable, to the question of what is the unemployment rate in the United States.  “5.6%!!” crow the lefties and their publicist arm (which is to say, the lamestream media).

Except it’s not 5.6%, not by a wide margin.  If you are so completely unemployed you’ve given up hope and looking for work for the past four weeks, you’re no longer “unemployed” for purposes of the BLS count.  Seriously, you aren’t; it’s as if you just vanished from the face of the globe, as if your belly no longer needed food, your children no longer needed food, and your car began to run on cold tap water.  If you’ve been making $82,500 a year and lost that job because your employer went bust — or if you used to work at a bookstore and minimum wage hikes have put your employer out of business — and in order to keep some ramen noodles on the table you cut your neighbor’s lawn for $50 every other week, you’re counted as “employed,” and therefore not “unemployed.”  If, because of how companies now use software to schedule their workers so that as few of them as possible are “full-time” for purposes of various federal and state mandatory benefits, and because of how many companies now use that software, you can only cobble together, among two or three part-time jobs, 18 or 20 hours of paid employment each week, you’re “employed.”  And so forth.

The CEO of Gallup calls this for the bullshit it is.  As the Blogfather would say, read the whole thing.

The employment picture is dismal and all the mulligans and we’re-not-counting-those-hungry-people-out-of-work will not change that.

This is, of course, a further illustration, as if such were needed, of why you never, ever trust government numbers on their faces.

Gosh, Maybe They Have a Point?

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A short while ago I “throwed” (as we say in the country) up a post on PEGIDA (or “Pegida,” as it’s commonly, but incorrectly, rendered), the “Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the Occident” movement which started in Dresden and now has a good deal of the hand-wringing class in Germany up in arms.

Since then there has been quite a bit of turmoil within the ranks, to the extent they can be said to have ranks.  The fellow who was the founder of the outfit, Lutz Bachmann, was forced to bail out when it became widely known that he had put up a picture of himself on Facebook wearing a Hitler moustache and with the famous ill-combed hair hanging off the side of his head.  He also expressed some opinions about immigrants and asylum-seekers that were fairly pointed and crude.  In truth he does in that picture bear something of a resemblance to Hitler, perhaps not as eerie as the fellow who played him in Downfall.  Bachmann’s not giving the Hitlergruß in the picture, which is good for him, because that’s a criminal offense in Germany, nor are there any Nazi symbols, uniforms, tracts, etc. to see.  But still, no matter where you go in the world there’s Shit You Don’t Kid Around About, and in Germany that’s one of them.  So he had to go.  By the way, the effort by mainstream politicians to tie him formally to AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, the rising fourth party in the country, hasn’t worked.

More seriously, Bachmann’s efforts, notwithstanding his resignation from the leadership slot, to pull the levers and control the movement, has lead another four members of the leadership to resign, among them Kathrin Oertel, their public speaker.  They were unwilling to continue onwards with Bachmann’s interference, and also, it seems, not with him associated with the movement at all, given his public statements.  They took a stand on principle, in other words.  You can oppose unlimited mass immigration from places that are irredeemably hostile to Western culture without sliming the actual individuals themselves.  They were willing to do the former but not the latter.  Good for them, I suppose.

Of course, this makes the question of who’s calling the shots all the more important.  PEGIDA wouldn’t be the first mass movement to have its original leadership effectively purged, whether quasi-voluntarily or not, and then be taken over by people a helluva lot less scrupulous than they were.

Be all that as it may, among the “concerned” rhetoric of the hand-wringing classes is the insistent question of just what does “Islamization” mean.  Asking the question that way is of course supposed to highlight that all these PEGIDA trolls don’t even know or understand what it is they’re protesting against.  I mean, unless you can “define” Islamization you can’t be against it, can you?  And by “define” we mean write something down which is internally coherent, comprehensive, not over-inclusive, and easy to hold up to any given set of facts to see if it fits in the frame.

I’d observe that this insistence of being able concretely to define “Islamization” is not at all dissimilar to the insistence that unless you can define “obscenity” you can’t be against that, either.  I forget which of the Supreme Court justices it was who, in an unfamiliar outburst of common sense, pointed out that whatever “obscenity” might or might not be in the abstract, he knew it when he saw it.  By like token, you can tell Islamization when you see it.

Like this story from this morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:  A 19-year-old girl was found dead in Darmstadt, in a park.  No missing person report was filed, no attempt made to hide the corpse’s identity.  Turns out the perps were her parents.  Her parents.  Both parents.  Her father strangled her, then he and her mother carried her body to a park and dumped it.  Dumped out in the leaves and dirt the little girl she bounced on her knee, whom she taught her first words, her colors.  Whom she tickled as she bathed, and with whom she laughed at all the silly things tiny children say.

The reason:  She wanted to marry a boy they didn’t approve of.

Parents, daughter, and boyfriend are all described as “Germans of Pakistani origin.”  Bullshit.  They’re Pakistanis who happen to living in Germany.

And this, all you hand-wringers, is Islamization of the Occident.  Now, in 2015, it is acceptable in that culture to slaughter your own child because you don’t like whom she fell in love with.  Let’s put this in perspective:  Not even in the Dark Ages, in the time of the Merovingians, did ordinary European parents kill their daughters for loving out of bounds.  I can’t even recall reading on any instances in which nobility or royalty, for whom these decisions had peace-versus-war implications, killed their children, male or female.  Might have locked them up in a convent or monastery, sure; but I’m going to take a lot of convincing before I consider that as being in the same league as taking your own hands and choking off the breath of life in your 19-year-old daughter’s throat.

Someone remind me again why it’s a wicked thing to question whether the continued uncontrolled introduction of people from cultures where such things are not only done, but the done thing, is a good idea for Western Civilization.

This is What it was Supposedly About?

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Last night I watched The Interview, the movie the forthcoming release of which was allegedly the impetus behind a massive hack of Sony.  Almost immediately responsibility for the hack was ascribed to North Korea.  I understand that those much more knowledgeable on the subject have since cast earnest doubt on whether that was in fact the case.  On two occasions since someone has shut down North Korea’s internet access with various forms of attack.

And so forth, in other words.

We are told that North Korea was moved to hack Sony, which made the movie, by anger at the movie’s portrayal not only of their shitty little country, but also by the pretty graphic depiction of Kim Jong Un’s assassination at the hands of two — well, “unprepossessing” is about the most charitable expression — American pop-culture television clowns.

Don’t get me wrong.  This little snot who’s running North Korea is perfectly capable of not taking a joke, and reacting in ways that are massively beyond any reason.  Among his earlier noteworthy killings was of a general whom he thought insufficiently enthusiastic about his accession upon Kim’s pappy’s death.  He had the officer tied to a stake which had been sunk into the ground at a point on which multiple artillery pieces had been painstakingly registered.  Then they blew him to shreds.  Later on he had an uncle arrested and not only had him killed but apparently his entire family as well, including spouses and youngest descendants, small children.  I saw reports — can’t say whether they were ever confirmed — that he had uncle killed by setting a pack of dogs on him that had been starved for an extended period.  So they ate him alive.

But this movie?  It’s neither very funny nor very insightful.  “Sophomoric” gives it a bit more credit than it’s due.  I’d put it at somewhere around seventh-grade level, because that’s about the oldest that you can reliably expect children to be intrigued by the clumsy sight gags (most involving gratuitous fake blood and suchlike).  Every character in it — including the two leads — is pasteboard.  Yes, I understand:  It’s a comedy, and in a comedy you don’t go looking for development, depth, irony, contradiction, or really much of the rest of what makes humans interesting to observe.  I’m judging it by the standards of other funny movies, and these characters are still pasteboard.

The closest it gets to a serious moment is when one of the leads strolls into a storefront — implausibly left unlocked — and discovers that what he thought was a bustling, well-stock corner grocery is actually fake fruits and vegetables in bins set out in front of photo panels of packed shelves and gleaming aisles.  He stomps on a few pieces of the fake stuff, grabs a couple, steps back out onto the sidewalk and screams, “Liar!” at the top of his lungs at one of the ubiquitous enormous pictures of Li’l Kim that confront the viewer everywhere in that country.  A close second comes in the actual interview itself when the same character asks Kim if he doesn’t think his people deserve some sort of reward for having endured all the decades of assault and hostility from the entire rest of the world.  Kim of course agrees, and then interviewer asks him, “So why don’t you feed them?”

That’s it.  Two minutes, tops, out of the entire movie.

The Sony hack involved the release of e-mails in which their senior executives make the mistake of being entirely honest about some of their products and performers.  I’ll confess to no small glee when I read of Angelina Jolie being described as a minimally-talented, spoiled brat of an actress, or something like that.  Whatever else she may be, she is emphatically not, as she is characterized on the cover of a recent pop-culture rag, “intriguing” in any degree, either in herself or in relation to anyone or anything else.  Nice figure and all, at least to the extent it’s actually hers and not the product of a surgeon’s knife, but I’ve never seen her in any performance, or read or heard any pronouncement by her, that suggests she’s any more intriguing than the squeegee man who smears your windshield as you wait for the light to change.  But dear ol’ Angie makes a raft-load of money for Sony, and so it savors of delightful malice to have the bigwigs call her out.  “Very awkward, by God!” as the Duke of Wellington observed about William IV’s public rant at the Duchess of Kent (which scene is accurately portrayed in The Young Victoria, by the way, but sadly without working in the Iron Duke’s comment).

So were it not for the release of those inconvenient e-mails I’d suspect the hack of being a false-flag operation by Sony to drum up interest in an entirely forgettable movie.  As it is, this movie will pull in vastly more money than it ever deserves, and more of a fuss will be made about it than it could possibly merit.  If it was North Korea who cracked open the seal at Sony, all they’ve done is learn something about the Streisand Effect.

Don’t Reckon That’d Happen Around Here

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Once upon a time, many years ago, when I’d just got back here after law skool in the Great Big City, our firm’s bookkeeper answered the phone and then went tearing out the door.  I asked what was up.  The answer was that their cows were wandering around the town where they live.

I observed, to no one in particular, “I bet my friends who went to Skadden don’t have this sort of thing happen very often around the office.”

From my dear ol’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we have a report from Klein Behnitz, which from the perspective of Google Earth appears to be a wide spot in the road in Brandenburg.

A 70-year-old farmer was “apparently” unable to deal with his 30 cows.  He was semi-retired, it seems, and only kept the cows . . . well, for the same reasons a lot of farmers keep livestock well past the time that they’re physically able to meet the full demands of farming.  As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, the connection between the peasant and his animals was among the lesser-recognized cultural tragedies of Stalin’s collectivization policies.  These people and their ancestors for centuries had lived cheek-by-jowl with their horses, cows, pigs, sheep, geese, ducks, chickens, and so forth.  And in a flash it was all taken away from them and they were shipped hundreds or thousands of miles away, to the depths of the taiga, to chop down trees.  Or just to starve or freeze to death.

Anyone want to bet that this 70-year-old was desperately hanging on to his life as “farmer,” and these cows were all he had left to do that?  The article mentions that his property, in the middle of the village, it seems, had up until recently always been “exemplary.”  But now it had “got above his head.”  And — heaven forfend! — he failed to watch over his cows sometimes, and — o! the horror of it all — in recent times his cows were “even running in the street.”  God save the mark.

So the government came to take his livestock from him.

They arrived this morning with their cattle trailers and he shot one of them with his shotgun, killing him.

I wasn’t there.  I’ve never been there.  So I don’t know what kind of a place Klein Behnitz is, other than from the perspective of however many miles in space Google takes pictures from.  But I’ve been in a lot of places like it.  And I have to ask myself where were this fellow’s neighbors?  If he can’t take care of his cows on his own, wasn’t there anyone at all in his village who could have pitched in, just a little?  Couldn’t they have taken turns?  Around here your cows get out in the road and, while you’re expected to come get them yourself, it’s also expected that your neighbors will help out if they can.

Maybe Klein Behnitz just got tired of an old man who wasn’t up to it any more.  I dunno.  But the government came to destroy a man’s very identity, and now another man is dead.

Someone explain to me how this demonstrates that “government is just another name for what we all do together.”

PEGIDA and the Projection of the Leftists

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Once upon a time I used CNN’s web site as my internet start page.  As Inspector Clouseau would say, not any more.  Ever since 2006, when CNN joyfully enlisted itself in Al Qaeda’s effort to throw the mid-term elections by releasing a propaganda film showing American troops being shot by terrorists, by broadcasting and re-broadcasting the short film, I have used the web site of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as my start page.  It’s a convenient way to keep my language skills from completely atrophying, and it can provide some extremely interesting cross-fixes on issues that concern not only Germany and Europe, but the entire world.  Without going into the subject too deeply, each society has its baggage, baggage which prevents certain topics from being discussed as honestly as in places which don’t have that specific baggage to carry.  Just by way of example, here in the U.S. it’s the legacy of chattel slavery; in Germany it’s the legacy of the Holocaust; in Britain it’s the legacy of the Empire; in Russia it’s the omerta which still hangs over a world full of collaborators in the most murderous ideology every to have plagued the Western world.

All of which is a very roundabout way of saying I’ve been, not exactly monitoring, but paying some degree of attention to a group that has coalesced in Germany in recent months and which calls itself Patriotische Europäer Gegen Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or PEGIDA.  Translated that works out in round numbers to Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the Occident.  I say “coalesced” because it’s not really terribly plain what sort of organizational structure, if any, they have.  In this respect they bear a more than passing resemblance to the Tea Party movement here.  It does not appear to be an astroturf movement, like MoveOn.org, or the Pew Foundation, or a front group for operations who dare not present themselves in daylight, as was the case for the communist/anarchist/terrorist backers of the “Occupy” groups.  It appears to be a more or less genuinely grassroots outfit, for the time being.  That’s neither speaking good or ill of it, only that the demonstrators are — at least at the moment — by and large unguided.  Again, that could bode well or ill, depending on how things develop.  They’re not being used, which is good, but then they’re ripe for being used, which is bad.

The center of gravity of PEGIDA seems to be in Dresden, although demonstrations have occurred elsewhere, most prominently in Cologne, where the cathedral doyens took it upon themselves to cut the lights off at the cathedral so that it couldn’t be used as a photo-backdrop.  Whatever.  Every Monday in Dresden they turn out by the thousand to march for, or against, whatever it is they think they’re doing it for.  Their first such march of 2015 drew something like 18,000 participants.  It’s been claimed that Dresden being the focal point is curious because there are so many fewer Muslims there than elsewhere in Germany.  I’m not sure that’s all that inexplicable; it’s why, after all, you find firefighting equipment and conduct fire drills in buildings that aren’t already burning.

But what’s this all about?  The PEGIDA movement is universally described as “right-wing” and “anti-immigrant”:  Publications from the predictable to those which ought to know better join in.  A few samplings:

The Guardian tells us, “German anti-immigrant groups have been quick to respond to the murderous attacks in Paris saying they are proof of the significant threat posed by Islamists[.]  Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Western World, a right-wing populist group which has been gaining support in weekly demonstrations since October, said in a statement that the attacks confirmed their views.”

From National Review, we have:  “it does seem that the rise of Pegida is yet another example of the truth of Mark Steyn’s maxim that I will quote yet again:  ‘If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.'”  In the author’s defense, he does observe that at least some of the participants in this movement have . . . ummmmmm . . . other affiliations which are partially or wholly objectionable.  On the other hand, he ought to know better than to tar with a single brush a movement which is (again, thus far) so unstructured.  Just because the Democrat Party here enjoys and in fact solicits support from numerous groups whose objectives and methods are abhorrent to the interests of the United States, do we paste single labels on it and its candidates?  How about the NAACP?  Of course not.

EurActiv.com shares with us:  “Pegida defames Islam in general.  At Pegida demonstrations, speakers not only took aim at radical Muslims but at Islam as a whole. Muslim burial rites were criticised, for example.”  The same article also mentions one of the problems with trying to get a grip on who and what PEGIDA is actually about:  “Up until recently, Pegida’s organisers had turned down requests to hold talks with political parties, claiming it desired to remain nonpartisan. Interview requests from German media are also usually rejected by the alliance.”  Gee whiz; level accusations, however thickly padded with code-words (and sometimes not even that veiled), of being a quasi-Nazi resurgence movement, and the people you’re accusing get reluctant to talk with you.  Who could have seen that coming?  And I’ll note that you cannot “defame” an idea; you can disparage it, hold it up to ridicule, even savagely attack it.  But “defamation” is something that is peculiar to people and their reputations (even “trade disparagement” is, at bottom, tied to people’s business reputations).

Newsweek (yeah, it’s still out there, not that anyone cares) labels it an “anti-immigrant movement.”  In a subtle elision of their news section with their reviews of current fiction, they bring us this quotation from the present German Interior Minister:  “German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the attack in Paris had nothing to do with Islam.  ‘Islamic extremists and Islamic terror are something entirely different from Islam,’ he said. ‘It is immensely important to underscore that difference on a day like today.'”  No.  Seriously.  He really said that.  Gunmen shoot up a newspaper office, shouting that Allah is great! and The Prophet is avenged, and that has “nothing” to do with Islam.

The Beeb goes for the click-bait headline:  Anti-Islam Pegida March in City of Dresden, but then goes on to flirt with heresy to its resolutely leftish agenda:  “What has startled politicians, though, is that many in the crowds at Dresden are not extremists or neo-Nazis. As conservative politician Wolfgang Bosbach puts it, these are concerned mothers and pensioners.”

Slate tells us, “Xenophobia is Going Mainstream in Germany“.  Here we’ve got a good example of the calling-them-Nazis-but-not-using-the-word.  “So far, PEGIDA has been smarter. They are taking the same ideas that traditionally were only voiced by scary guys with shaved heads and armbands—the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments—and packaging them in a way that normal middle-class Germans can embrace.”  And what are the “same ideas” shared by “scary guys with shaved heads and armbands”?  Why, those are neo-Nazi outfits.  And sacre bleu! we’ve got folks who explicitly deny being xenophobic and who’ll quote MLK at you “packaging” Nazi ideas so as to dupe regular folks.  But hist!  What’s this:  “PEGIDA’s opponents so far have been trying to dismiss it as part and parcel of a movement that includes people who wave swastikas and try to burn down mosques. “They are clearly Nazis,” one observer in Dresden commented to the New York Times. But to a lot of Germans, that’s not so clear.  PEGIDA has appeal beyond the traditional far-right fringe, and it would be a mistake for German leaders and the media to simply dismiss it.”  Maybe something that 34% of your population thinks has a point isn’t all that far out after all (or maybe it is; recall that Hitler polled over 40% in his last election).

For an article that eschews the customary why-bother-looking labels (although the author can’t resist the frisson-of-fear “shadowy”), we have at BuzzFeed someone who actually seems to have taken a look at at least a few of the actual people involved.

“In an interview at a hotel bar in Dresden’s historic center, [Kathrin] Oertel, the PEGIDA organizer, said that she and a dozen friends felt they had had enough after the Kurdish rebel group PKK and their German supporters held a rally in central Dresden in early October. ‘We don’t want them to carry out their quarrels on our streets,’ she said. ‘This isn’t any of our business.’  * * *  Oertel, 36, a business consultant and mother of three, said that the ‘Islamification’ of her home state of Saxony, where less than 3% of the population are foreigners, may not seem like a problem. ‘The Muslims are making it a problem,’ said Oertel, who has long blonde hair and was dressed all in black. She said it started in her children’s school, where Muslim girls wear headscarves and don’t take part in swimming lessons. ‘I don’t have anything against Christians or Buddhists or Jews,’ Oertel, an atheist, said. ‘They don’t bother me and don’t demand I observe certain rules so as not to offend them.’”

All of the above are other people’s take on it.  Does PEGIDA have anything to say for itself?  Turns out, it does, or rather might, assuming this document is legitimate:  A position paper of what PEGIDA is for, and what it is against:  Among the things they say (editorial aside: they fall prey to the annoying habit of ending every sentence with an exclamation!):

1.    They claim to be for the acceptance of war refugees and the religiously persecuted.

2.    They claim to be for the right and duty of integration into German society (contrast, for example, the official Nazi position that a Jew could never be a German).

3.    They claim to be for a reduction in the case load of social workers attending to asylum seekers’ needs.  They claim it is presently 200:1, which they point out — correctly, I suggest — is the equivalent of no help at all.

4.    In asylum applications, they claim to be for a process similar to Holland’s or Switzerland’s, and an increase in resources to “massively” sink the processing and decision time.

5.    They claim to be for “resistance” to a misogynist, violence-focused political ideology (Islamization is plainly meant) but deny being against resident “integrated” Muslims.

6.    They claim to be for an immigration policy after the models of Canada, South Africa, Switzerland, and Australia.  I’ll mark this one with a “huh?” since I know bugger all about how those places do it.

7.    They claim to be for “sexual self-determination.”  Whatever; I’ll observe that this position alone makes it incompatible with Islam.

8.    They claim to be for the preservation and protection of “our Judeo-Christian” “geprägte” culture.  That last word is significant.  “Prägen” is a verb which means “stamp,” as in to stamp a coin, or to stamp something with characteristics by influence.  It doesn’t imply identity.  This is important, because only a liar or a fool would deny that in fact Western civilization is profoundly stamped by Judeo-Christian ideas, and only a liar could deny that Islam wants nothing at all to do with large swathes of that.

9.    They claim to be for the introduction of plebiscites along the Swiss model.

10.    They claim to be against permitting “parallel societies” to arise, with specific reference to their structuring along the lines of sharia.  This is scarcely a newly-discovered issue in Germany.  The FAZ itself has repeatedly in recent times run articles and even series of articles on the subject.  I wrote at some length about one such here.

11.    They claim to be against radicalism, whether political or religious, and against preachers of hate, of whatever religion.

So that’s what they say about themselves.  They might be lying.  They might be using anodyne phrasing to mask something a very great deal more sinister.  Remember the Nazis came out with a 25-point agenda in 1920, not a single point of which mentioned  or even came close to implying the slaughter of every Jew in every corner of Europe they could lay hands on.  Said nothing about invading Eastern Europe and starving to death every Slav whom they didn’t work to death.  On the other hand, before concluding that whoever put this PEGIDA position paper together really means something different, I’m going to need a great deal more convincing than self-serving statements from mainstream politicians whose fear is transparently one of lost votes and money.  Angela Merkel may huff and puff that these folks are just self-evidently radical right-wingers who shove their little Nazi party pins inside their shirt pockets on the way to the rally, but how much of that is trying to drive a wedge between on the one hand a movement that 34% of her population expresses some degree of sympathy with, and on the other AfD, a nascent fourth party which has put down roots to the right of the CDU/CSU tired-out, anything-to-remain-power coalition?  A couple of years ago The Economist ran a pretty lengthy article on Merkel, and observed that her principal trait was a willingness to embrace the opposition’s position, to under-sell it, so to speak.  That’s just a very polite way of pointing out that you’ll do or say anything just to stay in office.  Nowadays, when the lamestream media no longer controls the discussion, eventually voters will figure you out.  It’s why RINOs in America are so contemptuous of the Tea Party:  These people actually stand for something and are willing to act on their convictions.

Of course, the inability to show that PEGIDA actually means something different from what its says doesn’t stop the professional hand-wringing class from claiming exactly that.  Case in point:  An article in today’s FAZ, “What the Demonstrators of PEGIDA Actually Want“.  Well.  Jolly good thing we’ve got this author to explain it all to us; we might have been fool enough to read PEGIDA’s position paper.  And what do they “actually want”?

“Obviously” they “fear foreigners whom they scarcely know.”  Funny, I’ve not heard that PEGIDA is campaigning against immigration from China, or South America, or even Eastern Europe; as near as I can tell they’re against further infiltration by specifically Islamic foreigners, and against further expansion of the power of Islamic residents over the coduct of society in Germany.  The common element is not place of origin, but rather a specific, aggressive, violent religion (kind of like they say in their position paper, you know).  “Islamization” means they’re afraid that the “culture could so alter itself, that one would feel as if he lived in an Islamic state.”  And then, in what American readers of, e.g., the NYT, will readily recognize as opinion-masquerading-as-reportage, we have the “many think” sleight-of-hand.  “Many think,” this author tells us, that the PEGIDA demonstrators fear “many other things,” and not just Islamization.  Like “losing their job” (the hoary stand-by of the left: you don’t have principles; you’re just in it for the money), or “that one day their pension will be too low” (ditto), or that their money will evaporate and their savings won’t be enough (gee, wonder why in Germany of all places the fear of inflation finds resonance; otherwise: ditto (the link, by the way, is to a picture of a five-billion Mark — RM5,000,000,000 — . . . postage stamp)).  The people in the former DDR have already experienced how, with the collapse of their worker’s and peasant’s paradise, their “conditions of life” can be “completely altered”; “perhaps” they’re just “scared of further change.”

Scared of further change:  The ultimate weasel accusation.  Sort of like Britain was “scared of further change” when it guaranteed Poland’s borders against . . . well . . . against the Germans.  Or like the abolitionists after 1850 were “scared of further change,” like the “change” that the new fugitive slave law was actually going to be enforced, and the slave power was actually entering an aggressively expansionist phase.  Or that the American colonists in the early 1770s were “scared of further change” that the king and Parliament were going to reduce them to vassalage after 150-odd years of letting them by and large run themselves.

But what “further change” might the PEGIDA folks be “scared of”?  Well, like getting your ass shot up by someone shouting Allahu akhbar! because he didn’t like a joke you told.  Or entire suburbs of your national capital being places where it’s just not safe for your own police and firefighters to go, because they’re attacked by Islamic thugs.  Or gangs of Pakistani men gang-raping over 1,400 little girls over the course of 18 or so years.  Or soldiers of your own country being slaughtered in broad daylight because . . . well, because Allah is great (or at least real swell).  Or “honor killings” where teenage girls have their throats slit because daddy doesn’t approve of their boyfriend.  Or entire segments of the population checking out of the law, establishing their own religious courts to mete out sharia justice.  Or competing groups of religiously-motivated thugs fighting it out on the streets of your own cities.  Or having to wonder, every time you get on a train, whether someone’s going to blow it sky-high for the greater glory of a 7th Century pederast.  And so forth.

That fat-headed German Interior Minister deserves to be on the next train that gets blown up.  What happened in Paris this past week has everything, every-damned-thing in the world, to do with Islam as such.  As that el-Sisi boy in Egypt said in exactly so many words (words which the Western press is studiously ignoring):

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible! . . . All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.  I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.”

I’m certainly not going to put myself out there as carrying the water for PEGIDA or anyone else.  They may turn out to be dupes or worse.  But to point out that Islamization of the Western world is an aggressively pursued policy that has absolutely nothing — nothing at all — good to offer us, and that open-door immigration from those areas of the world whose societies are not merely not-“geprägt” by Judeo-Christian values, but actively and violently opposed to them, is nothing that can end well?  Until someone can show me that the imams to whom el-Sisi was speaking actually get out there and demonstrate, by book, chapter, and verse, that all these criminals in Islamized Europe in fact have it wrong . . . well, until then I think PEGIDA’s got the better argument.

Layers of Fact Checkers

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Part of the knock of the Legacy Media on the blogosphere is its supposed inaccuracy, nay irresponsibility.  The just-say-anything-to-draw-the-clicks ethos of the bloggers stands in marked contrast, we are told, to the flaying gauntlet of editors and fact-checkers which even the slightest statement by A Journalist must endure before it sees the light of day.

Thus, we can all assume that everything we see or hear that comes from the Legacy Media is holy writ.  This especially applies to statements which characterize large numbers of people, in large areas, and over prolonged periods.  Because, of course, it would be the height of unethical behavior to make some inflammatory statement about an extremely sensitive topic (irrespective of to whom sensitive), and because it would be unethical we can rest assured that it does not happen.  Not with the Legacy Media.  No sirree.

Then, of course, we have this from CBS News (the same folks who brought you “fake-but-true” with their flagship 60 Minutes show in 2004, when they tried to throw a U.S. presidential election).  It’s a piece about a documentary which re-examines a killing in a small Florida town in 1952.  A black woman walked into a white doctor’s office and shot him dead.  At her trial a very sordid story came out, involving a prolonged sexual liaison between the doctor and the woman, and drugs either taken by or inflicted upon the woman and supplied by the doctor, the effect of which were, either separately or together, sufficiently mind-altering that the woman eventually beat the death penalty with an insanity plea at a retrial.  She’d been sentenced to death at her first trial.  The Florida Supreme Court in State v. McCollum, 74 So.2d 74 (Fla. 1954), reversed and awarded a new trial.  Apparently at that time it was within the court’s discretion to order that the jury physically view the location of a homicide.  The trial court so ordered, but then the judge voluntarily blew off the viewing, such that a portion of the trial proceedings necessarily occurred outside the judge’s supervision.  This was reversible error.

I’ll note, by the way, that this was small-town South in 1952, at the very beginnings of what became the final push in the civil rights movement.  A time during which whites all over the South (and north as well . . . recall that Brown v. Board of Education’s full style continued: “. . . of Topeka, Kansas”) were at general quarters to defend the system of legalized oppression which we all know now as Jim Crow.  At the risk of understatement, were I a defense lawyer I sure wouldn’t want to have to save my black client’s neck with an insanity defense in that place at that time.  Too hard to prove; too laden with visceral antipathy (I mean, think about it: that plea has never had good press, not with any defendant and not at any time).  And yet this defendant, while convicted, was spared the death penalty on that basis.  So maybe the racial dynamics of the place and time weren’t quite as simplistic as the CBS News article implies.  I can’t say for sure, although the two data points, viz. hang-’em-high all-white jury (interestingly the article gives the all-white racial make-up of the first jury, but says nothing about the second . . . you’d think that any high school newspaper reporter would ask — and answer — that question) and successful insanity plea, don’t inhabit the same logical space very well.

What I object to in the CBS News article, however, is this statement:   “The slaying stirred racial tensions in Jim Crow-era Suwannee County, when robed Ku Klux Klansmen regularly marched through Main Street in a show of force and lynchings were common in the Deep South.”  Were they in fact “common”?  Does anyone know?

Someone does know, and it only takes five seconds to type in the Google search term to find out.  The Tuskegee Institute (scarcely an errand boy of the Klan, we can safely assume) began keeping records of lynchings, everywhere in the United States, beginning in 1882.  They tracked it by year and by race of victim.  Here’s a summary of their data.  The last year in their database is 1968, so they covered 86 years total.  From 1882 through 1968 they show 4,742 total lynchings, almost 73% of the victims of which are given as black (I’m surprised the proportion is that small; I would’ve figured somewhere north of 95%).  So we can test whether “lynchings were common in the Deep South” during the years around 1952.  Mathematics and all, dontcha know.  For the twenty-one years centered on 1952 (ten before and ten after, plus the year itself, or 24.4% of the entire period for which the Institute keeps the data), the Tuskegee Institute shows, nationally, 32 lynchings, or not quite two-thirds of one percent of the total, with three of the victims shown as white.  To put it in perspective, almost a full quarter of the years covered accounts for less than two-thirds of one percent.  For the period 1952 through 1968 inclusive the Institute shows ten lynchings.  Suprisingly, three of those victims were white.  That was something that really surprised me when I first looked at their data.

To borrow an expression that’s become pretty commonplace in recent months about the supposed “epidemic” of rape on college campuses, “Even one is too many.”  That’s certainly true of rape, and it’s equally true of lynchings.  On the other hand, you cannot look at the data and come to any conclusion other than that by 1952, lynchings were very nearly if not absolutely a thing of the past, all but vanished from the American landscape.  Inclusive of the year that Ruby McCollum whacked either her rapist or her paramour (depending on whose story you believe), there remained a further ten to record, just over two-tenths of one percent of the total lynchings since 1882.  I defy anyone to make an argument that they were therefore “common” anywhere in the United States in 1952, or even terribly frequent during the twenty-one years including and surrounding that year.

But hey, who cares about mere numbers, when you’ve got a narrative to get out there?

Layers of fact-checkers my left foot.

President Wilhelm II

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Recently I’ve been re-reading Lamar Cecil’s highly enjoyable two-volume biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II. I picked up the complete biography shortly after the final volume came out in 1996 and have read it through a few times since.  Vol. I runs from his birth through 1900, and Vol. II takes him up through his death in 1941 a few days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

[Aside: I cannot fathom people who cannot understand re-reading a book. I’ve yet to meet anyone – and certainly I myself am not such – who is so perceptive that he picks up every last detail, every nuance, every interpretive shading, every careless conclusion, every challenge to his established thinking, on the first read-through. Just as you can never set foot in the same stream twice, because the water continuously flows and your second step is in different water, so you can never read a book as the same person twice. I would have first read Wilhelm II five or so years before my oldest child was born. I can tell you to a certainty that today I read the chapters on his troubled relationship with his parents, Uncle Bertie, and Granny Victoria through eyes that are substantively different than the eyes which first read those books. Similarly I have since 1996 read no small number of other books treating of the same times, personalities, and events. I think I would be fool indeed if nothing of what I have learned and seen and thought in the interval provided any deeper color, or more helpful perspective, on Wilhelm.]

At the risk of a plot-spoiler, Cecil’s summing-up comes down to this, in the final paragraph of Vol. II:

“What debts do Germans of today owe to their last kaiser? * * * Unhappily, there are none. It would seem that the last of the kaisers deserves, for his own time and place in history, the brutal envoi that the Duke of Wellington paid to King George IV, an inglorious king who had ruled England long before his kinsman Wilhelm was born. He was a sovereign, the Iron Duke regretfully concluded, who lived and died without having been able to assert so much as a single claim on the gratitude of posterity.”

In his preface Cecil observes that he’s spent some 30 years with Wilhelm; presumably that condemnation is the fruit of all those years’ acquaintance.

Wilhelm still fascinates, though. Seldom has a ruler come to a throne with such enormous capital in goodwill, youth, energy, and native intelligence. Seldom has a ruler come to a throne to rule over a people offering the scope of potential which late 19th Century Germany offered. Seldom has a ruler with such a people and such resources hit an historical sweet spot so squarely as Wilhelm II did. The Imperial Germany of 1889 to the crown of which Wilhelm succeeded was incontestably the most vibrant, most powerful nation in the most vigorous, prosperous, admired continent in the world.  To borrow a naval metaphor, Germany was hurtling down the catapult, afterburners fully lit off, and with nothing but clear sky off the bow and above.  By a freak of pathology — his father’s cancer — Wilhelm was able to hop into the cockpit and strap in before it cleared the flight deck.

As headily as Germany was advancing in 1889, in terms of learning, industry, the sciences, the arts, and general human advancement, the Germany of 1889 was just getting started. Britain, getting first off the mark of industrialization in the late 1700s, had hit and was beginning to pass her peak by then. France never would really get there. Italy, Spain, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were decrepit, mis-ruled societies still mired in centuries’ worth of inertia, corruption, and political stasis. The Netherlands and Belgium were making the run, but they were tiny, their influence on the larger course of the world negligible. Only Britain with her titanic empire and her absolute mastery of the seas which bound it together could seriously dispute Germany’s rise had she chosen.  She did not choose to; German merchants were winning ever-greater market share wherever they went . . . and thanks to a merchant marine that was expanding exponentially, they went wherever they pleased, the Royal Navy bearing the burden of protecting their trade as well. The United States, still hobbled by the lingering effects of the Panic of 1873 and with an entire region of the country – the South – still devastated from the Civil War, was only slowing beginning to see its way to becoming the behemoth it did. Think not? In 1889, American trains rolled on seamless tires manufactured in Essen by Krupp.

Had Wilhelm had the vision and strength of character to seize his world-historical opportunity – to repeat: the confluence of favorable circumstances at his accession was nearly unique in all history – even today the Wilhelmine Era might be looked back upon as not a gilded (as that time in the U.S. has become known) but a Golden Age.

And Wilhelm pissed it away. All of it. All the way down to his very throne itself. Not only did he wreck his army, the beautiful army to which he addressed his very first message as kaiser, but by the end of the war hundreds of thousands of civilians had been starved to death by the punishing blockade imposed by the Royal Navy.  That would be the same navy which at one time had benignly stood guard over the trade routes German merchants followed to bring untold wealth back home. Wilhelm put to plow, disked, raked, and fertilized the soil from which Hitler’s monstrosities grew. In 1914 Germany was the most over-educated, flourishing society in Europe, and in fact in most of the world. It was well on the way towards the society which, by the time Hitler came along, held more Nobel prizes in the sciences than everyone else put together.  In terms of the acid question of how ordinary people lived, only certain regions of the United States even came close to it (and in what is called the Life of the Mind, America had adopted entire chunks of the German Way of Doing Things, such as its university system; large portion of the “Progressive” creed sweeping the nation in the hand of people like T. Roosevelt and Wilson had similarly been taken over wholesale from German political thought). If Serious Learning can in fact be a safeguard against the societal expression of the darkest of human nature, then in Germany if anywhere that proposition should have held. But it wasn’t even fifteen years since Wilhelm slipped over the border into the Netherlands that Germans went to the polls and elected the Nazis, and only eighteen years and six months – just barely enough time for a child to be born and grow to majority age – between August, 1914 and January 30, 1933. Talk about “fundamental transformation.”

As repeatedly observed and illustrated by Cecil, the defective monarch who presided over this wastage of human potential was someone who had been told all his life long how clever he was, how infallible his judgments, how extraordinary, how central to a world-historical phenomenon he was. He surrounded himself with sycophants and charlatans, people whose sole function was to breathe reassurance into his ears, who shielded him from all information which might disturb his self-image of a figure of massive importance, keen insight, and unlimited talents. He kept these playthings about him until he tired of them or their presence became awkward to him or they failed somehow to live up (down?) to his standard of boot-licking, at which time they were cast aside with nary a further thought. No matter what he mucked up, it was always someone else’s fault – the Jews, Lord Salisbury, his Uncle Bertie (later Edward VII), the Catholics, or his servants who were just insufficiently loyal to the Hohenzollern crown and its cosmic destiny.

He fancied himself august beyond approach, the arbiter of sophistication, taste, and learning. In fact his intelligence, which was not mean at all (even those who fully appreciated his character flaws confessed themselves very impressed by the speed with which he could grasp issues and by his phenomenal memory, the latter a trait he shared with his grandmother), was nonetheless dilettantish, spanning a broad range but very, very little if anything penetrated to any depth. His judgments were snap and superficial, usually formed in terms of how an external stimulus had affected or reflected on him, and how his response to it would emphasize or might diminish his importance and dominance. He scrupulously screened those whom he permitted into his court for pedigree and function. If you weren’t of ancient nobility, or among the very highest governmental officials, or a military officer, then by and large you were simply not hoffähig (presentable). Of course, at his disportments – and he spent a phenomenal amount of time on vacation, hunting in the fall and winter, sailing in the summer, and betwixt and between flitting about the place, inviting himself to his fellow sovereigns and his wealthier nobles – you were perfectly fine as long as you were filthy rich enough. It was on the water, for example, that he hung out with American (and a few English) plutocrats. The Krupps, Thyssens, Stumms, Henckels, and so forth were very much to his taste – outside Berlin. And to repeat: He spent as little time in Berlin as he could get away with doing.  Everyone who ever knew him, from his childhood on, remarked at how little work he was willing to do, how little the hard work of mastering the governing process interested him, how willingly he cast his duties aside to play dress-up soldier.

Through it all, he never, ever learned. Anything. Even at Doorn, as a lonely, bitter old man, he was convinced that he had been right all along, that it was them, all those other people, who had ruined him.

And then it hit me: Our current Dear Leader is neither more nor less than Wilhelm II transcribed for 21st Century America, like Bach’s setting Vivaldi’s A minor violin concerto for organ (except instead of a masterpiece Dear Leader’s delivered up an excrescence). He’s spent his entire life being told how wonderfully clever he is, how infallible his judgments are, how destined (dare we say it? predestined) he is to play a fundamentally transformative role not only in his own country but on a world stage. Wilhelm’s acknowledged intelligence somehow never produced any noteworthy scholarly or mental achievement; we’ve been assured for seven years now how Dear Leader is just so brilliant that governing us contemptible roobs just bores him to death . . . and yet we have yet to see so much as an elementary school report card by way of actual documentation. Dear Leader’s books apparently were ghost-written; so were Wilhelm’s. Like the kaiser, Dear Leader too surrounds himself with groveling, fawning, truckling courtiers who vie for his attention by finding amusements for him and singing hosannas of praise of him, to him.  And like the Kaiser, Dear Leader is notorious for throwing his people under the bus, as soon as it becomes expedient to do so.

Dear Leader, like Wilhelm, fancies himself a consummate diplomat and statesman; like Wilhelm, his peers the world over view him with a mixture of pity and contempt, and more or less with impunity defy his wishes. Wilhelm could seldom utter six sentences in a row without telling an outright fable or offending someone who meant him well. Dear Leader, when prized away from his Telepromptr, is renowned for his ability to say the wrong thing, at the wrong time, to the wrong people. When Wilhelm let his guard down, as in the Daily Telegraph interview, out came gushing a torrent of falsehood, confusion, illogic, petulance, and self-pity.  When Dear Leader gets off-script and speaks his mind, we get treated to . . . well, to the same bizarre mixture of lies about himself and his actions, self-pity that no one will do as he instructs, and glimpses into an understanding of the world which conforms to exactly no observable data at all.  No one, absolutely no one with anything more than bare walking-around sense, believes a word coming from Dear Leader’s pie-hole, exactly as Wilhelm’s bloviating was treated by his contemporaries both within German government and abroad.

Wilhelm’s capacity for empty rhetoric and bombast (remember it was the dear ol’ kaiser who exhorted his troops to behave like Huns when he sent them to China to suppress the Boxers; how’d that work out for you, sport?) was limitless. In our own time we have a candidate for office the mere nomination of whom by his party causes the planet to cool and the seas to recede (paging King Cnut! King Cnut!!), “red lines” that suddenly aren’t, high-flown gobbledy-gook about post-partisan healing matched with relentless race- and class-baiting, ceaseless tripe about the “one percent” all while siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from precisely the plutocrats about whom he gasses on to us, and on whose Martha’s Vineyard estates he relaxes from his next-most-recent vacation.

Speaking of which, like Wilhelm, Dear Leader views his time at his government desk as so much tedium between vacations.  Like the kaiser, our latter-day Wilhelm always, always travels in high state, with fleets of flunkeys, retainers, and of course boorish-but-wealthy louts and hangers-on to lend a tinselly air of glamor to it all.

Wilhelm by virtue of having been born to his throne knew nearly nothing of the country he was destined to rule, and in fact even managed to avoid learning anything during his brief time in school and at the university. Dear Leader, born (according to his own statements made over the course of decades) abroad and raised in luxury in the fairy-tale atmosphere of Hawaii, makes a point of flaunting his ignorance of us little people out in fly-over country, commiserating with His People about how stupid we are in our clinging to our God and our guns.

Most striking of all is the absolute, immune-to-all-data conviction observable in both Wilhelm and Dear Leader of their own sublime magnificence, their all-encompassing infallibility in everything on which they choose to bestow the grace of their attention. Kool Aid didn’t exist in Wilhelmine Germany, but if it had, the kaiser would have drained his own pitcher, repeatedly and with a smirk on his face. And no one in modern American life appears more eager to believe his own bullshit than Dear Leader.

I could go on. Of course no historical parallel is ever perfect, and that’s no less true in the comparison of Wilhelm II and Dear Leader. But Jesus Christ and General Jackson! the resemblance is strong, disturbingly strong.

There is, of course, one significant point of distinction between the two:  Wilhelm actually desired the prosperity and security of his country; however boorish he might have been about it, he was unapologetically German.  Dear Leader is, at his warmest, profoundly ambivalent about the United States, and from everything he has said or done, both before taking office and since, genuinely believes that the world would be a better place with a less-powerful, less-prosperous, less-imitated America.

Wilhelm found a flourishing garden and left it a charnel house the toxins of which leach into the air and water of world society to this day. Where will we find ourselves, fifteen years after Dear Leader departs?

Christmas 1914

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I’d meant to blog this in time for Christmas Eve, but what with a great deal of family turmoil (father-in-law 1,500 miles away dying, and wife has disappeared for ten days and counting to take it all in) it just didn’t work out that way. These things sometimes happen.

Christmas Eve this year was the centenary of one of the most amazing occurrences in the history of nations. Beginning on December 24, 1914, and continuing over the course of a few days, several thousand British, French, and German soldiers on the Western Front spontaneously and collectively said, “Enough,” and downed arms.

It started with Christmas carols. The troops sang – had been singing since the beginning of the war – amongst themselves, in the manner of soldiers since Caesar stood road guard.

In this connection I’d observe that soldiers and sailors can be among the most soppy of sentimentalists. Maybe it’s something about the rawness of combat, seeing one’s friends and comrades shredded to bits of meat, or dying slowly of fevers, the flux, or gangrene (for those who survived their wounds initially), which opens the mind to the essence of human feeling. Combat troops can’t afford the oh-so-sophisticated detachment we civilians like to wear as a sign of our world-weary, weight-of-the-universe-on-our-shoulders mental and moral elevation above the rabble. For them the whole point of human existence can within seconds be reduced to the question of whether you’re going to get it or am I. Or in the first-person lyrics of “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden“: Eine Kugel kam geflogen; gilt sie mir oder gilt sie dir?

For centuries about all the troops had to amuse themselves, whether on the march or in camp – other than alcohol and whores of course, and the occasional sack of a city such as Magdeburg or Badajoz (for those who survived storming the walls) – was music. Simple tunes which could be played on penny whistles, harmonica, or fiddle. Songs which lent themselves to keys reachable by musically untutored men singing in groups. Quite a number of those tunes and songs have lasted to this day: “Soldier’s Joy” dates to the 1600s; “Muß i’ denn,” the unofficial song of the gunners, was used by Elvis. Back in 1965 or so, Columbia Records released two collections of Civil War music, one for the Confederacy and one for the Union; in the 1990s a soundtrack for Ken Burns’s The Civil War came out (unfortunately the Burns soundtrack is solely instrumental; the Columbia recordings have the words and excellent, very extensive liner notes). Still later the popularity of the movie dramatization of Master and Commander spawned a momentary revival of interest in sailors’ songs and tunes.

The Germans, especially those from the Protestant tradition, engaged in group singing with particular zest, even by the standards of the time and place. This isn’t exactly scientifically established fact, but it strikes me that going all the way back to Luther, the communal singing of the great chorales was part of daily life in the areas which became Germany. Listen to them – “Nun danket alle Gott” (from 1636, in the darkest days of the Thirty Years’ War); “Lobe den Herren“; “Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr” (among the very earliest Protestant songs, from 1524); “Lob Gott getrost mit Singen” (from 1544) – and you realize that you’re listening to the national music of a people. During the Great War the German troops frequently sang on the march. According to the myth of First Ypres (what the Germans recall as the Kindermord bei Ypern – the Slaughter of the Innocents at Ypres), the nearly-raw recruits shoved into combat sang “Deutschland über alles” as they marched onto the Old Contemptibles’ gunsights. Large numbers of them were August 1914 enlistees and were for all intents untrained when they were hurled against some of the best marksmen in the war.

A final off-topic observation: Among the most heart-rending passages in all the James Herriot books – it’s in the last one, The Lord God Made Them All – is his relation of hearing Russian troops singing one evening. They’d been liberated from slave labor in Germany at the end of World War II, and since it was impossible to maintain them where they were found, thousands of them were brought back to rural England. It must have seemed like paradise to them, green, fertile, with houses and village un-blasted by artillery or bombs, the air smelling neither of putrefying human bodies nor the smoke from corpses. One evening Herriot overheard them singing among themselves, songs which of course he couldn’t understand, not knowing Russian, but obviously songs of longing, loss, and heartache. The Russians, in their Orthodox church, had a similarly rich tradition of massed choral singing; after a few centuries of it you sort of get, as a culture, the hang of it. It nearly moved Herriot to tears. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but those prisoners, who had somehow managed to cheat the reaper who had massacred so many millions of their comrades, whether by starvation, labor, disease, or ordinary bullets, were in the process of being sold down the river by Churchill and Roosevelt. They were all compulsorily returned to the Soviet Union, where nearly to a man they were either shot out of hand or forwarded on to the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn, who met hundreds if not thousands of them over his time in the camps, points out that they were branded “traitors of the Motherland” rather than traitors “to” her, as would have been the normal usage. He also wonders, pointedly, how it was that in neither the Napoleonic invasion nor the charnel house of World War I did any Russians in any discernible numbers betray their Motherland, while after over twenty years of liberation of the proletarian and the peasant . . . they were declared to have betrayed her literally by the million.

In any event, Christmas 1914 started with the troops’ singing of carols. In many places the trenches were close enough that each side could hear the other plainly.  In many places the Germans had decorated their parapets with tiny Christmas trees, adorned in part with tiny candles. [Aside:  The institution of the Christmas tree is entirely German in origin, and wasn’t introduced to the Anglosphere until George III’s wife Charlotte came along and wanted something to remind her of home. George, being almost touchingly uxorious, obliged her with trees sprinkled about the royal palaces, and from there it spread to the aristocracy and eventually further on down the social scale. The tradition received added impetus from Victoria and her German husband Albert (Victoria grew up speaking German at home and she, Albert, and all their children spoke it in the family, which is why Edward VII never quite got over a slight guttural undertone in his English).]

At some point during Christmas Eve 1914 something clicked, and the troops began to mount their parapets and venture into no-man’s-land. It’s hard to track exactly who initiated it, and how, and in what order, although according to some reports it was the Germans who took the first steps. Not all the troops joined in. On the German side the Prussians by and large held back; it was the Saxons, the Bavarians, and the smaller contingents who participated. It was all, of course, entirely against orders, and without the knowledge of the higher-ups. In some cases it appears that shelling was laid on to discourage the fraternization. But for the most part, where the troops were willing the spirit ruled.

On Christmas Day there was, in the affected sectors, a general truce. The men buried their dead, cleaned up their turf, swapped chocolate, cigarettes, headgear, and insignia. Being Europeans, someone had a soccer ball and several impromptu matches were held among the shell holes. Letters got passed to be mailed to acquaintances in the other countries; many Germans, especially, had worked in England before the war, and so not only spoke good English but had formed friendships with the locals. The war had not yet obliterated the affection from their hearts.

Things carried on for the day, and in some sectors for a day or two after Christmas. By the New Year life and death were back to normal along the front, and the men who had proudly showed off pictures of wives, children, and girlfriends were blasting away at each other once again. The brass was of course livid, and where they could identify “ringleaders” it came down like a ton of bricks. I’ve never read that anyone was actually shot for fraternizing with the enemy, but I’d be very surprised if more than a few junior officers didn’t have their careers ruined because they either failed to stop their men or had joined in themselves. On the other hand, one has to wonder precisely how much you can ruin a man’s “career” when it’s pretty much a statistical certainty that he’s going to get killed in any event (the highest percentage casualties on all sides was among exactly those junior officers; they were the ones who went over the top with the troops, who lead their men into hostile trenches, whose job it was to show themselves physically contemptuous of certain death).

It happened again in 1915, to a smaller extent. This time the high commands were ready, and specifically directed shelling along those sectors where they feared the contours of the front lent themselves to such goings-on.

It never happened again during the war, and I’ve not heard of it happening during the 1939-45 war. Verdun beginning in February 1916 and the Somme in July put paid to the notion of we’re all in this together, only on opposite sides. The mountains of corpses not only contained many of the men who had looked about and taken the message of Christmas so earnestly in 1914 and 1915. Those same dead, and their maimed brothers, beckoned the survivors to revenge, not reconciliation; to savagery, not gentleness; to the war as its own purpose, calling, and unity, not to the message of glad tidings of great joy, which shall be unto all nations.

The Christmas truce of 1914 has been the subject of at least one quite readable book — Silent Night — as well as a tri-national film from 2005, Joyeux Noël. The latter was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film, and I highly recommend it. It’s set among the ruins of a farm in France (the farm cat has somehow made it thus far, and among the French soldiers is a man from that village who knows the cat and his name – Nestor – and he gets into a gentle dispute when he undertakes to correct a German private who calls him Felix).  The protagonists are companies of Scots, French, and Germans. There are a few ironic twists; the German lieutenant is Jewish, for example. [This is not Hollywood invention, either; there really were Jewish officers in the German army: The major who recommended one A. Hitler for the Iron Cross was Jewish, and among the very few German Jews initially spared the oppressions of the Nuremberg Laws were decorated veterans from the war.]  Some of the plot features are of course dramatic inventions – the German private who in civilian life is an opera star sneaking his opera-star wife into the trenches for a private concert, for example. But a great deal of the specific events depicted did actually happen at one place or another along the front – church services, burial parties, swapping of food and booze, the soccer matches of course, and so forth.

There are moments of tremendous sentimentality in the movie. The reason that the opera star wife is at the front in the first place is that she’s used her connections with the Kaiser to arrange a Christmas concert at the headquarters of his son, the Crown Prince. Of course she’s just got to have her husband to sing, and gets him detached for the evening to appear with her. They perform “Bist du bei mir,” arranged to Bach’s melody (the actual song is apparently older than Bach) from the Anna Magdalena Notebook. Watching them sing – if you know German at least – you realize it’s a love song, the narrator comforting himself at his death with his love’s presence: Ach how pleasurable were my end, if your beautiful hands were to close my faithful eyes (“Ach wie vergnügt, wäre so mein Ende; es drückten deine schönen Hände mir die getreuen Augen zu.”). For a brief moment the camera cuts to the ancient French couple whose house has been commandeered for HQ, and who’ve been exiled to the basement; they can hear the singing and the husband gently lays his hand across his wife’s.  Another such moment is when, back at the front (he turns down a night in the sack with her, in order to go back to his comrades), the Scottish chaplain, who also (of course) plays the pipes, first joins in “Stille Nacht,” then by way of request plays the first bars of “Adeste, fideles,” and opera singer mounts the parapet, grabs a Christmas tree, and strides into no-man’s-land, singing as he goes. O Come, All Ye Faithful. And they come, the other pipers joining in.

If you look the movie up on Imdb.com and check out the reviews, you get a good illustration of how reviews not infrequently reveal as much about the reviewer as about his subject. Several of the reviews – e.g. this one from The New York Times – take the movie to task for being too sentimental, too “vague,” insufficiently sophisticated (the NYT, entirely predictably, confuses cynicism with sophistication . . . they’re not at all the same thing). As if. Oddly enough, it’s Roger Ebert who gets it right: “Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward. But on one Christmas, they were able to express what has been called, perhaps too optimistically, the brotherhood of man.”  These things actually happened. Real people made the actual decision to forego enmity, bloodshed, and hardness of heart to embrace, for a few hours, the fundamental, astounding message of Christ’s coming: Glad tidings of great joy, which shall be unto all nations.

Now compare the NYT‘s gripe:  “Another reason [why the movie “feel[s] as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth”] is that the movie’s cross-section of soldiers from France, Scotland and Germany are so scrupulously depicted as equal-opportunity peacemakers that they never come fully to life as individuals. All are well-spoken mouthpieces for cut-and-dried perspectives that vary somewhat, according to rank, background and war experience. As ferociously as they may fight, these soldiers are civilized good guys underneath their uniforms. When they go at one another, they’re only following orders.”  Gosh, maybe it’s shown that way because, you know . . . that’s the way it actually was?  Those soldiers did all come from something they would have understood and recognized as a common European cultural tradition, with common assumptions about themselves and their world, common assumptions (up until August 1914) about the future, a common religious tradition.  For the benefit of the NYT‘s reviewer, who seems to be utterly ignorant of history, what made the Great War so horrific for its participants was that it tore to ribbons 400 years of how Europe had understood itself.  Even the scale of the Napoleonic wars could be fit into the pattern of dynastic feuds, territorial ambitions, shell-and-pea alliance systems.  There was great slaughter between 1792-1815, but it was not beyond human comprehension.  The Great War was like nothing anyone had ever seen or imagined.  The characters in this movie are not just individuals who are marked to die; they are the carriers of a doomed heritage, and we the viewers are trusted to be sophisticated enough to understand that . . . although that trust turned out to be misplaced with the NYT‘s reviewer.

If the movie seems too much like a greeting card declaring “peace on earth,” I suggest that Gentle Reader might contemplate whether that’s because we have so debased the very notion of Christmas and its meaning that to state it in plain Saxon seems . . . well, “squishy.”  You see, the truly subversive aspect of Christianity, the genuinely transgressive part, is exactly “peace on earth.” Other religions might have placed emphasis on being nice to one’s fellows, but all those were tribal gods, and the fellows to whom one was supposed to be nice were other members of the tribe. In the crucible of combat it’s hard enough to maintain the humanity of one’s own comrades in mind; to embrace within that notion the guys pointing their guns at you is taking the confession of our commonality to a level unknown to civilian life (it’s certainly beyond the ken of that NYT reviewer). The Christmas truce was in fact – and not just in the fetid imagination of some Hollywood scriptwriter – a physical manifestation of the essence of Christmas. And of course, in watching the movie, we the viewers know What Comes Next: After the events depicted were over, these real men really went back to killing each other. By November, 1918, most of those real men were dead or maimed for life in body or soul. Gee whiz; let’s think of how can we taint this with our own cynicism, so as to let all Those in the Know get it that we’re so much better than those men who chose, for a few brief hours, actually to embrace the message brought to us all those centuries ago?

True heroism is seldom sophisticated; it hasn’t the time for it. True heroism always touches upon the deepest, simplest, most noble human attributes. These things don’t lend themselves to all this bullshit about on-the-other-hand and it’s-complicated and you-wouldn’t-understand and fully-developed-as-individuals. It’s about the kind of stuff you find . . . well, you find a lot of it in the Bible: Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friend, just to pick one off the top of the head. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, to the end that all who believe in Him should not perish, but should have everlasting life. Paul going to Rome, knowing full well what awaits him there. The real men who actually laid down their arms were men who could say words like “hero,” “honor,” and “manhood” without smirking or winking.  If that’s not sufficiently worldly-wise for some dim-bulb movie reviewer from New York . . . well, that tells you about all you need to know about that reviewer, and the publication which gives him air.

And so now, in this 21st Century, a full hundred years after those men went Over the Top, not with fear in their mouths and death in their hearts, but in comradeship and – dare we say it? – love, let us contemplate what those men knew, that we have forgot. Do we, can we hear an echo within us of the Glad Tidings of Great Joy? And can we reject the tarted up “sophistication” so beloved of the NYT to embrace the simple humanity of the soldiers who, a century ago, said, “Enough”?

Joyeux Noël.

[P.S.  Reason has a nice piece on the truce as well, here.]

When it’s all About the Ideology

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You can tell that you’re in the cloud-cuckoo land of ideology when you are obliged to do stupid things in its name, even though everyone with even bare walking-around sense knows better.  For instance, after the Nazis kicked the Jews out of all university and school faculties (speaking as an American and therefore a beneficiary of all that human capital flooding to our country, I can’t help but observe that it was so much the better for us, here in the “decadent” Anglosphere), it was decreed that only “Aryan” mathematics and science be taught.  Somewhere (it’s quoted in Solzhenitsyn, but I can’t recall which volume) there’s a quotation from whatever party organization was in charge of ruining Soviet education, to the effect that “we stand for the principles of Marxism-Leninism in physics,” or something along those lines.  Really happened.  Can’t make this stuff up.

Of course, the communists were very explicit that for them, ideology in fact did trump everything, even abstract notions of truth and justice.  In the Gulag, it was the true believers who most vehemently denied that the objective fact of their own innocence was at all an indictment of the system that put them inside for a “ten-ruble bill” or a “quarter.”  There was the Party Line, and only the Party Line.  Whatever the Party Line was at the moment was truth and to be defended unto death.  Until it wasn’t the Party Line any more.  The Germans used to sigh, when someone they knew got raked in and worked over by the Gestapo or Kripo, because he’d had the temerity to say the wrong thing around the water cooler one morning, “If only the Führer knew!”

The communists and the Nazis were both political parties and movements.  Politics necessarily tends towards subordinating reality to ideology.  So while you can snicker about “Marxism-Leninism in physics,” you can at least acknowledge where they’re coming from.

On the other hand, a movement that is supposedly about truth, about justice, about fairness, about each of us being validated as a fully-equal human . . . that sort of movement is not supposed to have a “party line.”  The litmus test is then whether X, when X is some condition, or circumstance, or practice, or rule of existence, does or does not tend towards truth, justice, fairness, equality, or what have you.  If it does, then you embrace it; if it doesn’t, then you reject it.

Over at The Federalist we have a brief article by someone name of Heather Wilhelm (which is a cool name, by the way; have to wonder if her friends have nicknamed her “Bill” or the “Kaiserin”).  Mme Wilhelm explains her reasons for distancing herself from the self-description of “feminist.”  I get the vibe from most of the article that she’s not interested in being something that requires her to endorse any of the several things which she describes.

I only want to comment on one part of her article, “Today’s ‘Feminists’ Give Terrible Advice About Safety.”  Which they do.  As she points out (correctly):

“Now, most modern feminists would get upset about the very existence of a sorority self-defense seminar—’teach muggers not to mug!’ and all that—but I was happy to be there. . . .’This false idea, that women’s behavior is the real reason they are victimized,’ wrote Katie McDonough at Salon, ‘is regularly used to blame sexual violence on the “problem” of young women today.’  Well, no. We all know where the blame lies: with the perpetrator. The goal is to encourage women to protect themselves, with reality being what it is. It almost leads one to wonder: Do feminists really care about women’s safety at all?”

The answer to her rhetorical question is that feminists do care, but only to the extent that doing so does not conflict with the tenets of their ideology.  They stand for the principles of gyno-centrism in physics, in other words.

I served right at four years in the combat fleet, on a guided missile destroyer.  It was the twilight of — well, not even the Old Navy, but rather — the navy in which it was anticipated that sailors would behave like sailors, rather than Boy Scouts.  It was taken for granted that when we put into a foreign port, crew members would seek out the whores and tattoo parlors. [Aside:  Sailors may wear tattoos.  It’s part of being a sailor.  South Seas Islanders may also wear them; it’s part of who they are as well.  Anyone else wearing a tattoo who’s didn’t receive it involuntarily from the Nazis in a concentration camp is tacky and conformist.  Sorry if this offends.  No, actually, I’m not.]  It was taken for granted they’d drink too much.  It was taken for granted they’d go around gawping like the tourists we were.  It was taken for granted that they’d blow their money on cheap touristy-trinkets.  There would be a box of condoms on the quarterdeck, and whoever wanted however many he wanted took what he thought he was going to need.

Here’s the tie-in to Mme Wilhelm’s article:  Part of the in-brief, and part of the pre-liberty call speech at each and every last stinkin’ port call was Where to Stay Away From, and earnest reminders of the buddy system.  We did a port visit in Ocho Rios once.  We were told that if we went out in groups of less than ten, we might get rolled.  If we went out in groups of less than five, we would get rolled.  In fact we had members of the United States Navy get mugged almost literally within sight of the ship.  Why did we put that word out to the men, each and every time?  Because it was good damned advice, and if you cared about your men’s health and safety, you told them what they needed to know.  To hell with it if someone was offended; I just wanted my sailors back on the ship in one piece.

Safety advice that is appropriate to members of the United States Armed Forces is advice that is certainly not inappropriate to a college co-ed.  I’ll just state that as an absolute principle.

Thank God we didn’t have to deal with a feminist theory of naval gunfire support, is all I can say, or non-phallo-centric anti-air warfare.

But seriously, today’s feminist insistence on unreality, in matters of safety advice and others (such as those pointed out in the linked article), is the give-away that we’re not dealing with a human rights movement but rather a political movement.  More to the point, it’s a political movement which insists that “the personal is political,” which is why an 18-year-old freshman’s not knowing the basics of physical self-defense (and going unarmed) is something properly addressed through the filter of ideology rather than ordinary common sense.  It’s not a stupid personal choice, but rather a political statement, to be defenseless.

I’ll close by observing that this insistence that the personal is political is a very dangerous position.  The “political” is something which is properly the subject of debate and collective action in and through the polis — and that includes me and everyone else.  If you elide the distinction between the personal and the political what you do is create a world in which everything that you do and are, every decision you make — and yes, this includes abortion as well, Dorothy — is properly the subject for a collective decision that’s not your own, and the implementation of that decision through the physical coercion of the state.  Modern feminism’s staking out its position on that line makes the dangerous assumption that their side is always going to come out the winner.  That’s not true; if nothing else the 20th Century should have cured us of the illusion that the “right” side always ends up with its hands on the levers of coercive power.

And what’s really distressing is that the lefties have no inkling that their conflation of the personal with the political is anything but “progressive.”  It’s as retrogressive as it could possibly be; see, for example, medieval sumptuary laws, or religious tests, or the Inquisition.  The whole Anglospheric conception of human liberty rests upon neither more nor less than the assertion that the personal is most definitely not political, and the willingness to defend that distinction at gun-point.