GULag is Dead; Long Live GULag!!

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Someone do please call Sen. Durbin’s office.

The learned senator has equated the facility where we hold foreign irregular combatants, who have sworn enmity to the U.S. and who for the most part were captured either in the field or from intelligence developed from those captured in the field, to the GULag, that network of socialist re-forging enterprises run by the agency of which Dear Leader’s buddy Putin still considers himself identified, viz the KGB and its sundry predecessors, MGB, NKVD, GPU, OGPU, and Cheka.  He’s not the only member of Congress so to have publicly slimed his country.

Well, Sen. Durbin, this is how a modern, up-to-date GULag operates.  First, you have anyone who opposes you murdered, or disappeared, or charged with trumped-up criminal offenses.  Then when a bunch of young women have the temerity to protest what you do, you have them charged and convicted as well.  You then sentence them to several years in prison, and you ship them off to a labor camp.  The two remaining Pussy Riot singers (both under age 25, both with young children) have been removed, with no forewarning to their families, up to roughly 900 miles away.  The families first discovered the women had been removed when they attempted to send care packages to them at the Moscow prison where they’d been held.

Now let’s imagine you’re of an age to be married to a 25 year-old woman and have, say, a four year-old daughter.  Means you’re probably pretty young yourself.  Means you probably are a single parent now.  Or alternatively you’re a grandparent who’s just had the responsibility for a young grandchild dumped on you.  What is the likelihood that you’ll ever be able to afford to make a 900-mile trip to see your wife/child?  What’s the likelihood that that four year-old child will see her mother?

And just for the record, holding a prisoner in a cell sufficiently cold that he got the “shivers” is one thing.  Running Sukhanovka, a prison from which exactly one man is known to have emerged both alive and sane, is another.  For an inside look at Sukhanovka, written by that sole survivor, I refer the gentle reader to Alexander Dolgun, an American kid plucked in 1948, at age 20, from the streets of Moscow.  All that’s known right now is that the two Pussy Riot singers are somewhere in the Urals.

In the Urals, it gets down to -50 degrees Centigrade in the winter.

But Will He Call It “Peace in our Time”?

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Fars News Agency is reporting that Dear Leader has “recognized” Iran’s “nuclear rights.”  What precisely that’s supposed to mean is not terribly clear from the article.  The article cites only a “parliamentary” source for the statement, but then again coming from a place like Iran I’d have to imagine that parliamentarians don’t just go talking out of school.

What is also interesting is the route by which this recognition was conveyed.  Apparently we handed the message to the Swiss (who attend to such affairs in Iran as the U.S. has left), who then passed it on.

There was also the quickly-denied and quietly-air-brushed report that Dear Leader is making good on his campaign pledge to pursue direct talks with Iran, without pre-conditions.

What gives?  It’s impossible for anyone with even a nodding familiarity with the history of Europe in the 1930s not to see the parallels between this developing situation and 1938.  Once Chamberlain and the French had conceded legitimacy to Germany’s demand for the Sudeten Germans, the game was effectively over.  Ceding the Sudetenland to Germany not only gave away Czechoslovakia’s principal line of defense; in fact it made the balance of the country indefensible.  The Sudeten Germans had never, ever, lived under a “German” ruler, or in a “German” state.  They’d always belonged to the Bohemian crown.  Their claim that they wanted to go “heim ins Reich” was as transparent a fraud as has ever been made.

But the fraud was enough for Chamberlain, who was desperate to do something, anything, rather than face down Hitler.  The French were likewise eager to suffer any indignity rather than man up and defend a country which was their formal ally (France had an actual treaty with Czechoslovakia which obliged it to come the latter’s defense; at least Britain wasn’t selling out an actual ally).  Grasping back to Wilson’s alleged principle of “self-determination,” they cynically sold out the one country bordering Hitler’s Germany that could have put a whipping on him.

The key point was reached when they conceded any legitimacy at all to the German claim.  Once you admit that the other guy is right, you really don’t have much to stand on publicly, other than expedience, and if you’ve conditioned  your public to perceive surrender as expedient, you’ve come to the end of the game.

Let’s be honest where Dear Leader has put us.  We have conceded the moral right to Iran to pursue nuclear weapons.  I’m sure that paragon of candor, Susan Rice, will assure us that the “rights” extend only to “peaceful uses,” such as nuclear power, but there is absolutely zero indication that any of Iran’s nuclear program has ever been oriented towards peaceful purposes.  Having made that concession, how do we appear before the Security Council and demand even the continuance, let alone the increase, in any sanction against Iran?  How?

Iran has announced, repeatedly, its intention to obliterate the state of Israel from the map.  We have now admitted its right to do so.  When you validate a man’s possession of a tool, how do you deny him the use of it, especially the use he has announced as his principal intended use?

Tonight we will have another “debate” between Dear Leader and Mitt Romney.  I do trust that whoever it is that puts words in Dear Leader’s mouth for him will not think “Peace in our Time” is a good campaign slogan to take into the final days of the race.

Nothing Like Hiding in Plain Sight

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It’s remarkable, really, how up-front would-be totalitarians are about their goals.  Whatever can be said about its indigestibility as writing, Hitler was utterly frank in Mein Kampf about precisely what he intended to do.  He then went out and did it.  The Russian communists spelled out the terror they intended to unleash, and then did so.  And the Muslim Brotherhood, the outfit which occasions Dear Leader such “relief” that they’re finally in charge in Egypt, is equally forthcoming about where they’re headed.

From an article in yesterday’s The International, we read, “The MB is both a political and social movement that advocates moving away from secularism and toward a political and civil society that is organized by the principles outlined in the Qur’an, including the implementation of Shariah law.

“Louay M. Safi wrote an article for The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences in which he describes Shariah law as, ‘a comprehensive system encompassing the whole field of human experiences. It is not simply a legal system, but rather a composite system of law and morality.’

“Shariah law regulates and guides all aspects of life from politics and economics to personal issues of marriage, family, diet and hygiene and is meant to provide a guide for all things concerning morality.”

Got that?  It’s a “comprehensive system encompassing the whole field of human experiences.”  And “political and civil society” is to be “organized” according to its principles.  There’s a name for that, folks — totalitarianism.  I believe it was Solzhenitsyn who observed that in the Soviet Union even sleep became politicized.  Under Shariah, “all aspects of life from politics and economics to personal issues of marriage, family, diet and hygiene” are to be “regulated” by whatever someone else determines to be the law, based upon precepts articulated for a desert society of robber-shepherds 1,400 years ago.  Sandra Flake seems to believe that a third party refusing to pay for her birth control is just the World’s Most Intolerable Oppression of her and her lady parts; I’m sure she’d do so much better under Shariah.

We’re supposed to be reassured, though:  “Whilst emerging as a political force in the Islamic world, the Muslim Brotherhood has also actively engaged in a number of public works and charity projects. They have run banks, schools, hospitals, social clubs and facilities for the disabled, while at the same time adhering to principles of transparency and accountability.”  Repeat after me, chillerns:  Autobahnen; Kraft durch Freude; Winterhilfe; Bund deutscher Mädel, Hitlerjugend.  Shirer has an entire chapter on the nazification of everyday German life in the 1930s.  The Soviets likewise “engaged in a number of public works projects,” like the Baltic-White Sea Canal, a.k.a. Belomor, which cost only several hundred thousand lives, and no one could run banks, schools, hospitals, and social clubs quite like the NKVD.  Why, they even had an entire sub-system within Gulag for children, including children born in the camps.  Isn’t that heart-warming?

We’re also comforted to find out that the Brotherhood is committed to attaining power through the trappings of democratic processes.  We are not encouraged to recall that Hitler was the lawfully appointed and serving Reichskanzler, and the Ermächtigungsgesetz — the Enabling Act — which handed over more or less unbridled power to him, was a lawfully enacted statute, permitted by their constitution.  How’d that work out, again?

This is the outfit whose ascendancy our current administration applauds.  This is the outfit one of whose leading families has now placed a member — a family member who was actively engaged in the Brotherhood’s American propaganda arm — at the right hand of the Secretary of State.

But don’t worry, ladies.  This election is about how them Rethuglicans is a-comin’ after your lady parts.

Give Credit Where Due

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Among my more innocent pleasures is noting odd historical coincidences, such as Genl Burgoyne surrendering at Saratoga on this day in 1777, and Genl Cornwallis enjoying the same experience on the same day in 1781 at Yorktown.

What is interesting about the two campaigns is that Saratoga was a result of the British failure to achieve strategic coordination and concentration of forces, and Yorktown was the product of a truly amazing feat of coordination not only between widely separate forces, but also between allies as well as between branches of service – two separate fleets of the French navy, the Continental army, and the French army. 

Genl Burgoyne’s expedition from Canada to and down the Hudson came to grief because a three-prong offensive turned into a single-prong. The western branch of the offensive under Lt. Col. St. Leger, coming down the Mohawk, came to grief, fighting a bloody battle at Oriskany and then losing most of his Indian allies after fighting at Ft. Stanwix. The support that Burgoyne had anticipated coming upriver from New York City never materialized. And he was largely stranded in what was then still largely wilderness, with no adequate water transport. More to the point, while Burgoyne was hemorrhaging men through repeated skirmishing with the Americans, their strength was growing, as militia reinforcements continuously joined up. In the end Burgoyne was effectively pinned in place. He couldn’t go forward; he couldn’t go back; and he was running out of supplies. He had the distinction of being the first British commander to lose an entire army to the rebels. 

Fast forward four years. Cornwallis, the southern British commander, was on the Chesapeake after raiding, skirmishing, and plundering about Virginia. Clinton sends from New York orders to pick a deep-water port, fortify himself there, and send whatever troops he could spare north to New York. Washington is outside New York, with some French in company, and additional French in Newport, Rhode Island. He finds out he is going to have the support of the French fleet, which is headed north from the Caribbean. What if, he decides, he can steal a march on the British and get his army to Virginia before the British can either reinforce or slip away? If the French can hold off the Royal Navy long enough, and deny both relief and escape to Cornwallis, Washington can substantially lessen if not remove outright the British southern threat. 

In what has to be one of the lesser-known American strategic coups, Washington and the French make it work. Washington does the old march-through-the-countryside, shuck-n-jive routine to confuse Clinton about what he’s going to do. The French fleet from Newport loads up their troops and supplies and swings wide into the Atlantic and down to the Chesapeake. Washington and his army then hoof it from New York all the way down to Yorktown to join up with Lafayette and the French just arrived from Rhode Island. 

Cornwallis, in receipt of a letter from Clinton during the period that Washington is on the march and which promises reinforcements, stands pat, and does not attempt to fight his way out of Yorktown. 

The final nail in the coffin is driven home by the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse. He’d actually lost the race to the Chesapeake to Adm. Saml Hood. Hood got there first, found the place bereft of Frenchmen, and sailed on north to New York to join up with Adm. Graves. De Grasse arrives in Virginia a few days later, and sets up watch on the mouth of the bay. When Graves arrives, the French pull off one of their comparatively few fleet victories, and draw Graves ever farther out to sea. While the two combat fleets crawl away from shore, the French fleet from Newport arrives and debarks its troops. Washington arrives a few days later and the major southern British army is now bottled up, unable to fight its way out, with its back to deep water, and a hostile fleet commanding its sea lines of communication. There’s quite a bit of fighting, but without command of the sea approaches the British can do nothing to stave off the inevitable, and on October 17, 1781, four years to the day after Burgoyne’s surrender, Cornwallis asks for terms. The actual surrender takes place two days later. 

To put a bit of perspective on Washington’s achievement, even twenty years later a trip from New York to the Potomac was an agony of rutted wagon trails through woods, broken axles, overturned carriages, lodging little and mean. It took well over a week for a traveller in peacetime. Washington moved a poorly-fed, poorly-shod, poorly-paid army over the distance in a month. The strategic coordination occurred with no telecommunications and across hundreds of miles of wilderness and ocean. And every commander – at least on the American side – played his party just exactly right, doing precisely what was necessary under the circumstances of the moment to maximize the strategic position of the allies. It really is an amazing story. The American luck held just long enough, in just the right place, to snag a second British army. 

Yes, it was lucky (the French didn’t often best the Royal Navy), but in point of fact the strategic vision of it was largely Washington’s. He gets high marks for his never-say-die maintenance of the cause, but usually gets scouted as commanding general. With the Yorktown campaign he proved he had the strategic chops as well.

 

“Victors’ Justice”; But Was It?

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Today we celebrate – yes, “celebrate” is preciselythe word I want – the hanging of ten as wicked men as humanity has cast up on the shore in the past several hundred years.

They’d been riding high, these lawyers, engineers, architects, doctors of philosophy, journalists, when they had the lives of millions in their filthy hands. They’d erected elaborate administrative structures where memoranda silently wafted through the chancelleries, drifted across desks, being initialed, stamped, counter-signed, and on and on, before a background of towers of smoke belching from the ovens, day in and day out. And through it all the relentless clanking of cattle wagons coupling in the switching yard, the rhythmic beat of steel wheels over rails of even length, each clack! bearing the human cargo within that many meters closer to a yard where those marked for immediate death were sent to one side – the vast majority of them – and those to be preserved for a lingering, gnawing, terrified, starving, vermin-infested, beaten-bloody deathly labor were sent to the other.

These men and their underlings occupied blocks on hell’s own organizational chart, blocks labeled things like “Referat VIIa – Ausland” and similarly bland titles. What they did was set out to slaughter an entire people, to enslave an entire ethnic group, to purge by starvation vast territories that they might be settled by Volksgenossen – racial comrades. 

We caught them, we and our allies did. The big fish, the guys who did shit like decree that a conference would be held at some forgettable suburb called Wannsee to discuss the Endlösung der Judenfrage in Europa, the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe, we carted them to a place called Nuremberg, convened a body called the International Military Tribunal (to all the hyperventilators about Guantanamo Bay and the trials there: yes, Nuremberg was not a civilian tribunal). And we made them answer for what they’d done. At least we made some of them answer, to some extent; some got off with a fraction of what they’d deserved. Some of the most culpable got in effect a walk. The Allies’ objectives were three-fold: (i) to punish behavior which few outside the Soviet Union even understood that humans could be capable of (the Soviets understood it all too well, on which more later); (ii) to document for the world that all this really had happened; and (iii) to establish a principle that such behavior was once and forever more beyond that which civilized humanity was willing to tolerate. All of that was to be accomplished within a framework of law. 

Pretty high-falutin’ stuff, when you think about it. 

I want to poke a couple of holes in what happened at Nuremberg. Not in respect of the bastards we hanged; we should have hanged more of them. In fact, my standard response to the hand-wringers who moan that the death penalty is “inherently” cruel and unusual is to ask them if they are prepared to stand atop their dunghill and crow that the Nuremberg defendants ought to have lived. Ummmmm . . . silence. So shut up, please. Where I beg leave to depart from history, and from the tenets of what I do for a living, is in the effort to characterize what happened at Nuremberg as “justice” in any legal sense, and how mistaken it was to call it “law.” 

Allow me also to make absolutely clear up front that I draw a clear distinction between “justice” and “what happens in a court room.” Sometimes the latter results in the former, but generally not. It’s why I do not refer to “the justice system,” but rather to “the legal system.” It’s why I want to throw up in my mouth when I hear the Learned Colleagues or our judiciary bloviating about “administering justice.” Bullshit, with all due respect. Your task, if you’d bother reading the constitutional documents which create you, is to determine cases and controversies according to law. You can leave justice to those cosmic wheels which were grinding slowly before your grandfather’s grandfather was a gleam in his daddy’s eye. 

It was the IMT’s tragic flaw that it conflated “justice” with “law.” The main trial defendants were charged with four counts, for each of which the penalty of death was sought: 

(i) engaging in a common plan or conspiracy to commit a crime against peace; 

(ii) planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; 

(iii) war crimes; and, 

(iv) crimes against humanity. 

We had in the dock everyone from the guy who ran the Reichsbank until he was fired well before war ever broke out (Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht; he ended the war in a concentration camp himself) to the guy whose voice sounded sufficiently like Joseph Goebbels’s that he was used as a radio stand-in (Hans Fritzsche) to the guy who ran the Hitlerjugend (Baldur von Schirach). We had Fritz Sauckel, who was the Germans’ chief slave-catcher, and Albert Speer, who allocated the slaves so caught among the manpower-starved war industries, and Robert Ley, who was in actual charge of employing the slaves allocated. We had Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister who flew to Moscow on a warm summer evening in August, 1939 and with his Soviet counterpart Molotov carved up Poland and consigned Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to decades of Soviet depredation and slaughter. We had Wilhelm Keitel, the “nodding donkey” as he was known around the Führer’s headquarters, who had signed the Kommissarbefehl, under which party commissars attached to every Red Army unit were to be summarily shot upon capture – and were; we had Alfred Jodl, under whose command that order was implemented. We also had men of almost truly psychotic sadism, such as Julius Streicher, who stalked his bailiwick literally carrying a riding whip in his hand, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who ran the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) of the SS, to the lunatic fringe element like Alfred Rosenberg, the national socialist chief ideologue, to the actually driveling lunatic, like Rudolf Heß, once the Number 2 man in the party, but who’d been pretty much emasculated as a power player well before fighting broke out. We had Admiral Erich Raeder, commanding admiral of the bastard step-sister of the German military, and his immediate subordinate, Karl Dönitz, who came within an ace of starving a country into submission, then got fleeted up to command the navy and eventually, in the mad-hatter days of May, 1945 succeeded his dead-and-burned Führer.

 The problem, from a purely legalistic stand-point, is that what these men were accused of doing had never been defined as a crime. Now, from the Soviet stand-point that was no hindrance at all. If they thought you needed to be shot, why, they’d just march you down to the execution cellar (or out to a trench in the woods, as they did with 14,000-odd Polish officers, during that period when they were the Nazis’ allies). But the Americans and British had this curious tradition that without a pre-defined crime there could be no criminal offense. 

When had there ever been a “crime against humanity?” When had there ever been something like the Holocaust? Oh, well, other than the Holodomor, which netted seven million Ukrainians in less than two years, versus six million Jews in twelve; and other than the Red Terror, when anyone with more than two shoelaces was likely to be denounced to a Chekist troika, hauled in by sundown and dead with a bullet hole in the base of the skull by morning; and other than the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” during which hundreds of thousands of “special exiles” were given as little as ten minutes to be gone from their villages with what they could carry in their hands, and then dumped out without any tools, seeds, or shelter north of the Arctic circle. 

“War crimes” was a concept at least not completely foreign to the people in that courtroom. Of course, if by “war crime” you mean the wholesale shooting of prisoners . . . well, you’ve still got that Soviet problem. If you mean the wanton destruction of cities, with no effort even mildly to target genuinely “military” objectives within them, then the fly in your particular ointment is Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who set out to “de-house” the German civilian population. If you mean systematically starving entire peoples, as was done on the Eastern front, well, you’ve got several hundred thousand emaciated corpses from 1914-18 in Germany, victims of a highly successful blockade the principal intent and effect of which was to starve Germany into defeat. Furthermore, the slaughter of civilians in consequence of direct military action was accepted practice as late as the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular War. 

“Conspiring to wage aggressive war”? Huh? Since when was war something that a nation just sort of ambled into, without any planning or coordination among the various officials within its government? Well into the 1930s the United States maintained plans or at least the outlines of plans to invade pretty much every single possible country we might get to, including Britain and western Europe. Were we “conspiring to wage aggressive war?” France in 1914 went to war with Germany because of her treaty obligations with Russia. Germany went to war with Russia because of her treaty obligations with Austria-Hungary. Britain went to war in 1914 because of an 75-odd year-old treaty about Belgium, one of the signatories to which was Prussia. In 1939 Britain and France went to war with Germany by reason of unilateral guaranty given to Poland by those countries, which Poland had not asked for. Was that a “conspiracy” to wage “aggressive war”? In any of the foregoing I am not arguing the morality or immorality of what the belligerents did. What I am doing is pointing out how empty of meaning “conspiring to wage aggressive war” is as a specifically legal concept. For that matter, how do you define “aggressive” war? If the answer is that the “people who started the war” are necessarily the “aggressors,” do try to recall that from August, 1914 to this date historians still argue over “who started the war,” or whose “fault” was it that Europe exploded. I’m going to suggest that, again, as a legal concept, something that open to good-faith disagreement cannot form the basis for the definition of a crime, at least not consistently with any Anglo-American legal tradition.

A “crime against peace”? When the hell exactly did “peace” become something injurable by an individual’s action? A crime against peace must necessarily occur during peace, for during war there is no peace which may be disturbed. How do you know when a particular act of state crosses the line from recourse to violence, which so far as I’m aware no sovereign state has ever abjured in any enforceable sense, to a “crime against peace”? Either a sovereign reserves to itself every mechanism of compulsion on which it can lay hands, or it does not. War is of course the ultimate mechanism of compulsion. The United States had recourse to it in 1846 to enforce a somewhat dubious claim, inherited from Texas, to a boundary located on the Rio Grande. Britain had recourse to it in the 1820s when it desired that Turkey should no longer rule Greece. Prussia had recourse to it in 1866 when it desired to exclude Austria-Hungary from further involvement in northern European German politics. Russia had recourse when the Ottomans were alleged to have misbehaved themselves in Jerusalem, a place which then lay within their domains. Were all these “crimes against peace”? The situations from which they grew sure as billy-o had no implications for the several nations’ national security or other vital interests. 

All of which is to illustrate a principle that is fairly well-established in Anglo-American law, viz. unless you can plainly point to a specific behavior and say up front whether that is or is not within the scope of a criminal proscription, then you cannot, consistently with due process of law, make a crime of that behavior. Every person is entitled to know whether his conduct in any particular respect does or does not constitute a crime; ergo, the constitutional bar on ex post facto criminal laws. 

With all possible condemnation of the depravity of what the Nuremberg defendants (and millions more like them, every one of whom likewise deserved to hang) did, the charges of the IMT were brazenly ex post facto. And hopelessly vague. And let’s not forget that little matter of hypocrisy. The elephant in the room in that respect was of course the Soviet Union, which had waged absolutely unprovoked, undeniably aggressive wars of conquest against Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. In the former Baltic republics they immediately upon winning them embarked on their trademark bloodshed, in exactly the same fashion as Stalin had attempted to decapitate Polish society from September, 1939 through June, 1941. But it gets better. We charged Karl Dönitz with war crimes for waging unrestricted submarine warfare. Which he had. But then he offered the affidavit of Fleet Admiral Nimitz, who informed the IMT that the U.S. submarine fleet had operated under orders substantially identical to those of the U-boats. Oh. We convicted him anyway. 

I must say that I’m certainly not the first person to notice the above “discrepancies,” as Twain would call them. No less a personage than the then chief justice of the United States, Harlan Fiske Stone, termed the IMT proceedings a “high-grade lynching party.” “I don’t mind what he [chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson, a colleague on the Supreme Court] does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”  Jackson himself observed to Truman in 1945 that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.” 

But here’s where things really went off the rails with the whole concept of legalistic punishment for what Nazi Germany did, and why I say it was above all a mistake to call it “law”: We stopped. Way too soon. Every hack of a district attorney general knows that you either enforce a law whenever someone breaks it, or that law in fact does not exist, and everyone knows it. There were trials after the major war criminals’ trial. There were trials of the concentration camp doctors and commandants. There were trials of military commanders. There was a mish-mash of a trial starring Ernst von Weiszäcker and a couple of others from the Foreign Office, and a gaggle of other functionaries. The later trials were catch-as-catch-can affairs in large measure because the prosecution by that time was pretty much starved for staff and resources. They even had trouble rustling up enough judges to hear the later cases. 

The inevitable result was that in the western zones at least, trials subsequent to the main IMT trial became farcical in their outcomes. Just for example, we tried the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and their immediate subordinates, the commanders of the Einsatzkommandos. There were four Gruppen, lettered A through D. Each Gruppe had several Kommandos beneath it. They were roving death squads. They were what the Germans did before they hit on the notion of the gas chambers. They killed retail, by gunfire, which means that a specific person had to point a tangible object – a muzzle – at each individual, and squeeze the trigger. Thousands upon thousands of times. At Babi Yar outside Kiev, from September 29-30, 1941, they shot not quite 34,000 Jews in this fashion. Other Aktionen were smaller, but likewise just as individualized. 

The Soviets, bless their blood-thirsty little hearts, shot everyone they could find who had anything to do with the Einsatzgruppen. The western Allies had a separate trial; no defendant was more junior than commander of an Einsatzkommando. Apparently all those guns went off at the command of some officer but without other human intervention. There were fourteen death sentences handed down (not even every defendant got one). Only four actually danced at the rope’s end. The others all had their sentences commuted in 1951 to terms of varying lengths. By 1958 all had been released. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: This were the bastards who actually gave orders to aim and shoot at mothers holding their infant children, cooing to them so their last moments on earth would not be fearful, to see one last time their baby’s smile just before the machine guns barked. And by 13 years after the war they were all free. All. 

The Foreign Office was hip-deep in the Final Solution. Its emissaries, ambassadors, and bureaucrats knew what was going on, volunteered to assist the SS, the SD, and the military authorities, and enthusiastically pitched in when it came to compiling the lists of places from which deportations were to be made and the people to be deported. They hectored, cajoled, and threatened nominal allies, nominal neutrals, and of course the authorities of whatever stripe existed in occupied lands. In Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik, a book written and published in 2010 pursuant to a 2004 mandate from the German government, the history of the ideological penetration of the Amt before the war and its seamier activities during the war are spelled out in painstaking detail. But most of the book deals with the largely successful whitewashing operation of the post-war period. Numerous – I mean numerous – men with blood up to their shoulders retired, with full pensions, honors, and dignities. Oh sure, there were certain places where certain officials could not be posted, but that was a comparatively small inconvenience. 

Which is to say that for the most part, the bastards got away with it. Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, better known just as Alfried Krupp, so abused his slave laborers in Essen that even the SS complained about it. William Manchester’s damning book, The Arms of Krupp, contain descriptions of Krupp’s activities during the war that are beyond sickening. We attempted to try his father, Gustav, at the main IMT trial, but by that time daddy was too gibbering even by comparison with Heß. The only problem is that as of 1943 little Alfried was the legal owner of the whole cheese and been in actual command of running it for some time before then. He was the one who ought to have stood in the dock with Fritz Sauckel, Robert Ley, and Albert Speer. Oh, we tried him, eventually, and even nominally took all his property away. That lasted until the mid-1950s, by which time we needed him and his cannons again, and so by 1957 Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was once again free as the wind and the wealthiest private person in Europe. 

By trying to shoe-horn “justice” into “law,” all we did was make a mockery of both. We hadn’t the time, the people, the money, or the psychic energy left to dispense justice to all who needed it through the mechanism of legalistic procedures. So we laid down and let them get away with it. Churchill had wanted simply to shoot them as and when found. That would have been more honest, and less morally ambiguous. Certainly, we could have and ought to have put them in a setting in which we could spread before the world the documentary, film, and living evidence of their actions. And then taken them out and hanged them, not bothering to characterize what they did as a “crime” against anything. We would have saved ourselves having to go through the repeated theatrics of the subsequent trials. Tie the prisoner to actions x, y, and z, and if the supervising officer finds it has been done, stretch that boy’s neck a few inches for him. 

In the end we come back to the point that if you march a column of defenseless people, including literally babies in arms, to the edge of a trench in the forest, and give or follow the order to fire, you deserve to die of a broken neck occasioned by your plummeting from a scaffold with a rope knotted about it. Basta! 

Nuremberg’s unfortunate precedent endures to this day, with International Courts for this-that-and-the-other dotting the landscape, none of them capable of dealing with a monster. Will anyone dance on a rope for what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s? For all those mass graves, which they’re still digging up from time to time? Nope. How about the Iraqis who worked for Saddam? They’re still alive, most of them. For the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994? Don’t count on it. For the Khmer Rouge? Not a chance; Pol Pot himself died peacefully in bed, decades after he killed almost 25% of the population of his country. An impartial observer is entitled to ask exactly what the hell good is law if it cannot mete out any sort of “punishment” other that confinement in pleasant conditions, with “three hots and a cot,” and that only after decades of grinding procedure? If law is not feared, it is not worthy of respect. If it is unworthy of respect, it is not respected, in small things as well as large. We did the law no favor at all when we so over-tasked it at Nuremberg in 1946.

And this is where I depart from the tenets of my occupation: There are potentialities for wickedness, for depravity, for barbarity, within the human heart and mind and which are simply beyond the law’s ability to define them, to address them, to bound them with comprehensible intellectual frameworks, and to achieve justice commensurate with their nature. Those actions – so monstrous that their only claim to human status is that humans commit them – are in every meaningful sense outside the law. Those who actualize those potentialities place themselves beyond the law’s protection. They make themselves enemies of the human race, as pirates were once recognized to be, and liable to public justice upon sight. So ought the Allies have proceeded after the war. It would have entailed many thousands of executions, but in the end justice might have been done, and the commanding officers of the Einsatzkommandos would not have died free men.

 

Dept. of Be Careful What You Wish For

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In which connection we find the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporting that Scotland is going to have a referendum about independence.

Guys, this is a country in which 90% of the population is, on a benefits-net-of-taxes basis, living off the government in some respect.  Nine of every ten Scots is drawing on the public teat.  Where, precisely, is the money to come from if Scotland can’t tap into whatever wealth is left south of the border?  The national government in Westminster and the national parliament in Edinburgh have agreed to a referendum in roughly two years’ time, which will be open to all Scots ages . . . 16 and older.  Yep.  Children of 16, who except in the rarest (and most unfortunate of circumstances) have not even had the chance to understand what it means to pay one’s own bills from one’s own means — and among whom the “independence” movement seems to be particularly popular — will have the chance to over-ride their elders.  Isn’t that reassuring?

In the unlikely event that the referendum passes (only something like 30% support it at the moment), Scotland might turn into a test case of what happens when everyone wishes to live off of everyone else.  Oh sure, we’re seeing something like it in Greece, but then that’s just Greece, whose unfortunate population really hasn’t had much of a good day since the 1820s, if then.  Scotland has been at the forefront of society before (once upon a time if you wanted to be taken seriously as a doctor, you studied in Scotland; Scottish engineers worked all over and were highly prized; you don’t have to get quite as misty-eyed as How the Scots Invented the Modern World to accept that for a time Scotland could show its face anywhere without shame).  Perhaps they’ll be at the forefront of society again.

Maybe what is happening is that we’re are going to be afforded what navigators describe as a three-point fix.  You see, if you have a single celestial or visual line of bearing from an object of a known location, all you know is that you are somewhere along that line.  Get a second, intersecting line of bearing and there is geometrically speaking only one spot on the face of the globe which can simultaneously satisfy the conditions “I am somewhere along Line A and somewhere along Line B.”  Now if you get a third line of bearing from an independent fixed object, and if that line of bearing intersects at the same spot as the other two, the chances that you are not at that point become vanishingly small.  You are there; you have fixed your position; you have a “fix.”

You see, we have one line of bearing from Greece, a Mediterranean country that has embraced the notion that the government can provide all for everyone at no cost to anyone.  Greece has no industrial tradition (save for shipping), no traditions in the last several centuries (as in within the last millennium-plus) of educational attainment, cultural attainment, or refinement of any sort.  As was said of the United States in the early 1800s, who now reads a Greek novel, or performs a Greek play, or sings a Greek song?  Who looks to Greece for guidance in how to do anything right?  Anything at all?  Its politics since the Turks were run off nearly 200 years ago have been a devil’s cauldron of blood and back-stabbing, banditry, and comic-opera farce.  So that’s one line of bearing, taken from a country that’s been bitched up in one or more respects for centuries.

We have a second line of bearing from California, in which we see how socialism can take a nation’s most blessed region, from natural, demographic, and climatological perspectives, which has rich and vibrant traditions of cutting edge standard-bearing in industry, in husbandry, in learning, and (yes) in culture as well, and within two generations turn it into the kind of place Victor David Hanson portrays with sorrow over at his blog.  California is not a place that has to worry about paying for its own defense, or for controlling its own border, or for maintaining a foreign exchange, or for embassies, or for any of the other tasks that the modern nation-state must reckon its cross to bear.  California is sovereign, but within a federal system in which it is firmly embedded.  So that’s a second line of bearing.

And Scotland is set to provide us, perhaps, with that third line of bearing, from a nation and people who for centuries have been a by-word for vigor, for vision, for frugality, for self-reliance, stoicism, and courage.  There’s a reason that the 42nd Highland have since their organization in the 1740s been among the king’s most feared soldiers.  For three centuries Scotland has been a culturally distinct place within a larger kingdom, but not itself sovereign, either on its own (like Greece) or within a true federal system (like California).  Let’s be honest, folks: what Scotland will look like with 90% of the population net takers from the system ain’t exactly the stuff from which “Scots Wha’ Hae wi’ Wallace Bled” is written.  Welcome to your gory bed, or to victory the hand-out line down at the local ministry office indeed.

If Scotland is so cock-eyed raving mad as to think she’ll go it alone under these circumstances, we’ll have that third line of bearing, and when it intersects perfectly with the two from Greece and California, I think we can take it as settled that irrespective of culture, political structure, or history, if you pursue socialism you will drive yourself and your state squarely on the damned rocks.  Socialsim is therefore a course to be avoided.  The U.S. finds itself on a lee shore with the wind rising and the glass falling; it is high time to tack into the wind.

The Birthday of Laughter

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On which date in 1881 the Master, i.e., Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was born.

Some years ago a well-intentioned but hopelessly over-reaching person undertook to make films, movie shorts, of several of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels. I saw a few of them, and thought them uniformly unsuccessful. Can’t recall the name of the fellow who played Jeeves, but I very distinctly recall a scene in which he raises an eyebrow.

Wodehouse fanatics (and to know him is to be one) will easily recognize this as alarmingly over-acted. Jeeves would never indulge such a vulgarity as a raised eyebrow. Oh, he might flicker one by just a hair or two, but certainly not so blatantly, as did this actor, as well as to wink at the viewer. 

So what is it about Wodehouse that makes his best work so hard to stage? At least as to the Jeeves stories it’s not the first-person voice of the original. I can think of at least two other such narratives – Graves’s Claudius novels and Mortimer’s Rumpole stories – in which the filmed versions are every bit as effective as the underlying written texts. Nor is it the structure of the stories themselves; they do, after all, read almost as if written for the stage, in terms of dramatic entries and exits, each scene with its own internal dramatic development, crisis point, and resolution (which of course serves in the overall structure as a device to heighten the dramatic conflict of the main plot). In fact quite a few of his novels originally appeared serialized, and so you would think they’d be if anything even better suited to dramatization than would otherwise be the case. 

It’s got to be the language, by which I do not mean so much the dialogue as the narrative in which the dialogue occurs.  Although Wodehouse’s dialogue is priceless by any measure, and some of his settings of Clarence, Ninth Earl of Emsworth are as good as any vaudeville cross-talk act ever, for me what makes Wodehouse work is the attendant language. Just by way of example, in Chapter 3 of Heavy Weather occurs the following excerpt of conversation between Clarence and his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, concerning the imminent arrival of another sister, Lady Julia Fish. Let’s read it straight through, without input from the narrator: 

Constance: “While we are on the subject of Miss Brown, I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.” 

Clarence: “Did you? Capital, capital. Who is Julia?” 

Now let’s see how it reads with Wodehouse’s setting: 

“‘While we are on the subject of Miss Brown,’ said Lady Constance, speaking the name as she always did with her teeth rather lightly clenched and a stony look in her eyes, ‘I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.’ 

“‘Did you?’ said Lord Emsworth, giving the matter some two-fifty-sevenths of his attention. ‘Capital, capital. Who,’ he asked politely, ‘is Julia?'” 

What takes that brief exchange – an ordinary misunderstanding, such as might occur to anyone speaking to a wooly-minded peer with a large income and good digestion – and makes it into comic gold are the three words “he asked politely.” How do you capture that on film? 

And then of course there are Wodehouse’s descriptions, such as painting an extremely angry person as looking like “a tomato striving for self-expression,” or a heavily-mustachioed man with eyeglasses as looking “like a motorcar coming through a haystack.” Various of the female blisters who troop through the Wodehousian world have laughs like a squadron of cavalry crossing a tin bridge. “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes” is not something you’re going to capture with a camera. “The Metropolitan Touch,” in which Bingo Little decides to bring the West End to Twing village, just wouldn’t work without Bertie’s descriptions, such as an orange – “a dashed great hunk of pips and mildew” – hitting him in the face. Or try to imagine Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving at the grammar school as it might appear on film. 

For that matter, having recourse again to the Blandings Castle saga, we find Beach the butler giving Ashe Marson the gen. about the forthcoming house party at Blandings: 

“‘We are expecting,’ said Mr. Beach, ‘a Number of Guests. We shall in all probability sit down thirty or more to dinner.’ 

“‘A responsibility for you,’ said Ashe ingratiatingly, well pleased to be quit of the feet topic. 

“Mr. Beach nodded. 

“‘You are right, Mr. Marson. Few persons realize the responsibilities of a man in my position. Sometimes, I can assure you, it preys upon my mind, and I Suffer From Nervous Headaches.’ 

“Ashe began to feel like a man trying to put out a fire which, as fast as he checks it at one point, breaks out at another. 

“‘Sometimes, when I come off duty, everything gets Blurred. The outlines of objects grow misty. I have to sit down in a chair. The Pain is Excruciating.’ 

“‘But it helps you to forget the pain in your feet.’ 

“‘No. No. I Suffer From My Feet simultaneously.'” 

Beach goes on to observe that the Lining Of My Stomach is not what he might wish the Lining Of My Stomach to be. 

How do you stage that capitalization of Beach’s? On paper it works perfectly; on the screen, flat. 

Once I looked up a list of Wodehouse’s novels, and printed it off. There were eighty-odd titles listed, and I was proud to find that I had over seventy of them, ranging from his school stories, copyright beginning 1903 I think, to one whose copyright date was 1970 (again, if memory serves; I’ve slept since then). When we drove my first-born off the lot, so to speak, the very first thing he ever had read to him was “The Purity of the Turf.” He couldn’t have been three days old when I balanced him on my chest and read to him of Bertie and Jeeves, of Rupert Steggles, Claude, and Eustace, of little Prudence, egg-and-spoon defending champion, and of the difficulty of “estimating form.”  I’d like to think that early exposure had a tiny bit to do with his teaching himself to read by the time he was six.

In “Without the Option,” Bertie and Oliver Sipperly are pinched on Boat Race Night while unburdening a bobby of his helmet, and Sippy has the presence of mind to give the court a false name. “‘The case of the prisoner Leon Trotzky – which,’ he said, giving Sippy the eye again, ‘I am strongly inclined to think an assumed and fictitious name – is more serious.'” In homage to that line, whenever I am accosted at the check-out line to give an extra dollar to this-that-or-the-other, or importuned by some charitable beggar on the same errand (they usually catch you while you are standing in line, confident you will be unwilling to surrender your place in order to exterminate them), against the promise that my name shall appear on a shamrock, or stylized baby bootie, or little flag, or whatever – as I say, whenever so approached, I invariably give a name such as Leon Trotzky, or Vyacheslav Molotov, or Pavlik Morozov.  Or Galahad Threepwood or Roderick Spode.  I like to think that by so doing I am perhaps spreading a little sweetness and light into the day of some stranger who happens to discover that Bukharin has given a dollar to Toys for Cross-Eyed Dogs or whatever it was, much as Frederick of Ickenham might have done on a “pleasant and instructive afternoon.” 

I am also pleased to note that Wodehouse resonates in the culture beyond confessed misfits such as myself.  In 1999, if the reader will recall, we were inundated with lists of the 100 greatest thingummies of the 20th Century.  On a list of the so many greatest novels I was tickled to find Only a Factory Girl, by Rosie M. Banks.  Rosie of course is the novelist who marries Richard “Bingo” Little, the impresario of Twing, as above mentioned.  During John Roberts’s confirmation hearing for chief justice, he was asked who was his favorite writer.  He gave Wodehouse, an answer upon hearing of which I thought this fellow may not be all that bad after all.

Wodehouse remains my lifeline in many ways, my way back to sanity when nothing in the world makes sense any more, when the thought of picking up a history or a biography, with their litanies of crimes and follies, just seems unbearable, and fiction with its swarms of characters who want to do something, who want you to do something, is equally insupportable, and news of current events strongly suggests recourse to strong drink. A dive into Wodehouse is then a plunge into crystalline purity of human existence untainted by crisis or ill-will beyond a desire to nobble the neighbor’s pig. One thinks wistfully of Galahad Threepwood, who looked as if he’d never been to bed until age fifty, and still gave the impression of being just about to raise a foot in search of a brass rail. One looks for the Earl of Ickenham’s assistant Walkinshaw, who applies the anesthetic. One longs for the somnolent peacefulness of an English country parish, scented of Sunday best and farmer, and the gentle drone of the Reverend Mr. Heppenstall’s sermon on Certain Popular Superstitions. 

And one makes one’s way back to shore.

 

 

 

Happy Navy Birthday!!

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Here’s the world’s oldest warship afloat, underway on her own:

I grew up using the 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and it still had a prayer for the Navy in it (they’ve since just lumped it all in to a prayer for the armed services):

“Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; Vouchsafe to take into thy almighty and most gracious protection our country’s Navy, and all who serve therein. Preserve them from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that they may be a safeguard unto the United States of America, and a security for such as pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions; that the inhabitants of our land may in peace and quietness serve thee our God, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Than which more need not be said.

Maybe There’s Hope for the Place, After All; or Not?

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The Telegraph reports that a proposal to outlaw blasphemy in the new Tunisian constitution has been dropped.

Tunisia was where the so-called Arab Spring started, in those starry-eyed months so long ago.  Now we’ve got Islamofascists running rampant in Libya and Egypt, Assad no nearer to being run out of town on a rail than ever, and Jordan showing signs of being undermined.  Sweet.  Depending on how one is keeping score, our diplomacy in that part of the world is one-for-not-much.

We still haven’t retaliated for what happened in Libya.  To some extent that’s understandable, and as difficult as it is to say, commendable.  There were, after all, more or less genuine demonstrations around the country against the militias who staged the movie review carefully-planned attack, demanding they be disarmed.  The problem in Libya seems to be that there is no real effective government that could do the disarming; contrast Tunisia where at least there seems to be some adults in charge.

Dear Leader has expressed “relief” that the Muslim Brotherhood is now in charge of Egypt.  At the same time we’re about to cut them a nice whacking great check.  At the same time the rumors are swirling that we’re going to release the man who masterminded the first WTC attacks in the 1990s.

Assad keeps slaughtering his own.  At least for the moment he’s got Turkey at his back door.  On the other hand, with Erdogan, who famously compared democracy to a streetcar that one exited at one’s stop, in charge of Turkey and sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently stoking fond memories of Ottoman glories, I’m not really comfortable that story has a good ending either.

Assad’s backers, the Iranians, are getting closer to nuclear weaponry by the week.  Only now, after nearly four years of sitting on our hands, they’ve managed to move their R&D and production facilities to places where we can’t get at them with anything other than boots on the ground.  Of course this tribe has long announced their intention to obliterate Israel from the map.  What doesn’t get nearly as wide play is how thoroughly they give the balance of the region the wind up.  They’re Persians, you see, not Arabs.  The “diversity” mavens of the U.S. academy notwithstanding, the rest of the world doesn’t operate that way.  They cordially despise each other and act accordingly.  And Iran’s only desirable product, hydrocarbons, aren’t going to save them from the cataclysm of going from 7 live births per female in 1979 to 1.6 today.

But at least Russia’s still going to hold to its nuclear disarmament treaties with the U.S., so we don’t have to worry about that specter in the room.  Oh, wait, never mind.  Now if this is the kind of “flexibility” that Dear Leader was promising Putin — not knowing he had a hot mic on him — that he would have “more” of than after the election, exactly what does Dear Leader have up his sleeve to give away?  He’s already sold out the Poles and the Czechs, two places in continental Europe where we were actually sort of well-liked.  In a high point for “smart diplomacy,” he chose to let the Poles know by a telephone call . . . on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet 1939 invasion.  For a street-level view of what happened next, after September 17, 1939, in Soviet-Polish relations, see Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man; for the larger story, see, e.g. Allen Paul’s Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Polish Massacre.  Think this is all just ancient history, stuff no one outside Poland ought to care about?  Vladimir Putin, formerly of the KGB, f.k.a. the NKVD, still self-identifies among his buddies as a “Chekist.”

This is what I find worrying about all the above.  After 12 years of self-flagellation over Vietnam, years in which we Americans neglected and indeed vilified our military, a bunch of crazies in Tehran were able to storm our embassy and hold our citizens hostage for over a year (that is, by the way, still a payable on our books, so far as I’m concerned); our only serious effort to get them out turned into a Keystone Kops disaster.  In 1980 we tossed out the clown we had and elected Reagan, who (with the ironic exception of Dear Leader) has to be one of the most personally popular presidents of the past 40 years.  We borrowed ourselves silly to re-constitute our ability to protect ourselves and project our power abroad.  We managed it, but in the process we went from the world’s largest creditor nation to its largest debtor, pretty much within the space of Reagan’s presidency.  We’ve never come back.  We’re now in a world that is every bit as dangerous, every bit as hostile, with multiple loci of economic and military challenge which didn’t exist back in 1980 (I mean, seriously, who outside her immediate neighbors cared what China had to say? or India?).  As in the late 1970s, we’ve allowed our military strength to diminish, at least numerically and materially (in terms of quality of personnel we’re most likely close to the best we’ve ever had, and arguably the best anyone’s ever had).

The difference between 1980 and 2012 is this:  We’ve long since ground our seed corn, economically.  We owe $16 trillion.  Where are the resources going to come from if we are to crawl back now as we did then?

Genl Marshall, a truly extraordinary man, was extremely worried during the war.  He was not worried that we would lose it.  He was worried that it would go on so long that the derangements to American society and its economy would no longer be recoverable afterwards.  After some period of time, the massive spending, borrowing, intrusion of governments into the ordinary workings of American business and the substitution of its objectives for private persons’, diversion of men, money, and assets from peaceful and productive pursuits, and absence from the workforce of most of a generation of healthy males (the unhealthy ones weren’t in the military, recall), would so erode the channels of economic life that the U.S. would be economically defeated even though militarily victorious.  Perhaps he was thinking of the position that France found itself in the late 1780s.

I’m going to suggest that we may have arrived at the point Genl Marshall foresaw, but through largely non-warlike means.  Servicing a $16 trillion note will suck the oxygen from the air that American business needs to function.  The government spends a proportion of our GDP that is unmatched for any period since the war ended, and with the healthcare catastrophe it is proposing to take over, directly or otherwise, a full fifth of the economy.  The federal tax system is already pulling a proportion of the GDP that is pretty close to what it’s ever been able to raise (roughly 19-21%, as I recall), irrespective of the bracket structure in place at any point.  Over a third of all American working-age adults are simply no longer part of the workforce.  The collapse of the labor force is, by the way, a trend that goes back to 1950.  Somewhere I saw a chart that superimposed a graph-line of labor force participation over recessionary spells, going all the way back to 1950 or so.  What struck me was that with each recession, labor force participation plunges.  It then comes back as the economy comes out of recession . . . but it never again reaches the level it had just before the drop.

If growth shot up to a sustained breakneck pace per year we might be able to grow our way back, if at the same time we hived off massive portions of federal outlays.  But chopping off that kind of spending, when so much of the economy has become dependent on that spending, is going to do what to our short-term growth?  And exactly how realistic is it to suppose that we can sustain that frenetic growth rate for long enough to get the bills paid?  If every generation or so the business cycle takes a downward turn, and if we need multiple generations’ worth of uninterrupted growth to work our way out of our position, how likely is it that we’ll pull it off?

We may have painted ourselves into a corner.  Will we be permitted the time to stand pat and wait for the paint to dry?

Don’t Worry Dad; That Won’t Happen to Me: Uninventing Government

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Which is the short version of the speech that pretty much every lead-footed teenager gives his parent when it is suggested that driving like a bat out of hell is a good way to end up on a slab.  I’m a better driver than those guys in the paper last week.

This is the same speech we’re getting from our political class, with its refusal to address the spending avalanche.  Right now the Fed is the purchaser for over 90% of new issues of long-term treasury debt.  Our left pocket is the only source of borrowed money for our right pocket, and our right pocket is shelling the stuff out as fast as the left pocket tops it off.  At that fund-raiser where dear ol’ Mittens was so crass as to suggest that having 47% of your adult population not paying any money into the game was not a good idea, he also observed out that when a government is buying over 90% of its own debt, “at that point you’re just making it up.”

Almost no one’s really picked up on that comment; certainly no one is making an issue of the fact that we’re just making up our economy.

We’re assured by all the Deep Thinkers that this is not really a problem.  The Fed will stop in time; the economy is just about really to take off.  We’re going to grow our way out of this mess.  No, really; we mean it, this time.  And again and again, the numbers keep coming back — unexpectedly!!, as Instapundit would drily note — short of anywhere near what they would need to be for that to occur.  And so we keep firing up the presses and printing off another run.

Math, of course, operates as it will, irrespective of person, party, or country.  That we’re the U.S., or that we’re so diverse a society, or that we have a flashy military, or lots of television shows, or whatever won’t insulate us.  That either party is in or out of power, or partly-in and partly-out won’t help.  All the Learned Cogitations of our judiciary won’t stop it.  The solemn assurances of our chattering classes (of which I am now to some degree a member, I suppose) that Everything Will Be OK can’t stave it off.  Two plus two will never equal anything other than four.

As long as the federal government continues to spend not only more money that it raises in tax revenue, but vastly more than it can ever raise in tax evenue, even by expropriating not just the “1%” but the next 49% as well, the avalanche will not pull up short.  It will reach the bottom of the hill, where we are standing, absorbed in the most recent doings of Big Bird, or the Kardashian sisters and their lady parts, or whatever “reality” show is currently up in the ratings.

This is what it looks like when the avalanche hits bottom.

Germany’s hyper-inflation destroyed its middle classes.  The poor were already poor and generally on some form of relief.  The wealthy either had their wealth in hard assets or abroad.  The middle class, the ones who got up in the morning, went to work, came home and played with the kids, or with the kids’ mommy, went to church, listened to concerts, and generally pursued that inward self-development that is summed up in the uniquely German concept of Bildung — they were wiped out.  For almost 150 years Germany had consciously, aggressively pursued the creation of a society based on Bildung, a notion that is quite a bit broader and deeper than what English-speakers would think of as “education,” or “learning,” or even “cultivation.”  It is, to be sure, all those, but it is also quite a bit more.  That segment of the society that Germany knew as the Bildungsbürgertum was its sea anchor.  It was what kept the ship pointing into the waves.

Within a matter of months the Bildungsbürgertum was largely wiped out, their inward Bildung unable to heat the apartment or even rent one.  The wealthy industrialists, merchant princes, bankers, and landed aristocracy took a lick, of course, but they survived.  The proletariat, the Pöbel, was not to be considered sortable.  And so the Bildungsbürgertum looked about them for a mode of existence, a form of organizing their world and their understanding of themselves in it, that would validate them, elevate them, show them a way forward.

Recently Peter Watson, an English author, published a book, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, a social, cultural, and intellectual history of German from 1750 to right about now.  His point in doing so was to demonstrate that there was a German culture before1933, and that to view Germany and its history exclusively through the prism of the Nazi era was not only to do it a disservice but also to abandon a rich trove of human insight.  I am of course over-simplifying his argument, but Watson identifies the shattered Bildungsbürgertum of the 1920s as forming a large constituent of the fertile soil where sprouted the plants whose fruits were the mountains of corpses shown on the newsreels of the camps’ liberation.

There is only one sure way to keep a teenager from driving to his own death.  You take away the keys.  There is only one sure way to take away the ability of the political class to drive us over the cliff.  You take away their power.  Kicking out Set A of them and replacing them, temporarily, with Set B will not do the trick.  We must get over the notion of “reinventing government” as a deus ex machina.  What is wanted is not “reinventing”; it is uninventing government that will save us, if we are to be saved.