Once Every 35 or so Years Won’t Spoil Me

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I have to suppose that I’ll weather the challenge to what’s left of my virtue.

Back in the 1960s, right about the time my little then-nearly-completely rural county was desegregating its schools (the last graduating class of the “colored” high school was 1964, I think), they built a new high school in the largest of the county’s five incorporated towns.  Back then the county had three high schools in different areas of the county, and each high school was very much an integral part of the social peculiarity of the part of the county it served.  My home county isn’t all that big — the only interstate highway through it has exits that happen almost exactly to coincide with its opposite borders, and those exit numbers are 19 miles apart — but for generations each part of the county was, if you were so inclined, a world unto itself.  People tended to marry within the geography; they went to church near where they lived; for decades the county was dotted with tiny one-room school houses (some of which still exist, forlornly out in the weeds); they worked in “their” part of the county, and that’s where you’ll find them buried.  There are nearly 300 family cemeteries in my tiny little county.

In the early 1970s they consolidated all of the high schools into one rather large facility located in the largest town, and the three former high schools became junior high schools, running 7th through 9th grades.  When I came through that high school in the very early 1980s there was still quite a bit of the initial culture — I don’t know if it’s the right word, really — shock aspect when each year’s 10th graders got to the county high school and suddenly there you were in class with a bunch of strangers, people whose frames of reference were to places and activities you were largely unfamiliar with.

You have to understand that back then children around these parts were, while largely “free range” within their own part of the county (in the summer time I’d vanish into the woods or wherever after breakfast and I’d be back for supper), also largely immobile in terms of other parts of the county.  If you lived up in the “north end,” there were certain creeks where you went swimming or fishing; you went on hay rides with certain families; you rode your horse on certain lands; you went hunting in specific woods and fields.  If you had a paying job, it would have been on someone’s land or in someone’s business you could ride your bike to, or bum a ride with an older sibling or neighbor (usually in the back of a pick-up truck).  Ditto in the south end, the middle, or over towards “the river.”  So in addition to never having been in school before with all these strange people, you had had very little interaction with any of them outside school.  By the time I came along the acculturation process went pretty rapidly and by the end of the second or third week of school we were all one seething mass of pimples and hormones.

All three of the former high school buildings are still school board property, and two of them in use as middle schools.  The third houses what my generation knew as the “jail school” for disciplinary hard cases, the ones a thoughtfully administered three of the best out in the hallway couldn’t adequately tune up.  The parents hated it when you got sent there because the school bus didn’t stop at that school.  The parents had to carry you there, and if your parent worked in the next large city, 45 miles in the opposite direction, that was a pain in the butt. And so it goes.

The former high school, then junior high, now middle school in the central, largest town is typically hideous late-1950s/early-1960s institutional architecture.  Looking at it you take some convincing that at one point this joint was considered sleek.  In that next city over, there are numerous much older school buildings still in use and almost without exception they exude a character that the architecture of that period just seems to lack.  It is architecture that looks like it was made — predestined from the deepest recesses of all time — to be painted institutional green.  My mother taught in that school for 142 years, and it must have been soul-crushing.

Back when it was new, however, back when boyfriends carried their girlfriends’ books, when those girlfriends would get their butt sent home if they showed up at school with a skirt above their knees and the boyfriend likewise if he showed up in a t-shirt, someone built a tiny little burger joint right across the street from it.  It was called The Frosty Jug, or simply “The Jug.”  [Aside:  Perhaps someone will as an exercise in dredging up useless trivia calculate how many hundred thousand burger-and-coke joints there are out there with that name.]  They had curb service, still, even when I was in what was by then the junior high school.  It was where those kids who didn’t have after-school jobs or chores back on the farm could congregate, poke their noses under each other’s hoods to admire the new Holly four-barrel or the breather cover, gossip, and do what teenagers back then did.  I imagine it must have looked more than a little like something from a story-board from a Happy Days script.

When they consolidated the high schools The Jug entered a decline from which it’s never really salvaged itself.  Junior high school kids seldom had jobs and therefore spending money, and so the market for The Jug dried up.  You could still go and get a greasy burger, ditto fries, a flat coke, buy a can of “dip” (i.e. “smokeless” tobacco such as Copenhagen (“Cope”) or Skoal), or play pinball on one of their beat-up machines.

By the time I was in junior high The Jug had acquired a further function, as the venue (behind the building, where you weren’t so visible from the street) for the kinds of vicious fights that would get all participants and most of the spectators thrown out of school, had they been staged on school property.  I still remember one day seeing this thug named Mike G. walking back towards the school building, his face an absolute mass of blood.  He’d been over at The Jug, where he had fought another thug, John F., and at some point John had applied his belt buckle (this was the heyday of the redneck belt buckle as big as a small hubcap) with energy and dexterity to Mike’s face.  John F. later went on to distinguish himself by getting sent to one of those teenager Gulag facilities where the parents have to sign over legal custody of the child to the jailers.  While there ol’ John made a name for himself as one of their hardest cases, ever; last I heard Mike G. was in prison somewhere.  Right, in other words, where the rest of us need him to be.

The Jug closed completely shortly after I left high school.  It was vacant for a good period, then it was any number of equally forgettable things, most recently a barber shop.

Within the past year or so someone bought the building and has re-opened it as a burger-and-coke operation.  Much smaller scale than it was, because middle schoolers have even less disposable money than junior high kids, and besides, nowadays as soon as school’s out the remorseless grind of “activity” starts, with grim-faced parents and hapless children dragooned to a never-ending series of practices, recitals, games, tournaments, exercises, and so forth.

Today, for the first time since about 1978 I think, I had a hamburger and fries at The Frosty Jug.  It was pretty good, I have to say; I’ll be back.

I must confess that before I left I crept behind the building to check.  I’m pleased to report that the ghost of John F. does not haunt The Jug.

14 April 1865

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I suppose the temptation to weigh in at least a little bit on Lincoln’s assassination, 150 years ago today, is just too great.

Even the Europeans, who can find little good to say about the U.S. except for the fact that we elected Dear Leader twice — but perversely refuse to close ranks behind him and gratefully bow our heads beneath his yoke (a continent of atheists and agnostic whispers in our ear: “His yoke is easy, and His burden is light”; have they no sense of irony?) — relax their rules about envy and scorn, for example, here, under the headline “Death of a Savior“.

Among the numerous navel-gazing questions about Lincoln and his life, the question of what would have happened to his reputation had he lived remains right up there with the most popular.  The City Point conference, between Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Porter formed the basis for both Grant’s surrender terms to Lee and Sherman’s to Johnston.  Grant’s have been — rightly, as I think — hailed as the first step towards restoring the U.S. to a single country.  Sherman’s, which were repudiated immediately upon their becoming known, were and remain condemned as handing the farm back over to the foxes.  In truth Sherman’s terms, at least to the extent that they addressed themselves to the political reconstitution of the nation, were beyond what he was authorized to offer.

So why did Sherman, who according to a recent biography was self-admittedly most comfortable in the No. 2 Role, even when that No. 2 Role involved vast, largely-independently-exercised authority, go so far into what he must have known was forbidden territory?  Well, between Grant on April 9 and Sherman on April 18 Lincoln had been shot.

While Sherman must have known he was exceeding his authority, let us not, 150 years after the fact, and with the experiences of all that has come during that time to inform our thinking, be too eager to excoriate Sherman.  The simple fact is that in April, 1865 everyone was facing a universe of facts that had never in recorded human history converged.  For the first time — ever — a republic had successfully weathered a full-blown civil war.  The Roman republic weathered a slave insurrection, but its civil war shattered it, and in fact the next successful republic of any size, Venice, did not arise for another thousand-odd years.  The next geographically extensive republic did not arise until 1789, with the United States.

No one knew in April, 1865 how the Union was to be restored, or even whether it would be in its former form.  Certainly there were not a few voices in the North who vocally opposed re-admission of the Southern states, on any terms.  When I wrote “successfully” in the paragraph above, I said that in the sense that there was still a republic in its pre-war form . . . in the North.  That republic had not been destroyed, but no one had ever re-grafted geographically-defined rebels back onto the body politic of a subsisting republic.  The war was also “successful” in the sense that the rebellious areas had been recovered; they would not form any part of a foreign country.  But beyond that much, no one knew or could know when or if we could once again have a United States of America, covering the continent and constituted as it had been.

Moreover, we’d just shot a president.  That had never happened before, either.  The Army of Northern Virginia had laid down its arms and was in the process of disbanding.  But there were still large numbers of armed Southerners out there.  Sherman must have viewed as among his very highest priorities transforming them into formerly-armed Southerners.  Was it so unreasonable to fear that Lincoln’s killing might be used as the occasion for renewed combat, either by Southerners thinking they were back in the game or by Northerners seeking the kind of scorched-earth victory urged by dimwits like the author over at The New Republic whose article I excoriated the other day?

In any event, Sherman’s terms were rejected by the new administration and by Congress, as doubtless they would have been by Lincoln had he not been shot (of course, in that event it’s unlikely that Sherman would have offered the terms in the first place).

There are two schools of thought about how, in terms of reconstruction, a second Lincoln administration would have played out.  The first takes the saintly view that Lincoln would have multiplied the fishes and loaves and all would have come aright, with nine million illiterate, unskilled, destitute former slaves seamlessly integrated as full participants in the socio-political fabric of a society in which they’d been, a very few years before, the chattel property of the majority group.  This is a species of the same thinking that ordinary Germans and Soviets, caught up in the grinding mechanisms of their respective hells on earth, used to exclaim at the most recent outrage observed or experienced by them:  “If only the Führer knew!”  “If only Stalin knew!”

The second view — more realistic, I think — holds that Lincoln would have run aground on the shoals of a Congress which was packed with people who wanted vengeance, neither more nor less.  While the North had not experienced the demographic devastation the South did — fully one-quarter of all Southern males of military service age were dead or wounded, many maimed with arms and/or legs missing, eyes shot out, festering abscesses where bullets remained lodged in their bodies — there were full many towns across the North who could engrave the names of a large proportion of their sons on the monument out on courthouse square.  The North had to pay for its war as well, and that can’t have sat very well with the electorate.  What kind of chance would Lincoln’s overall notion to “let ’em up easy” have stood in that Congress?  Recall that Lincoln was emphatically not viewed at the time with any kind of the same reverence we hold for him.  For many people he was just another politician temporarily holding office.  Everyone who counted in the North knew that on March 4, 1869, Abe Lincoln was going back to Springfield.  In contrast, the political machine run by Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s first secretary of war and a man of whom it was said that the only thing he wouldn’t steal was a red-hot stove, lasted for years and years after the war, longer than reconstruction itself.

For that matter, how would Lincoln have reacted when his overtures toward the South were rejected, when his generosity was abused?  What would he have made of the Black Codes that swept across the landscape in the war’s aftermath?  We know for a fact that Lincoln could be, when he saw the need, just as brutal a politician as anyone who’s ever practiced the craft.  Witness how Maryland got treated at the war’s outset.  Lincoln wasn’t about to take a chance on having Washington isolated by enemy territory from the rest of the country, and so Maryland got to feel the weight of Lincoln’s boot on its neck.  Lincoln also fully approved of Sherman’s march to the sea, the sole objective of which was the civilian population and its means of support.  Is there any reason to suppose that a victorious Lincoln, having let ’em up easy only to get kicked smartly in his shins for his trouble, would have reacted with any greater forbearance towards those who kicked him?  It’s not at all inconceivable that, so far from burning his political capital to ram-rod a gentle settlement down the Congressional throat, Lincoln would have in response to the South’s continued resistance embraced every last single measure of what we know today as Reconstruction.

But John Wilkes Booth saw to it that we were spared the spectacle of a tarnished hero.  Every society must have its saints; it is an illusion to suppose that humans can do without figures of divinity.  We already had Washington, but Washington belongs to another world, a world in which the U.S. was a feeble string of recent colonies whose very existence as a nation the rest of the world wasn’t going to accept and didn’t accept fully until 1815.  Washington is also tainted by the very sin — slavery — which Lincoln excised.  Lincoln, struck down in the hour of his triumph, a figure unmarred by the inevitable filth of having to pick up pieces and re-assemble them, is a figure so dramatic that if he hadn’t actually existed, we would still be seeking to invent him.

One more set of thoughts on Lincoln.  It is fashionable these days — from a remove of 150 years, of course, and from people who will bear neither moral nor political responsibility for having been wrong — to execrate Lincoln for not coming to office pledged to do whatever it took to end slavery.  The argument goes something like this:  Slavery was recognized as a wickedness by wide segments of the population.  There was and could be no good-faith disagreement whether it must end.  So to say that Lincoln approached it with the attitude of his time is a bullshit cop-out excuse.  He should have made the extirpation of slavery the center-point of his administration from the first day and never deviated from it in the slightest degree.  That he didn’t is justly an indictment of him.

How trite.  People whose putative, hypothetical choices — 150 years later — can carry no moral responsibility for the blood, horrors, and death of civil war, for the destruction of the world’s only functioning republic (which was the first truly representative republic in, you know, fucking forever), for the splintering and crashing to rubble of what actually then was “the last, best hope of the earth,” can safely sit upon their moral thrones and hurl scorn at the man whose real-world choices would and did bear that responsibility.  People today can build into their “well I would have done thus-and-such” proclamations the unspoken knowledge that the country did survive, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people did not perish from the earth. The people whose decisions would make the difference between survival and destruction of that nation had no such luxury.  They had no idea whether a republic could survive a civil war.  Remember that the entire knock on republics as a form of government was that they must inevitably fly apart, riven by faction.  It’s why everyone, from Washington on down, described the United States as an experiment.

Today’s moralizers overlook that the most crucial outcome of the war was not the abolition of slavery, but rather the once-and-for-all-time determination that the United States was a permanent union.  If the answer had been anything other than that, then abolition would never have happened.  The Civil War amendments to the constitutions, with the possible exception of the 13th, would never have come about.  Instead of the world’s most vibrant, flexible, potent economy ready and willing to act as the arsenal of democracy, we’d have squabbling little penny-ante states, all divided by mutual suspicion and seeking nothing so much as their neighbors’ undermining.

Lincoln anticipated as much in his House Divided speech.  He was right: A house divided against itself cannot stand.  He did not expect the house to fall, but he did expect it to cease to be divided; it would become all one thing or all the other.  What happened over the course of 1862 is that Lincoln came to the conclusion that the abolition of slavery had become necessary to save the union now, without which saving the eventual abolition of slavery would have been a vanished hope (at least for his time).  Without saving the union now — in 1862 — none of the reasons for which the union’s preservation was sought — including the abolition of slavery — could be hoped for.  Once the union was lost, it could never be re-established, north or south.  And so in the crucible of war the eventual political objective — destruction of slavery — became a political predicate for its own enabling circumstance — union.  A result truly “fundamental and astounding,” to borrow Lincoln’s own words.

And those people who claim that Lincoln should have campaigned in 1860 and come to office in 1861 on a platform of immediate abolition?  They demonstrate only their own foolishness, and their own cavalier disregard for what remains the last, best hope of the earth.

Thus today we observe the passing of our only unblemished secular saint.  It is intriguing, but ultimately unproductive, to speculate on what would have happened had he not died when he did.  It is morally contemptible to damn him for not acting as we — safely removed from responsibility and with the solid rock of indissoluble union beneath our feet — in our moral purity claim he should have.

Although his Gettysburg Address is the more widely quoted (in fact it is, by a wide margin, the longest single entry in my mother’s 1953 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the only speech given in full), I have long felt much more deeply moved by the peroration of his Second Inaugural:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

More than which cannot be said, and better than which has never been said.

 

Bang the Tin Drum Slowly

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Günter Grass has died, at the age of 87.

Not quite 30 years ago I read The Tin Drum (in the original).  Haven’t read it since, but the ol’ boy’s death suggests I might ought to re-read it.  I also saw the film version a number of years ago, but in all honesty I can’t say I recall much about the movie.

The Tin Drum is set in and around Danzig (as it then was), a city whose 20th Century past was, to put it mildly, troublous.  That part of Europe — where what had been Poland for centuries was finally partitioned out of existence in 1795 — had long been a mish-mash of ethnicities, and Danzig was no exception.  The novel begins before the war and ends after the war, in an insane asylum in what had by that time become West Germany.

Grass’ own life arc mirrored the turbulent history of his home town.  Born too late to serve in the Wehrmacht during its triumphant years, by the time he was subject to compulsory service the war had irretrievably turned against Germany.  His first, unsuccessful brush, with military service was when he attempted to volunteer for the U-boat service in 1944.  He was turned down, most likely because of his age (he’d just turned 17), thereby setting himself up to survive the war.  Had he been accepted for U-boat service there is a strong likelihood he would not have lived; of the 40,000-odd men who served aboard the boats, almost exactly 30,000 never came home.  By 1943 Germany had lost the Battle of the Atlantic.  In March, 1943, the Allies sunk over 40 U-boats in one month.  Doenitz withdrew them from the North Atlantic patrol after that and from then through the end they were hunted beasts; many boats didn’t even complete a single patrol before their destruction.

Shortly after being turned down for the U-boat service he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, where he served in an armored unit from February, 1945 until his wounding on April 20.  He was captured by the Americans (again a fortuitous circumstance: most of the Germans captured by the Soviets were sent to their deaths in the Gulag) and eventually released a year or so after the war.  By then Danzig had become Gdansk and the Poles, to whom it was turned over, had ejected all ethnic Germans (in fairness, the Soviets had ejected the Poles from the 150 or so miles of Poland that Stalin took as part of the post-war Great Carve-Up).  Grass fetched up in the Ruhr district, where for a time he worked in a mine and later did an apprentice as a stonemason.  He began writing in the 1950s; The Tin Drum was published in 1959.

For years he was a reliably left-wing voice, although he did speak against the most radical elements, at least in terms of their aim of immediate socialist revolution.

In 2006 the facts about his service in the Waffen-SS came to light.  In all his prior and very public statements he’d never mentioned it.  Not a few people took him to task for it, precisely because he had been such a prominent critic of Germany’s engagement with its Nazi past.  In truth he ought to have known better than to let something like that lie fallow for so long.  If he actually was drafted, and unless he did things in uniform he’d just as leave we didn’t know about, then there was no reason to have buried his past.  If anything you’d think it would have made him a more credible, more effective advocate for his public positions.

Was Grass a volunteer or a draftee?  I have no way of knowing whether any draft papers or other illuminating documents would have survived this long.  What did his unit do while he was on active service with it?  If it was on the Eastern Front it most likely spent most of its time getting shot to pieces by overwhelming Soviet forces.  But was it involved in massacring a few civilians on its way out of town?  I haven’t seen anything one way or the other.  You’d think that, given how Grass suppressed a biographical phase that the ordinary viewer would see as highly significant — one way or the other — someone would have taken the time to dig up the facts.  That is, after all, how Kurt Waldheim came to grief.  His unit was known to have been in the Balkans during his service and it was easily discovered what it had been up to during that period.  It didn’t bear the light of day very well.  [Aside: I still remember seeing Waldheim’s campaign posters from 1986 in Vienna, when he was running for president:  “An Austrian the World Trusts”.  Cue Inspector Clouseau:  Not any more.]  I may be entirely wrong:  That investigation may already have been undertaken and discovered that there’s a whole lot of absolutely nothing at all to see.  If that’s the case, however, then why did he bury his past so long?

Grass expressed some trepidation about German reunification, a sentiment in which he was hardly alone, either in the world at large or even within Germany itself.  Konrad Adenauer was far from the last German not entirely to trust his countrymen with their own power.  Among Americans, I still recall a professor of mine, who’d fought in the U.S. Army during the war, laconically observing that he got “a very peaceful feeling” when he contemplated the existence of a forcibly divided Germany.

Nonetheless, the collapse of the international communist experiment and the unwinding even of large aspects of the European social democracy model left Grass, like many on the left, casting about for some point of relevance.  In the U.S. we see the left-extremists clustering around two overall approaches to the problem:  The first is to embrace the descent into irrelevance, as with the “social justice,” “micro-aggression” would-be thought police.  The other is doubling down on the 1930s-vintage neo-communist expansion of the state, as with the EPA’s nascent attempt to regulate your back-yard hamburger grill.  In Europe it’s taken, and is taking, the form of collaborating in the Islamization of the continent, and its hand-maiden, hatred of Israel.

In April, 2012, Grass published “Was gesagt warden muß,” (“What must be said”) a so-called “prose poem” in which he takes issue with Germany’s delivery of a nuclear-capable submarine to Israel.  He claims to fear that Israel may assert a right to an alpha strike on Iran, in order to prevent its development of nuclear capability.  He asserts that a nuclear-capable Israel endangers a fragile world peace.  He claims to speak now, because he is tired of the hypocrisy of the West.  And so forth.  The piece is short; here’s a translation of it in The Guardian.  Read it all.

Left unsaid by Grass is any mention that of the two states he specifically names, one — Iran — has adopted for its formal policy the extermination of the other, its “wiping from the map,” and the killing of as many of its citizens as possible; the other — Israel —  for whom Iran has such sanguinary and explicit intentions, has adopted no such policy in respect of any other nation or people.  One of the two nations — Iran — at that time was, and remains today, a known sponsor of some of the most bloodthirsty islamo-fascist terror groups in the world, almost all of whom expressly address their violence against the United States and its interests.  The other is not a sponsor of international terrorist groups.  One of the two nations — Iran — hangs homosexuals from construction cranes, stones adulteresses to death, and regularly practices torture on its own population.  The other — Israel — does not.  One of the two nations — Iran — sentences Christians to prison or death for practicing or preaching their faith.  The other — Israel — has in its parliament political parties representing its minority ethnic populations.  One of the two states Grass mentions gives every reason to fear its possession of any weapon of mass destruction.  The other has never.  One state — Iran — has never been the object of an attack by its united neighbors with the intent of eradicating it.  The other — Israel — has repeatedly weathered these attacks.

There is no other way to characterize Grass’ point:  Iran and Israel are morally equivalent quantities.  The attack of either on the other would be equally worthy of condemnation.  The attack of either on the other is equally to be feared (although, you know, Israel has, you know, never actually, you know . . . attacked Iran).  The world, presumably, would be equally injured by the extinction of either.  The attack on Iran by an Israel fearful that the mullahs mean precisely what they say about wiping Israel from the map, and Germany’s having enabled any of that attack, would splash a further taint of guilt on an already guilty-ridden land which could never be washed clean.

At the risk of understatement:  I am profoundly uninterested in any person, in any ideology, in any theology which cannot tell any material difference between the Iran of the mullahs and Israel, the only functioning democracy in that entire area of the globe.

Maybe his poem was nothing more than a desperate grasp for relevance in a world in which his chosen politics has been refuted pretty thoroughly by the march of time.  Certainly his later bleat in favor of Greece, and how awful it is that the rest of Europe, and Germany in particular, are just being such meanie-pokers to decline to shovel sand down a rat hole indefinitely, argues in favor of that hypothesis.  Or maybe it could be something more sinister.  Maybe it has something to do with why Grass chose for some 60 years to cover up his service in the SS.

In any event, we have lost another anti-Western voice from the world’s babble.  Whatever his talents as a writer may have once been, he won’t be missed.

Layers of Editors and Factcheckers, Perhaps

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Logic checkers, not so much.

Yesterday, when I launched the All-New (Now Featuring Moxie!) post category of Them Awful Southerners, I hadn’t suspected I might be putting out a great big ol’ jar of honey to catch me some bees.  No, I thought it would just be something I could occasionally have recourse to, sort of like Teutschtümelei (an expression I picked up 30-plus years ago from a play by either Lessing or Schiller, I forget which; it doesn’t translate very well, but if you imagine a strident form of hoaky, kitschy Americana, that would be about our modern equivalent) for stuff pertaining specifically to Germany (as opposed to just using German sources for a post on a topic of more general interest).

I may have under-estimated my powers of seduction.  No sooner do I launch Them Awful Southerners than sure enough, here comes today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with its lead, above-the-electronic-fold headline:  “Erschossen im Herzland der Sklaverei“; “Shot in the Heartland of Slavery”.  For starts, oughtn’t it read “Shot in the Former Heartland of Slavery”?  I mean, if South Carolina is the “heartland of slavery,” does that not imply that, you know, slavery is still practiced there?  I haven’t been to South Carolina since 2005, but when last there I don’t recall that being the case.

But let us not bust too hard on the reporter; he probably didn’t write his own headline.  Just because the FAZ wants to run the equivalent of “Fun Times in the Heartland of Nazism” over a report on the 2015 Oktoberfest in Munich, it’s not his fault, is it?

The text of the article must, however, be laid at the author’s feet, and he required to answer for it.  The author — who is based in New York City, which may fully explain the whole thing (here’s his c.v. on the paper’s website; he certainly appears to be someone who ought to know better than to publish bullshit like this) — has actually written two articles.  The first article is about a police officer who conducted a perfectly normal traffic stop until the driver panicked and ran, after which (i) the officer shot him down like a dog, and then (ii) attempted to falsify a crime scene.  The second article is one more tired-ass installment of Them Awful Southerners, and how we’re just lyin’ in wait for the next unsuspecting darky to happen along so’s we can lynch ‘im.  The two articles are separated by a helpful bridge in which the author lets us know everything we need to about him and his ability to think or to report honestly.

The incident happened one week ago today.  The beginning and the end of the confrontation are shown on two separate videos from two independent sources.  The first part, the stop, the request for license, registration, and proof of insurance (just like I got asked for when stopped for my last speeding ticket) all went by the book and are captured on video by the police cruiser’s on-board camera.  Significantly, the audio originates from a microphone on the officer’s shirt.  You can hear the officer indicate that he’s pulled the driver over for a broken tail-light, and then ask for license, registration, and proof of insurance.  The driver tells the cop he doesn’t have registration because he’s still in the process of buying the vehicle, at which point the cop returns to his car, presumably to run the plates.  At that point the driver gets out of the car and the cop asks him to get back in.  Which the driver does.  Then the driver panics.  He gets out and runs.

The cop and the driver are now out of frame for the cruiser’s on-board camera, but you can hear confused words and rustling, apparently as something was disturbing the officer’s body microphone.  You can hear the officer tell the driver he proposes to use his taser on him.  Which he does, without the desired effect.

At this point the second video, captured by an aware hair-dresser on her way to work, picks up.  You can see the taser’s wires deployed.  You see the driver running away and the police officer pickle off eight (!) rounds at a fleeing man.  The driver was struck five times, at least once through the heart.  He falls dead.

And this is where the officer, having already ended one life and screwed up his own, damns himself as a liar.  The by-stander’s video captures him as he turns away from his victim, goes back to where they’d been standing a few seconds before, picks something up out of the grass, and then take it over and drops it beside the corpse.  It was his taser gun.

It seems that in his initial report and his post-event write-up he alleged that the driver had seized his taser, and that he had attempted first-responder life-saving on his victim.  Neither happened.

Within a matter of a couple of days the officer was fired (not placed on “administrative leave,” with or without pay, which is the common administrative proceeding in use-of-deadly-force occurrences, until the facts are straightened out), and formally charged with murder by the district attorney general’s office.  Tellingly, as soon as the officer’s lawyer got the by-stander’s video to examine in detail, he requested and was granted leave to withdraw.

Now, every lawyer in the United States knows what happened.  The client swore up and down to his lawyer that he’d Told it Just Like it Happened in his report.  And then the lawyer takes a look at the video evidence that shows him his client just lied to him about the central fact of his defense.

To this point the FAZ has done a good job of summarizing the actual facts as they can be shown to be.

So much for the allegro of this little concerto grosso.  There then follows an adagio of a few paragraphs, consisting of the obligatory Ferguson comparison.  Although the author is finally forced to observe that the forensic evidence in Ferguson can’t be squared with the pro-criminal version of events, and contradicts the supporters of a violent felon who was shot down in the middle of attacking, for a second time, a police officer, you can tell from the author’s remaining observations that he’d just as leave not have to admit it.  Our Author states that Wilson, after the publicity exploded (which is to say, after the witch hunt started), “submerged, but found sympathizers who spread his version” of the events.  In the end, he was “believed not only by his fellow citizens on the Grand Jury,” which was “directed by the state’s attorney” (grand juries are not so directed, by the way), but also the investigators from the DOJ who “found that the credible witnesses confirmed Wilson’s representations.”  In last Saturday’s events in North Charleston, there is no video of what happened between the time the shooter, officer Scott, and his victim step out of frame in the police car’s video and when the by-stander’s video picks up.  In Ferguson, our New York City author is glumly forced to admit that officer Wilson’s claim that the thug he shot attacked him through the window of his police cruiser was “supported” (notice he didn’t say “confirmed”) by the forensic evidence. [This word choice is what poker players call a “tell.”  It allows you to read what’s going on the other guy’s mind.  Our New York City author won’t say Wilson was “confirmed” by the forensic evidence, even though (i) Darren Wilson had orbital fractures of his skull surrounding his eye, (ii) the thug’s blood was found on the inside of Wilson’s vehicle door, and (iii) all of the ballistic evidence demonstrates that the perp’s hands were not raised, but rather were lowered, and he was charging Wilson with his head down when struck by the fatal round. You know, exactly like Wilson said it happened.]  In fact the DOJ didn’t so much rely on “credible witnesses” which it “believed” over the criminal’s buddies when it formally agreed with Wilson’s “version” of events as “spread” by his “sympathizers,” but rather on the physical evidence, which was specifically cited by Dear Leader’s own U.S. Attorney General.  You’d never suspect that from reading this author’s words.  It’s very considerate for this author to provide us with such rich indication of his journalistic ethics, and in fact, his basic honesty.

In the final movement, we suddenly find ourselves 250-300 years ago in South Carolina.

This sentence made it into print in a major European newspaper:  “South Carolina is the heartland of North American slavery.”  Present tense.  “Here lived more slaves than free persons.”  At least the author got the right tense on that one.

The police forces in South Carolina “developed from patrols for catching runaway slaves.”  Wrong.  Slave patrols and the few law enforcement forces of the times were entirely different.  Slave patrols were manned — on a compulsory basis, by the way — by ordinary free whites, in much the same way that in many places way back when every able-bodied free male had to work on the public roads a certain number of days each year.  These slave patrols had no judicial functions at all, in contrast to the sheriff and his deputies, who served warrants, who levied executions on personal and real property, who ran the jail, dragged the town drunks in for a beating every so often, and otherwise did what little law enforcement went on back then.

Having conflated the historical antecedents of today’s police forces with runaway slave patrols, our author then tosses a few observations about how such patrols operated.  Whippings and the death penalty for “ringleaders” were authorized.  Of course, our author doesn’t point out that the slave patrols didn’t do the whipping or impose the death penalty.  Generally, it was the owners, post-return, who did the whipping, or for those too squeamish, turned their slave over to a public facility for that purpose (there was such a place in Charleston, and another in New Orleans, and I’m sure most every larger Southern town similarly catered to those too cowardly to look their own victim in the face).  Death penalties for ringleaders of slave resistance were imposed by trial courts (however cursory the trial may have been, it was nonetheless a formal judicial proceeding).  Although the owner was supposed to receive his property back undamaged from the slave patrol, “wanted dead or alive” was not an unusual term of capture for repeaters.

Our author then slips up and gives us another “tell” about where he got his information.  He informs us that Indians were used as auxiliary patrollers.  This comes from a misinterpretation (willful? hard to say) of the Wikipedia.org write-up on the Stono Rebellion — of 1710.  It’s less well known than Nat Turner’s of 1835, but until Turner, the Stono revolt had been by a wide margin the bloodiest slave insurrection in North America.  Here’s the author’s source quotation:  “The lieutenant governor hired Chickasaw and Catawba Indians and other slaves to track down and capture the Africans who had escaped from the battle.”  The quotation is referring to the aftermath of the more-or-less pitched battle in which the slaves were defeated (after having killed 44 whites in action against their own losses of 25).  The Indians were pretty much run out of the Carolinas by a few years after the Revolution, a point our author isn’t familiar with, and so he just assumes that Indians regularly made up such auxiliary forces.  And by the way, as the Wikipedia.org article makes plain, the participating slaves were not defeated or caught by slave patrols, but by a raised-for-the-purpose militia.  If our author knew his ass from a hole in the ground he’d understand that militias in both colonial and post-colonial eras were filled by the entire able-bodied male population capable of bearing arms.  So once more, we’re not talking about either functional or organizational precursors of the North Charleston police department.

Did we mention that Stono happened in 1710, a brief 305 years ago and a scant 40 years after Carolina Colony was first settled?  Our author’s remaining data points intended to draw a straight line between the slave patrollers and local South Carolina police forces come from . . . 1739 and 1772.  Here, I’ll draw you a picture, doofus:  In 1772 South Carolina was a loyal colony of the British Crown.  Municipal law enforcement in South Carolina has existed as long as there have been municipalities.  South Carolina’s city police departments are no more descendants of the slave patrols than is the New York Police Department, which has even today its own set of problems with its black citizenry.  New York City until the 1820s had slavery and therefore slave catchers; here’s a basic history for you to read.

The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was founded in Munich in 1919.  Hitler, at the time working for the army, was detailed off to attend a meeting to see what sort of subversion was going on there.  He came, he saw, he took the operation over.  After a time it became the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSdAP.  It took it a while to spread from Munich, but it did, and the world knows its blood-soaked history as that of Nazi Germany.

By the editorial and reportorial standards of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, we should refer to Bavaria as “the heartland of the Nazi party” and to Berlin as “the capital of Nazi Germany.”  In the present tense.

Repeat after me, class:  Not everything in the South has to do with slavery.  Just like not everything in the Federal Republic of Germany has to do with the Holocaust.  You’d think that of all places and papers, a major newspaper in Germany would know better than to try to draw straight lines between present-day misbehavior and long-ago atrocities visited upon an oppressed group.  Apparently that’s too much to expect of today’s left-extremists.

Final take-away:  The more you strain to make connections between unrelated phenomena, the more you beclown yourself.

[Update 13 Apr 15]:  For some reason the FAZ has closed comments on the linked article.  Yesterday when I came across it, there were no comments.  This morning there are maybe 12-15 total.  This is a much lower count than many articles garner.  Why shut off comments now?  I would hope that it’s because the editors realize they published what was, in its main point (the Them Awful Southerners parts, as opposed to the purely factual recount of what happened last week) a made-up piece of garbage by someone who hadn’t the slightest notion of what he was talking about and out of shame they don’t want to call any more attention to it.  On the other hand, we’re talking about a newspaper that’s already started its cheerleading for Chairman Hillary, so the more likely explanation, alas, is that having been caught out peddling bullshit, they’re reacting in the time-honored left-extremist fashion: shut down the debate when the other side starts to win.

Most of the comments are on the lines of what you’d expect from Europeans engaging in long-distance psychoanalysis of Americans, or condemning what a materially awful place the U.S. is to live because free health care! or something.  Several of the comments, however, come from Germans who claim extensive personal experience of the U.S., not only through their own travels here but also through their relatives and friends who live here and whom they visit.  Interestingly, every one of those commenters who has actually experienced America at close range calls bullshit on the white-cop-gunnin’-for-Uncle-Tom-the-runaway-slave-everyone-living-in-fear-of-being-gunned-down-while-walking-the-streets theme of the story.  Finally, I’m pleased to note that at least one of the commenters, who also claims personal experience of Charleston, points out the bogus present tense of the heartland-of-slavery claim.

One more point:  One of the commenters claims that the hair-dresser who shot the second video has stated that the officer and the victim engaged in a physical scuffle on the ground, before the video picks up.  I haven’t taken the time to track that down to see if it’s in fact the case, but it seems like it may be plausible.  Something caused her to reach for her cell phone and starting recording.  How likely is that to have been seeing a simple shoving match between a cop and a pedestrian on the one hand versus, on the other, a cop and a citizen on the ground pummeling each other?  If it’s true, it certainly puts a slightly less sinister sheen on the events.  But, and this is The Salient Point:  This officer shot eight times at an unarmed man who was in full flight away from him, and at least some of those shots were at his center of mass, which is to say potentially fatal.  The man at whom he was shooting was known to him (the officer would already have his driver’s license from the first portion of the stop), and how much harder could it have been to obtain a second warrant for his arrest?  Whether the cop was shooting in anger, or out of lack of training (or, who knows? perhaps he was acting from racialist motives), he still acted in an inexcusable fashion, and sufficiently out of line with his training and established procedures that the police department (remember they’d have taken the hair-dresser’s statement as well) fired him in a matter of hours.

So I suppose the intermediate take-away on the actual event is stand by to stand by.

Questions With Easy Answers

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Prof. Ann Althouse (whose surname I want to spell Althaus, just because) asks what will sex education look like when the government decides it’s time to encourage young women to get pregnant.  She links to a NYT article about birth rates in Europe.

The linked NYT article does discuss a few initiatives that are government-sponsored, such as in Putin’s Russia, but most seem to be from the private sector: magazines, pop culture, even churches.  There’s the obligatory pointing out that as the population ages, lavish public spending will become increasing hard to maintain, although the pollyannish NYT writer decrees that “productivity gains over time” will make up for the fact that the number of people across whom your tax base must fit is shrinking relative to the number of people drawing from that tax base.  As you would expect from anyone whose understanding of economic activity is on a par with that of a South Seas Islander devotee of a cargo cult, she doesn’t explore how productivity, which requires massive, long-term, continuous investment in both human and material capital, is going to keep going up as ever-larger slices of its returns get hoovered up by an ever-more voracious government in the form of taxation.

[Aside:  This glib assumption that productivity will continue to grow irrespective of how much flesh is carved from the body economic in taxes and regulation seems to be a blind spot of the left-extremists.  They’re perfectly able to understand that tax policies and regulation drive behavior, as with so-called “green energy” tax breaks, or other tax-based hand-outs to their favored constituencies, or the individual mandate of the “Affordable” Care Act.  But they never seem to grasp that non-targeted tax policies, such as generally higher or generally lower taxes on productivity, or generally more or less onerous regulation, also drive behavior.  Similarly, they do not seem to grasp (maybe they do; I just have never been exposed to any statement or proposal from which that grasp is apparent) that even unpredictability in these matters drives behavior.  Capital investment has very long time horizons.  In thinking about whether to spend time and money now and for the next few years on Project X, I have to achieve some measure of comfort not only about what the economic landscape looks like today, but also I have to achieve some comfort level with my assumptions about what it will look like five or ten years down the line, when I hope finally to be reaping the rewards of my investment.  The devastatingly simple truth is that you cannot keep cranking up taxes and regulatory burdens on the productive members of society without seeing massive loss — some measurable, some not: how do you measure innovations that never happen because you’ve made it not worthwhile to put in the time and money? — in the society’s aggregate well-being.  It’s the phenomenon that Amity Schlaes calls a “capital strike.”  I’ve yet to hear a leftist come right out and acknowledge that.]

Althouse asks what we can think of as the next question implicit in that NYT article:  Government looks around, realizes it has to do something about its tax base, and decides to get into the business of encouraging pregnancy among young women, that it needs to “do something.”  What does that “something” look like?

This being America, of course, we have that pesky li’l 14th Amendment which requires that what is done for one must be done for all, and so here we’ve also got issues about deciding which young women we want to encourage to get pregnant, and how we direct our efforts to them with minimal effect on non-desired target groups.  At the risk of belching in church, we do not want unmarried, unskilled teenagers getting pregnant.  We do not want unmarried, unskilled, unemployed women already on public assistance to get pregnant.

The problem of course is that short of coerced insemination everything that government can do must fall under the category of persuasion.  Almost everything that might persuade a woman whom we would like to see reproduce will also be very persuasive to a woman whom we’d just as leave not.  There are very few criteria that you could grasp by way of selection that would hold up under the 14th Amendment.  Age would be one, but that’s very, very imperfect, because of how long a woman’s child-bearing years last.  Most of the “bad” demographic indicators — above all unmarried first birth while a teenager — are strong predictors of social pathologies even for that same woman’s children born at any time in her later years.  In other words, if you’re a 21-year-old with three children, all born out of wedlock, statistically it doesn’t much matter if your next child is not born until you’re 31:  That child is nearly as likely to experience bad life outcomes as those first three.  Harsh to contemplate, but those are the numbers.

A further thought suggests itself:  Once government gets into the business of encouraging pregnancy, you cannot avoid the issue of thinking about whom do you encourage.  This is because the answer to the question will vary depending on the political objectives of who is asking the question.  For some people, it is precisely those women who are the least likely to be able successfully and independently to raise productive members of society that will be the most-favored target group.  Think I’m talking through my hat?  As long ago as 1966, two professors writing in The Nation advocated specifically the recruitment of a government-dependent permanent underclass for the explicit purpose of forging electoral alliances to back radical-leftist political ends.  As the Blogfather would say, read it all here.  Think I’m over-stating their cynicism?  The article specifically advocates fighting against programs the effect of which would be to give the government-dependent the life skills necessary to escape that dependency.  Seriously, you have to read it to believe it.  Not since Stalin starved Russia’s peasants of their own food in order to subsidize the rapid industrialization of the cities has anyone called for such callous exploitation of an entire segment of society for one’s own political purposes.

A final thought intrudes, on the lines of there being nothing new in the world.  At least here in the United States we have a large portion of the political spectrum which joyfully reaches for the nostrums of the 1930s to address the tumults of the 21st Century.  Sure enough, it turns out that the 1930s provide us a blueprint of how to encourage not only fertility, but “public service” among the young women of society.  It was called the “Bund deutscher Mädel,” and it was the sister organization to the Hitlerjugend.  Both groups were herded apart from their parents, against whom they were encouraged to rebel, and on whom they were encouraged to inform, and were consciously thrown together, all while being constantly reminded of the duty to produce more little soldiers for the Führer.  There is a vignette in William L. Shirer where he recalls seeing the joyful romps through field and forest by the broadly smiling, lusty (not to say lustful) youth of Germany.  Members of both groups had to do a period of what we would now refer to as “public service” in some menial capacity.

None of the above thoughts provides any comfort for someone thinking about the answer to Prof. Althouse’s question.  Maybe the question is not what such efforts would look like, but whether government needs to get into that business in the first place.

But the actual answer to Prof. Althouse’s question is pretty easy, I suggest:  It would look something like Cloward-Piven, with generous borrowings from the organizational manuals of the Nazi party.

Announcing the First Change in Forever

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The reader of this blog will have noted that I haven’t spent a great deal of time or energy figuring out how to snazz up the place, or what additional features and fillips to add here and there.  It’s all and frequently more than I can get around to just to toss a post up now and then.

But after my post of this past Thursday I got to studying, as we say around here, if maybe an additional post category would not be what the Germans describe as “angebracht,” or “in Ordnung.”

The left-extremist media and blogosphere emits among its more predictable output regular installments of excoriation of everyone who lives south of the Ohio River for not crawling about on hands and knees, scattering glass shards ahead of ourselves and sprinkling ashes over our sackcloth, and all for the horrible crime of being from the South and not thinking exactly as they do.  Commenting and fisking such items is something of a regular thing around here.  Not frequent, but something of a theme.

Thus:  I now proudly introduce a new post category:  Them Awful Southerners.

Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945

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In addition to this year marking the sesquicentennial of the events surrounding the end of the American Civil War, it also marks the 70th anniversary of the last year’s events in World War II.  I’ve already blogged the destruction of Dresden.

On this day in 1945, at Flossenbürg prison in Germany, a small group of people were stripped naked and hanged.  For those who are unfamiliar with continental practices, I’ll point out that the trap door was never popular with the Nazi regime.  When they hanged you, they put a short noose about your neck then kicked the stool out from under you.  So you strangled.  A few years ago I read a book, My Father’s Country, written by a woman whose father was a major in the Wehrmacht.  Before the war he’d been a successful businessman.  Although not directly involved in the July 20 plot, it had been mentioned to him shortly before by a cousin of his or something, and because he didn’t rat them out, he too was tried and hanged.  I recall the scene in the execution chamber, where a group was gathered to be hanged together.  One of them — I think it was the major — went from one man to the next, saying, “Brace yourself.  It takes about 20 minutes.”

In pondering over the events at Flossenbürg I realized today that I have biographies of the three most prominent victims: Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Major General Hans Oster, and Oster’s former boss at the Abwehr (the Wehrmacht’s counter-intelligence organization), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.  Alarmingly I can’t seem to find the Oster biography online anywhere any more, not even on Amazon.

This is unfortunate because of the three, Oster is the least known and the one who was by a wide margin the most fearless of the group.  Oster came to despise the Nazis very early in the game, and on religious grounds.  He was almost foolhardy in his opposition, openly discussing his desire to rid Germany of the pestilence.  He was also willing, after much soul-searching, to go so far as to commit what was undeniably treason in an effort to sabotage the German war effort, repeatedly warning a Dutch acquaintance who worked at the embassy in Berlin of the exact date and time of the planned invasion.  He wasn’t believed.

Oster’s opposition to the Nazi regime was, if not as inextricably so as with his fellow victim, Bonhoeffer, an outgrowth of religious conviction.  Nonetheless he had initially supported the national socialist movement.

How could that be?  The Nazis never made any secret of their anti-Jewish sentiments (their 25-point program adopted in 1920 already in Point 4 states right out that a Jew can never be a German and therefore can never be a citizen) and, even if you are not willing to charge individuals with foreknowledge of the Nuremberg Laws, or the Einsatzkommando operations, or the Operation Reinhardt facilities, or the slave labor or death camps, still:  How difficult could it have been to see what direction they were facing?  You’ve got an organization which (i) readily turns violent (although in fairness to the Nazis, their most active opponents were equally as violent towards them, when they could manage to be), (ii) has aspirations about the ordering of society which, if not explicitly totalitarian, were easily recognizable as laying down the marker of a claim to be the central organizing structure in the lives of everyone (the Nazis very much meant it when they described themselves as “socialist”), and (iii) defines its other central tenet — “national” — in such exclusionary terms, and with reference to such unabashedly identified not-our-kind-dear groups.

I’m not impressed by the proposition that these otherwise-decent people simply chose to overlook the warning signs of what the Nazi party could become given a chance to because of desperation to do something, anything, to restore the political integrity of the German state relative to its international pariah status.  By the late 1920s the Weimar Republic had largely managed to put Germany back on an equal footing as a player in international affairs.  Yes, they still had to pay reparations, but then so did France in 1871.  Yes, they were still prohibited from setting up any but a minuscule military apparatus . . . but then other nations, e.g., the United States, also drastically curtailed their militaries, and voluntarily so.  By the late 1920s Germany was a country with whom other countries did business as an equal, and no longer as a conquered territory.  So I can’t accept that things were just so awful for Germany that a reasonable person could have concluded that the Nazis for all their faults were the lesser of any two sets of evils.

At least Oster opened his eyes in fairly short order after the Nazis took power.  The doings of June 30, 1934, when several hundred people, including the last chancellor of the republic, were slaughtered in an orgy of retribution, finally seem to have rung his bell.  Others, like Canaris, it seems, never did tumble to the fact that the wickedness was inherent in the philosophy and the system, and was not just an aberration of Hitler’s character.  Canaris towards the end even specifically affirmed his faith in national socialism, repeating that his objection was to Hitler.  In this respect he was indistinguishable from the communists who want to draw a distinction between “communism” and Stalin’s bloody reign.

However different were their paths towards opposition, both came to that place well before the war.  This was in contrast to the numerous officers who only turned against Hitler when it became apparent he was losing their war for them.  Both Oster and Canaris were at the heart of the plot that, were it not for Neville Chamberlain’s craven knuckling under at Munich, would have spared the world a war.  Very briefly, there were a number of officers who were terrified of a war in September, 1938.  They knew that Germany wasn’t ready for it and yet Hitler was giving every indication of being intent on provoking exactly that.  So they decided to take him out if it came to armed confrontation with the Western powers.  It really did come down to the last hours, apparently.  Hitler had his troops on the Czechoslovak border, and the plotters had stationed armed men in apartments in and near the government quarter of Berlin, weapons and the ready and waiting only for the signal to seize Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and the rest of the leadership, as well as key facilities.  And then Chamberlain flies to Munich and caves; from that point it became obvious that there was to be no war, and the senior officers in involved withdrew their support.

The plot’s existence remained hidden until 1945, when Canaris’s diary was discovered, detailing the events.  He was already under arrest, as was Oster, on other grounds — Himmler had long since pegged both as traitors although they’d been kept alive in the hopes of further implicating others.  When Hitler found out that they’d been at it since 1938 he ordered them all hanged.

Bonhoeffer, Oster, Canaris, and several others at Flossenbürg were hanged, 70 years ago today.  Whatever may be said about their support for the regime at any point, they did finally oppose it, backing their actions and their words with their lives.  Let him who is without sin, I suppose.

Remind Me Who’s Still Fighting the War?

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As I think Gentle Reader will have divined by now, I am from the South.  This fact causes me no shame.  There are millions of people all over the world who disagree with me on that point.  Being from the South is, in their book, inherently shameful, and people who aren’t ashamed of it should be doubly shamed.  Or something.  On the other hand, I’m not particularly cock-a-hoop about being from the South, either.  It is neither more nor less than my home and the place, among several places in the world where I have felt at home, that happens to be the place where I most feel at home.  I am entirely comfortable that there are thousands of other places where, given enough time, I could feel at home.  Providence just happens to have set me down here.

Be all that as it may (as an old priest of mine used to say . . . and by the way, he was 178 years old when I knew him in the early 1970s, was very much Old Southern . . . and he had marched at Selma, a fact he never mentioned; we only found out years later from a third party source that he’d been there):  I suspect that nearly every Southerner who ventures outside the South, or who has had close contact with non-Southerners — “Yankees” we call them, no matter where they’re from, sort of like Bavarians call everyone who isn’t from Bavaria a “Prussian” and the Amish refer to all outsiders irrespective of origin or ethnicity as “English” — shares as a common experience a number of accusations, nearly all centering on either (i) race, or (ii) what a certain generation of Charlestonians until recently referred to as the “late unpleasantness” (World War I was the “recent unpleasantness”).

Specifically, we are, so the Yankees, all secretly yearning for our lost power over the Coloreds, mourning the passing of the day when we could have any one of them who got “uppity” tied up and whipped or worse.  And of course we’re “still fighting the war.”  We hate Catholics, Jews, and any other outsiders.  We’re either too stupid to wipe our sweat off our own sister’s ass after buggering her, or alternatively we’re so damned evil-genius clever that we manage to control the whole stinkin’ country with 22 U.S. Senators and a minority in the House of Representatives.  And so forth.

Now, can you tool about the South and find people who meet some, most, or all of those descriptions?  You bet you can.  You can also — with the arguable exception of folks sporting an on-going fixation on “the war” — find them everywhere else you choose to look if you’ll be so kind as to open your eyes and ears and close your pie-hole for a moment or two.  At least some of the people you’ll find in the South who are, so to speak, more Catholic than the pope on matters pertaining to either or both race or the war are what they know in West Virginia as “come-heres,” people who have moved south from other parts of the country.

All of which is to say:  Whatever, guys.  If that’s what you want to think, enjoy your ignorance.

April 9, 2015, is the 150th anniversary of General Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.  By that time they were so beaten down that Grant had to cough up 25,000 rations to keep them from starving after the surrender.  The men who finally ran them to ground, who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in ranks a stone’s throw or closer apart and blazed away at them with .58-cal. rifled weapons (seriously: pace of 90 feet — 30 yards — and imagine someone pointing a rifle at you from that distance; the firing lines were that close or closer in numerous battles), receiving fire in return, seem to have thought fairly well of them.  Not that the Army of the Potomac wasn’t over-joyed to have won; not that they entertained any illusions about the cause for which Lee’s men had fought so long and so hard.  But they respected them, as only the mutual survivors of near-death experiences can.

Don’t take my word for it, Gentle Reader.  The officer designated to take the surrender — Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top and who would, in the summer of 1914 become the last man to die of a battlefield wound from the Civil War — has left us his thoughts on the subject:

“The momentous meaning of this occasion impressed me deeply. I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms. Well aware of the responsibility assumed, and of the criticisms that would follow, as the sequel proved, nothing of that kind could move me in the least. The act could be defended, if needful, by the suggestion that such a salute was not to the cause for which the flag of the Confederacy stood, but to its going down before the flag of the Union. My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;—was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier’s salutation, from the “order arms” to the old “carry”—the marching salute. Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!”

Thus the men who alone unquestionably earned the right to an opinion about the men they had fought.  It is, however, precisely the respect angle of Chamberlain’s words which so galls the extreme left nowadays.  Having won is not enough for TNR.  Gentle Reader is of course entitled to come to his or her own smug opinions, 150 years after the fact, and without the stench of septic wounds or rotting human or horse flesh in the nostrils.  But I do think that the men who did achieve the result, with their own flesh and their own wounds and privations, are entitled to be heard on the subject, even now, even today.

For a worthy example of today’s left-extremist sanctimony, we have The New Republic’s modest proposal to make April 9 a national holiday.  And of course to remove from public view every name of every person who served in the Confederate armed forces, from buildings, parks, U.S. military installations, everything.  Presumably acknowledging the existence of these people in any other context than to execrate their memory is not harmonious with the vision announced by Dear Leader, and so forth.  The occasion for the article is a speech Dear Leader recently delivered on the 50th anniversary of the fighting at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma (where my old priest was, and not as chaplain to the Democrat party, either).  From the author:

“In the self-critical America of Obama’s imagination, more people would know about the Edmund Pettus bridge and its namesake. The bridge itself wouldn’t necessarily be renamed after Martin Luther King or John Lewis or another civil rights hero; because it is synonymous with racist violence, the bridge should bear Pettus’s name eternally, with the explicit intent of linking the sins of the Confederacy to the sins of Jim Crow. But Obama’s America would also reject the romantic reimagining of the Civil War, and thus, the myriad totems to the Confederacy and its leaders that pockmark the South, most of which don’t share the Pettus bridge’s incidental association with the struggle for civil rights.”

“Self-critical”?  This is supposed to be a trait which the United States shows only in Dear Leader’s imagination.  Similarly, perhaps, to the self-criticism of modern Iran.  But really, is this author so ignorant of American cultural history?  Well, yes, yes he is.  We are a people who has agonized about our personal and collective sins, about what it means to be a free citizen, rather than a subject.  We not only inherited the curse of slavery and nurtured it for another 90 years, but we also fought a vicious civil war to end it.  We have spawned more anti-vice campaigns than you can say grace over, and from the Great Revival of the 1750s to Billy Sunday drawing crowds of thousands to be told what filthy sinners they were, we’ve demonstrated an unquenchable appetite for self-criticism.  When we fought our first war for overseas expansion, there was tremendous and very public gnashing of teeth at the abandonment of our political identity as a country in it for something other than sordid gain, as detailed in Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower.  For over a century we drew back in horror at the thought of fighting on a European battlefield, only to get dragged in twice in a single generation to precisely that.  After the first time around we agonized over what role, if any, America should have in the wider world.  After the second war we got to confront an implacably hostile, murderous system of government, and we spent the next 45 years agonizing over how to fight this blood-soaked system without becoming like it ourselves.

No, when our learned author from The New Republic taxes us with a lack of “self-criticism,” he means that we fail properly to abase ourselves before the rest of the world.  We don’t have to — we’ve got Dear Leader to do that for us.  He’s gone trotting about the place apologizing for us enough to last several generations.  [Aside:  And what is it with left-extremists and “self-criticism”?  Are they all really that transparently Maoists?]

I have additional news for our author:  The Edmund Pettus Bridge gets just as much play in schoolbooks as the Civil War.  And American students ignore both just as predictably.

“It’s unfathomable that anyone today would attempt to name a new military installation, or rename an old one, after a Confederate general. But at the time these bases were named, there wasn’t nearly as much of a consensus behind the argument that the Confederates committed treason against the United States in support of a war for slavery.

That lack of consensus was an ineluctable consequence of concerted postbellum efforts to sand down the seams reuniting the states. There was a real but inadequate constituency for crushing the Southern establishment after the Civil War, and reintegrating the country under an entirely different paradigm. Instead, the North enabled the South by giving it unusual influence over shaping the official mythology of the war. Yes, the South surrendered. The states ratified the 13th Amendment. The Union survived. These facts couldn’t be altered. But memorializing the rebellion as a tragedy of circumstance, or a bravely fought battle of principle—those narratives were adopted in part for the unspoken purpose of making the reunion stick.”

Other than the transparently bogus notion of the North somehow “giving [the South] unusual influence over shaping the official mythology of the war,” (I mean, was there a vote somewhere?) my principal quibble with the above quotation, and in fact the entire article, is that those who served in the Confederate armed forces were traitors.  He’s perfectly correct, of course, that the war was, when you really pull all the onion layers back, a war to preserve slavery.  Anyone who thinks that the South would have seceded in the absence of the slavery question is deluded.

On the other hand it was also a war about the fundamental nature of the union itself.  It was slavery which made confronting that question unavoidable; no other issue penetrated so deeply into the fabric of the economy or the society that existed in the South.  But 1860 wasn’t the first time the question had come up, either.  The Hartford (that’s Hartford, Connecticut, I’ll remind the author) Convention during the War of 1812 was gathered for the specific purpose of discussing secession in response to the economic catastrophe that was that war.  The nullification “crisis” of 1832, when South Carolina did no more than what Dear Leader has done — declare entire chunks of lawfully passed statutes of Congress to be nullities — certainly pointed the way to the issue.

This author’s characterization of the Southern military as “traitors” presupposes a settled answer to the question, “Is the union indissoluble?”  There was and had never been any such thing.  I defy anyone to point to any provision of the U.S. Constitution which addresses the subject of whether or under what circumstances a state may or may not leave the union.  It sure as hell isn’t implicit in the very notion of a national government, either.

I’ll give the author a quick history refresher:  In 1787 the United States consisted, with markedly few exceptions, of a narrow string of settlements along the coastal plain, with an enormous back-country populated by hostile aboriginals, and beyond that terra incognita.  It wasn’t just some grandiloquent gesture that caused the Lewis and Clark Expedition to be named the Corps of Discovery.  We really had no idea at all of what was on the far side of that river.  For all we knew Prester John was lurking somewhere out there.  Such “roads” as existed were stump-clogged mud bogs that were in the most literal terms a threat to the lives of all who traveled on them.  Rivers ran free, meaning you floated downstream — there being no steam navigation, Best Beloved — until the next rapids, then unloaded your flat-boat and either portaged around them or, if they were too high, built yourself a new boat below the falls.  A simple letter could take weeks to make it up or down the East Coast, even; heaven help you if you were at Harrodsburg in the Kentucky wilderness.

No one knew whether it was even physically possible to govern such a vastness, with such varying climate, topography, and ways of life, as a single nation of free and equal citizens.  No one had ever tried it before.  In part of his interviews for Ken Burns’s The Civil War, Shelby Foote, whose massive three-volume history of the war I’ve read (I never thought I could learn so much about the Red River campaign), he points out that the Southern states would never have ratified the U.S. Constitution 1787-88 if they had not thought they had every right to get out if they so chose.  I have no reason to question that statement.  [Aside:  Surely someone has culled through the public statements, speeches, newspaper screeds, and so forth of the ratification process in the different states.  I would be curious to discover whether and to what extent the specific question of dissolution was broached and hashed out.]

What I do know is this much:  The man who had commanded the army of liberation, and who had been president of the Constitutional Convention, in which latter capacity he would have been present for pretty much every session, would have received the committee reports, would have listened to the delegates chewing things over among themselves not only on the floor but in lodgings afterward, or during walks in the evening, and of course as the Universally Acknowledged Disinterested Player would have been the natural person to vent one’s own thoughts to . . . he found the subject of secession sufficiently significant that he specifically addressed it in his Farewell Address, and at length.

Mind you, Washington’s Farewell was not a speech but an open letter to the American people.  Not being extemporaneous, every word in it — and everything not said about the subjects covered in it — would have been the product of hours of earnest reflection.  The Farewell was his political valedictory; he never expected to step before the national public again.  Whatever he was going to say to the nation that he, as much as any man alive, had birthed, was in his letter to his people.  Whatever he left out he had to have assumed would be forever left unsaid.  Let’s hear it from the Father of His Country:

“The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”

That is his opening paragraph on the subject of the union.  He spends the next paragraphs dwelling upon the mutual advantages of union, in commerce, in liberty within, in freedom from subjugation from without.  Washington recognizes two groups of considerations for solicitude for the union, what he calls “sympathy” and “interest,” with oddly enough the self-interest angle receiving most of his attention.

I’ll also point out, in relation to the question of whether a permanent union were even possible, Washington observes:

“These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the Union as a primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole with the auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full experiment.”

A “full and fair experiment”; it was certainly that.  Our TNR writer would tar with the brush of treason those who eventually considered that the experiment had been unsuccessful.

But the one thing that Washington, in the eight consecutive paragraphs which he devotes to the subject of the union and why it deserved to be, had to be preserved against enemies within and without, there is one assertion he never makes.  He never, not once, states that the Constitution created an indissoluble union and that as a point of law the individual states surrendered their right to go their separate ways.  With all the other reasons of sympathy and interest that Washington laid out for the cause of union, with an eloquence latter-day politicians would do well to study (I watched some of Rand Paul’s recent announcement of his candidacy for president, and it sounded like a collection of one-liner sound bites), he never even skirts with the point-blank conversation-ending claim that the Constitution itself forbids it.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think the South ought to have lost the war, if only for the reason it was fighting to preserve a monstrosity.  I think it is a good thing that the South did lose the war, and not only because by losing the war slavery vanished from our part of the world.  I do suggest, however, that the most important outcome of the war was achieving a final, literally-sealed-in-blood resolution of the most basic of all questions about the nature of the union.  Had the answer gone the other way, then the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would have been dead letters from their adoption, because they wouldn’t have applied in the seceded Confederacy in any event, and because if anyone up North had tried to enforce them (or any other civil rights legislation), then you would have had states splintering and re-configuring until all you had was something that looked an awful lot like Germany after the Treaty of Westfalen in 1648.

What would the world look like now, had there been only an impotent United States in 1917?  In the spring of 1918 — right about this time of year, in fact — all that stood between the Kaiser’s troops and Paris was a thin line of green American troops.  They held, just barely.  That Britain and France had lasted even that long was only because of the behemoth American economy which could churn out war material in truly mountainous quantities.  Germany would have won the war, in 1918 if not sooner.  True, we’d have been spared the second round of the conflict, but what would a European continent dominated by an authoritarian Germany have looked like?  What luck would Germany have had against the Soviet Union, if they had got into it as they did in 1941, only with no British Empire and United States to back-stop the Soviets?  It’s widely known that the Red Army and its supplies rode in Dodge trucks; what’s less known is that the foot soldiers marched in American-made felt boots.  Even less known is that the famous T-34 tank was an adaptation of an off-the-shelf design by an American; would that design have existed?

Brown v. Board of Education — assuming Kansas were still in the union at that point in any event — would have been a dead letter.  There would be no Civil Rights Act of 1964.  No Title IX.  No Social Security.  No Medicare.  No food stamps.

There would be, in short, almost nothing that either the left-extremists or American patriots hold dear, had the result of the Civil War been that the union is dissoluble, that the experiment failed, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people was to perish from the earth.

But in 1860, as leaders north and south had to make up their minds where to stand, none of the answers were known.  Robert E. Lee is merely the most famous example of someone who didn’t jump ship until his own state voted to leave the union.  Had he been in it for the express purpose of preserving slavery, it is not unreasonable to expect that he would have placed his services at the disposal of the slave-mongers much sooner.  But he didn’t.  As Shelby Foote also points out in his interviews for Ken Burns, when Lee referred to “my country,” he was referring not to the Confederacy or to the United States, but to Virginia . . . and in doing so he was merely following a convention that was not at all that uncommon at the time.

I’m not, in fact, at all averse to the notion of making April 9 a formal observance nation-wide.  Can’t say I’m all that interested in the expense of making it a federal holiday (add up the payroll expenses of one day’s pay for the civilian government and that’s what you give away, per national holiday), but it would not at all be inappropriate for us to celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy.  What I don’t agree with our Learned Author at TNR about is why the occasion is worthy of celebration.  He wants to observe it to spit on the graves of the men who marched in front of General Chamberlain that day.  I want to observe it because what April 9 marked was the opening steps in the healing process from a Civil War.

You see, Civil Wars don’t have to end like ours did, with the defeated side laying down its arms and the combatants going home, to be left in peace so long as they never raised their hands against the victors again.  Ours nearly didn’t end that way, either.  Jefferson Davis sure as hell wasn’t interested in that; General Lee received counsel to disperse his troops as guerillas.  But after Lee and Grant (and remember, this was only a few days after Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln had met at City Point and discussed precisely this issue) determined it would not so end, the war in fact stopped.  There were no more burning cities or farms.  Cattle were not slaughtered and the owners left to starve over the winter.  Even in the depths of the war specifically on the civilian underpinnings of the war, during Sherman’s march, there was no rapine, no hanging of random victims.  For all of its outrage, Southern Womanhood was never outraged, not even in places like Clarksville where the occupation was especially hostile and long-lasting.

Contrast the Russian civil war of 1918-22.  Vast swathes of the Russian landscape were reduced to howling, starving, blood-soaked wilderness.  Both sides knew there was to be no mercy for the vanquished, or their families or their homes.  And so both sides fought accordingly.  Is that how our TNR writer wishes our Civil War had been fought, how he thinks it should have ended?  In Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on the beginnings of the Gulag, on the Solovetski Islands in the early 1920s, he tells of a young man, scarcely older than a boy, who when he was arrested gave as his “profession” the answer, “machine-gunner.”  What kind of society do you imagine gets built with those stones?

Contrast the Roman civil wars, with their proscriptions and thousands of necks chopped through.  Remind me, O TNR writer, how the Roman republic came through that experience.  Perhaps our TNR writer would prefer to see the United States enjoy something along the lines of the Taiping Rebellion, with its tens of millions of dead and devastation of enormous areas of the country; hell, we know (from his fondness for “self-criticism”) what he thinks about the Chinese experience of the first half of the 20th Century.  War lords and dead peasants by the million, interspersed with foreign subjugation.  Closer to our own day, and therefore even less excusable to be found in TNR‘s cocoon of ignorance, are the ructions in the former Yugoslavia.

Here, I’ll go ahead and pose a challenge to TNR‘s advocacy of a scorched-earth ending to the American Civil War:  Point to me one single instance in all of recorded human history where a civil war that ended as this buffoon wishes ours had ended — with the losing side not merely defeated but “crushed,” an outcome not sufficiently dear to enough hearts, as this writer moans — produced as a result of having so ended a regime of peace, justice, or prosperity for the most downtrodden of society.  Does this goof-ball really think that the recently freed slaves or their descendants would have been better off in a South that looked like Tambov in 1922? or the Mongolia of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg? or Kosovo in the early 1990s? or China in the years of the Reds’ consolidation of their power after 1949?

I’m not trying to excuse the legalized oppression of Black America that descended on the South for the century after the war.  There’s no excuse for it.  It didn’t have to be that way.  But it wasn’t that way just in the South.  Let’s hear it from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Heart of Atlanta Motel case —

“This testimony included the fact that our people have become increasingly mobile, with millions of people of all races traveling from State to State; that Negroes in particular have been the subject of discrimination in transient accommodations, having to travel great distances to secure the same; that often they have been unable to obtain accommodations, and have had to call upon friends to put them up overnight, S.Rep. No. 872, supra, at 14-22, and that these conditions had become so acute as to require the listing of available lodging for Negroes in a special guidebook which was itself “dramatic testimony to the difficulties” Negroes encounter in travel. Senate Commerce Committee Hearings, supra, at 692-694. These exclusionary practices were found to be nationwide, the Under Secretary of Commerce testifying that there is “no question that this discrimination in the North still exists to a large degree” and in the West and Midwest as well. Id. at 735, 744. This testimony indicated a qualitative, as well as quantitative, effect on interstate travel by Negroes. The former was the obvious impairment of the Negro traveler’s pleasure and convenience that resulted when he continually was uncertain of finding lodging. As for the latter, there was evidence that this uncertainty stemming from racial discrimination had the effect of discouraging travel on the part of a substantial portion of the Negro community. Id. at 744.”

Jim Crow as a legal system may have been peculiar to the South, but Jim Crow as a way of doing business was nation-wide, as the testimony cited by the court amply demonstrates.  Does our TNR author really think that those practices would have been less widely spread, or more gentle, in the aftermath of a civil war ending as he wishes ours had?

Alt-history is always fraught with peril, because you’re by definition discussing something that did not happen.  I’ll say this much, though:  I am entirely convinced that for all of the failures of the post-war United States, north or south, adequately to deal with dumping several million largely illiterate, unskilled, destitute people who had to learn the most basic survival skills as free citizens into the socio-political mix, and for all the outrages committed against them and their descendants over the next century, the fact that, 50 years after the march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge we have made the progress we have (or had made until Dear Leader came long to poison the wells all over again, purely for partisan political advantage) is largely because of, not in spite of, how the Civil War was ended, beginning on April 9, 1865.

And for that reason I’m all in favor of making it a day of national thanksgiving and remembrance.

As far as the Southern combatants being traitors whose very names are or should be unpronounceable in polite society?  I suggest TNR-boy needs to get sent for some re-education, and maybe self-criticism, in a struggle session.  Just like Chairman Mao would have decreed.

 

Sometimes an Author Tells it All Up-Front

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Like in the very first sentence of the sub-headline.

From the FAZ this morning, we have the headline “Framework Agreement with Iran Greeted World-Wide.”  The first words of the sub-headline tell you all you need to know about the story:  “Except for Israel, the forthcoming framework agreement for Iranian nuclear development has been greeted positively everywhere in the world.”

Everyone thinks it’s such a great idea for the mullahs to get the bomb; everyone, you know, except for the people at whom the weapons will be aimed.  The people whom this monster-regime has promised to “wipe from the face of the map.”  The people who have six million of their co-religionists to mourn, victims done to death by the joyful cooperation of a continent full of the parents of those now greeting positively the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the most violent of the governments of the Religion of Peace.

Iran gets to keep its enrichment facilities.  Oh, but they promise to convert them to “research facilities,” get it?  Arak, their heavy water facility, is to be modified so it can’t make weapons-grade product (anyone want to bet how easily it will be re-converted right back, and in the meantime expanded, while all the dhimmi strut about and crow about the deal they’ve made?).  They “promise” (wink, wink) to reduce the number of their centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,100 (of course, they don’t see themselves as having made many promises about what kind or capacity of centrifuge will make up those 6,100, and of course we have no expectation that the technology will so far advance that 6,100 will be able to the work of the 19,000 older units, most of the “excess” of which are believed to be out of commission).  For the next fifteen years they’re only “allowed” (wink, wink) to enrich uranium to 3.67%.  And for the next 25 years it all is supposed to be “monitored” by the International Atomic Energy Commission.  Yeah, because that outfit has been so effective at keeping Pakistan, North Korea, and (but for the Israelis) Syria from developing nuclear capacity.  Here’s an English-language take on what Dear Leader seems to think he’s got for a deal, versus what the people aiming to “wipe the state of Israel from the face of the map” think the deal is.

What has happened is that we have announced that the state of Israel and its inhabitants have at the most another 25 years to live.

And in exchange for getting the green light to annihilate the only functioning democracy in that entire area of the world, what did the Religion of Peace get?  Oh, of course, we are lifting the oil embargo and other economic sanctions.  Starting now.  So that during those fifteen or 25 years Iran will be able to afford to expand and up-grade its nuclear weapons program peaceful use of nuclear power which they so desperately need, being cut off from any alternative source of energy, like hydrocarbons or solar in the middle of a desert.

Back in 2001-2003, when we wiped out two governments, one of which had attacked us on our own soil and was only by heroics of ordinary American citizens prevented from demolishing the very seat of our legislative branch of government, and the other of which gave sanctuary to all manner of people actively engaged in similar plans and activities, and which in fact was making efforts to accomplish what we’ve now permitted Iran, the world — and the Democrat Party and their operatives with bylines, by which is meant the lamestream media — huffed and trumpeted that this was just “a war for oil.”  Ignoring the fact that if all we wanted was Iraqi oil in unlimited quantities, all we had to do was drop sanctions on Saddam, they alleged that we spent all those billions and all that blood “for oil.”  They still maintain that, by the way, although ownership of the oilfields, refineries, and oil remains and has always remained in the national Iraqi state.  Period.

How do the movers and shakers in the countries that actively traded with Saddam’s blood-soaked regime under the radar, violating UN sanctions on that butcher (and with Iran as well, if memory serves), react now to the news that we’ve got Israel strapped to the gurney, and set an execution date for it?  Why, from the FAZ we discover:  “German Firms Hope for Billions in Iranian Contracts.”  War for oil my aching balls.  I’m proud to note that at least most of the comments to that last article as of right now (0948 local for me) seem to understand what’s going on, how deeply cynical it is, and what the actual stakes of this sell-out are.  “Germany is helping a state whose declared goal is the extermination of a neighbor,” is representative.  On the other hand, another commenter starts his gibbering with:  “At last we are freed from the shackles of the USA.”  Well of course, sacrificing a bunch of filthy Juden is a small price to pay to break free from the “shackles” of a country that protected your country ass for 45 years from those who would gladly have done to you what they did to your kinsmen across the Wall.  Because it’s all about you.  Of course.  Another commenter rejoices that now we’ve got Iran freed to go its way, as well as Cuba, and so all we need to do is free up Putin and all will be coming up roses.

Yeah, except for those whose death warrant has been typed up and is awaiting signature, everyone’s cool with what just happened.

[Update: 08 Apr 15]:  It’s hard to help observing that the people the most cool with the “deal” Dear Leader and Kerry allege that we got are just exactly those people who read their words, and stop the inquiry there.  If you listen to what the Iranians think they got, there emerges a picture that simply cannot be reconciled with the one being peddled by Dear Leader and his stooge.  As pointed out here, we have given them “an ayatollah three-fer. It gives them money. It gives them more time to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also gives them diplomatic political cover to continue dithering[.]”