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Ruth King

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‘Spying on the Reich’ Review: Reading Hitler’s Mind For intelligence agencies in Britain and other European countries, uncovering Nazi plans meant penetrating one man’s intentions. By Stephen Budiansky

By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spying-on-the-reich-book-review-reading-hitlers-mind-6445464b?mod=article_inline

Struggling to divine Germany’s intentions in the midst of the Sudeten crisis in 1938, the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, put his finger on the fundamental point that had flummoxed conventional intelligence-gathering efforts against the Nazi government. “It is impossible to know anything for certain,” he reported to London, “in a regime where all depends on the will of a single individual whom one does not see.” The terrifying repressions of a total police state made the most innocuous efforts at penetrating the German regime’s secrets arduous and dangerous; no one seemed to know for certain who Hitler’s chief advisers were; and even those intimates were frequently caught off guard by the führer’s last-minute changes of mind, guided as much by instinct and temperament as any rational calculation. His decision to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 was made just two weeks before issuing the order to march. “We needed the secrets of a country,” recalled Czechoslovakia’s spy chief, “where people spoke in whispers.”

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Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler

In early 1939, as the world stood on the brink of war, British intelligence officials were deluged by so many contradictory rumors—Hitler was merely bluffing; Hitler would attack the East first; Hitler would begin the war within two weeks in a barrage of bombs and poison gas on London—that Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Adm. John Godfrey, observed, “Whatever happened, someone could say ‘I told you so.’ ”

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Wokism and History. Part Three: “The Commissariat” Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 22nd, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/wokism-and-history-part-three-the-commissariat/

Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided up Poland. Germany invaded first from the north, west, and south, the Soviet Union subsequently from the east. By early October the war was over. A victorious Germany concluded that while its forces had learned much about Blitzkrieg and needed improvement, Soviet Russia in comparison seemed inept.

That impression was solidified by the so-called “Winter War” of November 30, 1939–March 13, 1940, when the Soviets invaded neutral Finland. Although technically a victory, Russia lost nearly 500,000 dead, wounded, missing, and captured, compared to 75,000 causalities of the so-called losing Finns. Hitler concluded that his new ally Stalin’s Russia was a paper tiger, a view enhanced by the vast and continual improvement in German war-making for much of 1940–41 with the victories in Norway, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa.

Germans assumed that the Russian officer corps was largely to blame for these embarrassments, especially given that during the 1937–38 Stalin purges, some 30,000 officers were executed on the pretext of anti-Stalin, anti-communist sympathies.

Among them was over 75 percent of Soviet generals and admirals—at precisely the time Stalin was vastly expanding and modernizing his armed forces and in dire need of competent officers.

Given these exempla, Hitler turned on his ally on June 22, 1941, and foolishly invaded the vast Soviet Union. The initial three-pronged attack was stunning, and nearly knocked out the Soviet Union in the first three months of the invasion, inflicting somewhere between 4-5 million casualties, with perhaps over 2 million immediate dead. Hitler was at first convinced that Stalin had wrecked his military and Moscow would be in German hands by early September.

What followed December 1941—Hitlerian strategic blunders, German overextended logistics and manpower shortages, vast resupplies of Anglo-American Lend-Lease war material to Russia, intact Russian industrial production beyond the Urals, and improving Soviet generalship—had doomed Germans to defeat by late 1943.

By 1943 Stalin had reversed course, reviving the Russian Orthodox Church to lend religious zeal to the war, and increasingly turning over the day-to-day decision making, both tactical and strategic, to an array of talented Soviet generals, most famously Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev, Vasily Chuikov, and Konstantin Rokossovsky. Both Konev and Rokossovsky had been purged between 1936–38 but were by 1941–42 “rehabilitated.” In short, once the Soviet Union de facto ended the commissariat/ideological control of the military and allowed it to function more on the basis of military efficacy, the Soviets began to take advantage of inherent German weaknesses.

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Divisive resolutions lead to political morass at World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem David Isaac

By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.jns.org/divisive-resolutions-lead-to-political-explosion-at-world-zionist-congress/

Delegates to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem this week hoped for a forum to discuss the pressing issues facing world Jewry. Those hopes faded as committee meetings swirled around divisive resolutions, finally exploding on Thursday when a right-wing bloc organized a mini-rebellion.

Made up of Mizrachi, Likud, Shas and Eretz Hakodesh, the bloc put together enough signatures to force a vote by name, meaning each of the nearly 700 delegates would be called one by one for all 18 resolutions, a process that would have taken hours. The move was brought about by Mizrachi’s fear that people would cast multiple votes using other people’s clickers.

The move threw a monkey wrench into Thursday’s proceedings and completely changed the plans for Friday; the original schedule was thrown out in order to make way for a discussion of the resolutions. It was also agreed that resolutions would not be voted on during the Congress but next week electronically.

What finally set the right-wing bloc into action were resolutions against judicial reform, Orthodox conversion and changes to the Law of Return, said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, chairman of Eretz Hakadosh, a faction representing Orthodox values within the World Zionist Organization (WZO) that supports strengthening the state’s Jewish identity.

“We had a situation where the World Zionist Organization was voting against positions of the Israeli government,” he told JNS. “I’m proud that Eretz Hakodesh went in to defend the principles of Torah Judaism, of Israel, of family, and we didn’t buckle. The left and the Reform [movement] realize there is a formidable force challenging them.”

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Do Humanists Care about Academic Freedom? The roster of a new free-inquiry group at Harvard reveals some conspicuous absences. Joshua T. Katz

By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/do-humanists-care-about-academic-freedom

On April 12, the psychologist Steven Pinker and the psychobiologist Bertha Madras announced in the Boston Globe the formation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard (CAFH), a faculty-led organization devoted to the principles of free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse. This is welcome news. After all, everyone looks up to Harvard. Unfortunately, however, all is not well at America’s oldest university. Noting that Harvard ranks 170th of 203 in FIRE’s “2023 College Free Speech Rankings,” Pinker and Madras state with depressing force that “we know of cases of disinvitation, sanctioning, harassment, public shaming, and threats of firing and boycotts for the expression of disfavored opinions. More than half of our students say they are uncomfortable expressing views on controversial issues in class.”

As I write, the CAFH has 71 members, many significant presences in academia. Among them are three university professors (Harvard’s highest rank), including former president Lawrence Summers, and all but six are tenured or tenure-track; only four are retired. As Pinker and Madras put it, “We are diverse in politics, demographics, disciplines, and opinions but united in our concern that academic freedom needs a defense team.”

Consider the diversity of disciplines. Nine of the 71 are from the law school, eight from the medical school, and five each from the schools of business and government. Along with two members each from the schools of divinity, education, and public health, plus one from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, they constitute 34—almost half—who are affiliated with Harvard’s professional schools and are not members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). One former director of admissions is also on the list. As for the remaining 36, 19 are social scientists, six are scientists, five are humanists, and another six are members of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), which is technically part of FAS, though Harvard often assesses it separately.

These figures are, at one level, not unbalanced: the total number of faculty members in the seven professional schools just mentioned (1,196) is comparable with the total in FAS plus SEAS (1,102). But at least three reasons for concern stand out.

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Fred Bauer: An eminent political theorist reconsiders a word that haunts the American political debate.

By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-liberal-in-all-of-us

The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective, by Michael Walzer

A prominent political theorist and longtime editor of the democratic-socialist magazine Dissent, Michael Walzer has been at the center of major intellectual debates and activist movements of the past 60 years. In his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics, Walzer fuses his longstanding interest in pluralism and his decades of activism to craft a narrative of the “liberal” that stresses flexibility, uncertainty, and diversity. Through stories about visiting Israel in the 1950s, organizing against the Vietnam War, and marching against Brexit, Walzer offers a synoptic view of a career of political involvement. And his wider account of the “liberal” illuminates conflicts about politics today, challenging some of the dichotomies of our own polarized moment.

A debate about liberalism broadly understood suffuses contemporary American political life. Some critics of liberalism—perhaps most notably, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed—argue that a liberalism of relentless autonomy has dissolved social bonds and led to an alienated misery. Others insist that liberalism should be defended from an onslaught by post-liberalism, nationalism, populism, and other supposed reactionary terrors.

Rather than conjuring some titanic clash between isms, Walzer offers a more parsimonious account of “liberal” as an adjective. Here, what is liberal is not the product of some grand ideology, nor does it necessarily lead to a single set of conclusions (as ideological narratives often do). Instead, it is marked by ambiguity, toleration, pluralism, and an acceptance of openness. That spirit of generosity is not the same as moral relativism: liberals “oppose every kind of bigotry and cruelty.” But it is marked by some acceptance of difference and an openness to correction. For Walzer, the “liberal” is not an ideology but an accent for an ideology; it is “not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.” The “liberal” is thus compatible with a wide range of ideological orientations, and the course of the book is dedicated to exploring the liberal flavors of different ideologies (all dear to Walzer’s heart): liberal democrats, liberal socialists, liberal nationalists and internationalists, liberal communitarians, liberal feminists, liberal professors and intellectuals, and liberal Jews.

In this sketch of the “liberal” as not ideologically tethered, Walzer taps into a broader tradition. Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear,” which he cites as an inspiration, argues that the core of the “liberal” is the avoidance of cruelty. Helena Rosenblatt’s more recent The Lost History of Liberalism also broadens the valence of the concept by attending to diversity and even tensions within different liberal traditions. Walzer does not discount the possibility of liberalism as an ideology; he argues that liberalism in this sense (of free trade, open borders, radical individualism, and so on) has many resonances with contemporary American libertarianism. However, he also hopes to show how “liberal” as an adjective can be compatible with a variety of other traditions and political approaches. The “liberal” supports pluralism in numerous ways.

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Biden Administration Still Negotiating a Secret ‘Deal’ with Iran: As Many Nuclear Weapons as They Like? by Majid Rafizadeh

By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19590/negotiating-secret-iran-nuclear-deal

Nothing seems to stop the Biden administration from wanting to reward the ruling mullahs of Iran with a nuclear deal that will pave the way for the Islamist regime of Iran legally to obtain as many nuclear weapons as it likes, empower the ruling mullahs with billions of dollars, lift sanctions against their theocratic regime, allow them to rejoin the global financial system and enhance their legitimacy on the global stage.

These benefits presumably include further enabling the regime’s ruthless expansion throughout the Middle East — Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and the terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip — and into Latin America.

“The Americans are keeping their desire to negotiate with the Islamic Republic [to revive the nuclear deal] in secret in the midst of denial and silence”. — Independent Persian, February 23, 2023.

In addition, Iran, called by the US Department of State a “top sponsor of state terrorism,” has been ratcheting up its presence and terror cells in Latin America while using the continent as a sanctuary.

During the Biden administration, the Iranian regime has also attempted to assassinate US officials on American soil.

Even The Washington Post pointed out that the attempted kidnappings should be a serious warning to the Biden administration: “The message for the Biden administration, which has frequently proclaimed its intention to defend pro-democracy dissidents, is that Iran and other foreign dictatorships won’t shrink from launching attacks inside the United States unless deterred…”

Instead, the Biden administration remains silent and evidently still wants to reward the mullahs with the nuclear deal and it continues to see “diplomacy” — read: appeasement — as the only path to deal with the Iranian regime.

Nothing…. seems to be deterring the Biden administration from trying to give the Islamist regime of Iran the ultimate gift: unlimited nuclear weapons.

Nothing seems to stop the Biden administration from wanting to reward the ruling mullahs of Iran with a nuclear deal that will pave the way for the Islamist regime of Iran legally to obtain as many nuclear weapons as it likes, empower the ruling mullahs with billions of dollars, lift sanctions against their theocratic regime, allow them to rejoin the global financial system and enhance their legitimacy on the global stage.

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Turkey: The Abandoned Iraqi and Syrian Christian Asylum Seekers by Uzay Bulut

By on April 21st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19550/turkey-iraqi-syrian-christian-refugees

Iraqi and Syrian Christian asylum seekers, stuck in Turkey for years, suffer from countless problems such as their children’s lack of education, severe poverty, lack of religious liberty, lack of work permits, restricted freedom of movement, the hostility of some Muslims against their faith, and rejections of their asylum applications by Western governments.

“Although the European Union says the full amount has been allocated and more than 4 billion euros have been disbursed, the Turkish government has taken issue with the pace and manner of the payments, which have gone to refugee-serving organizations rather than government accounts.” — Migration Policy Institute, April 8, 2021.

Even though Syrian and Iraqi Christian asylum seekers in Turkey face harassment, poverty and discrimination, the asylum applications of many Iraqi and Syrian Christians are rejected by Australia, Canada, the US and other Western countries. Why?

Around 22,000 Iraqi and Syrian Christian asylum seekers currently live in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. They have been exposed to genocide, terrorism, war crimes and crimes against humanity in their home countries. Where are the Western governments?

So, what has happened to the 6 billion euros given by the EU to Turkey so that Turkey would help refugees more? If such a huge amount of money has been granted to Turkey to provide more for refugees, why are so many refugees and asylum seekers still suffering under horrible conditions in the country? And who are these organizations referred to as “refugee-serving”? Have they taken the money, embezzled it, spent it, and it wasn’t enough? The international community, including the EU, urgently needs more transparency regarding how the money has been spent and how many refugees and asylum seekers have benefited from it.

Why not issue non-refugee visas? Especially as, according to figures reportedly released by the Biden Administration, 5.5 million illegal migrants have crossed the Mexican border into the US as well as “more than 414 million lethal doses” of fentanyl just in 2022.

Currently, asylum seekers need humanitarian visas to be resettled in the West. But many Christian asylum seekers are educated or have skills, so they would be qualified to receive work permits to reside in Western countries. They hope to safely migrate for work, using their skills to provide for their families and live dignified lives.

Where are the UN, international women’s organizations, the International Rescue Committee and children’s rights organizations? These asylum seekers are facing extinction in their homelands, suffering in places such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and hoping someday to find safety in the West.

The Christians of Iraq and Syria have for decades suffered from persecution and instability caused by oppression by the Ba’ath regimes, the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the outbreak of Sunni-Shiite fighting in 2006, al-Qaeda terrorism, the 2014 genocide by ISIS, ongoing Turkish airstrikes on Iraq and Syria, and in many cases, pressures and harassment at the hands of their Muslim neighbors. All this persecution has forced many of them to leave their home countries and seek asylum elsewhere.

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Looking for Answers to the Autism Epidemic in All the Wrong Places Joan Swirsky

By on April 21st, 2023

https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/04/20/looking-for-answers-to-the-autism-epidemic-in-all-the-wrong-places/

According to the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest statistics, in 2020 one in 36 children (approximately four percent of boys and one percent of girls) was estimated to have autism spectrum disorder, estimates that are significantly higher than those in all previous years. White children are about 19 percent more likely than black children and 65 percent more likely than Hispanic children to be diagnosed with autism.

Experts offer various reasons for the general increase in this condition:

The role that being an older parent plays not only in the incidence of autism but also Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities.
Genes.
“Something” in the environment.
The increasing number of vaccines given to infants and children, which today routinely number 16.

What is consistently omitted, however, is the role that ultrasound exams during pregnancy may and probably do play not only in this seeming black/white disparity, but in the rapidly escalating incidence of the condition. More about that below.

WHAT WE KNOW TODAY

Autism is a neurological disorder that affects the normal development of the brain, causing self-defeating behaviors and an inability to form social relationships. It usually appears before the age of three. Most scientists believe that autism is strongly influenced by genetics but allow that environmental factors may also play a role.

To be diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, a child must have deficits in three areas:

Communication (most children can’t make eye contact; others can’t speak).
Social skills (typified by disinterest in both people and surroundings).
Typically “normal” behavior (many autistic children have tics, repetitive behavior, inappropriate affects, et al).

Those diagnosed on the autistic spectrum range from high-functioning, self-sufficient people, even geniuses, to those who need lifelong supportive help.

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A is for Activist: Indoctrination in the Classroom Lana Starkey

By on April 21st, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/04/a-is-for-activist-indoctrination-in-the-classroom/

If, through omission or commission, I have inadvertently displayed any sexist, racist, culturalist, nationalist, regionalist, ageist, lookist, ableist, sizeist, speciesist, intellectualist, socioeconomicist, ethnocentrist, phallocentrist, heteropatriarchalist, or other type of bias as yet unnamed, I apologize … —James Finn Garner

James Finn Garner’s 1994 satirical children’s book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times has aged very well, albeit ironically. What was once a farcical parody of the trend towards political correctness and an incisive comment on the censorship of children’s literature could now be mistaken for one of the many earnest attempts to “clean up” the canon. The depiction of the woodsmen in “Little Red Riding Hood” as “sexist’, “species-ist” bigots and Garner’s reimagination of Cinderella’s fairy godmother as a male “Fairy Godperson” is now perversely de rigueur. Indeed, it would have Helen Adam of Edith Cowan University—one of the most recent Australian academics to call for traditional children’s books to be cancelled—very pleased indeed. Adam has highlighted ten classic children’s books that fail to showcase “diverse characters” and “perpetuate gender stereotypes” and she wants them scrapped.

Apparently, “children need to experience affirmation of their identities and respect and understanding for those who may be different to themselves”. That sounds quite reasonable until we delve further into Adam’s article and discover that it is built on the philosophies of critical theory and identity politics: the idea that power shapes all social relationships. She writes that educators’ “unconscious attitudes, practices and expectations” of children in class may “negatively impact self-confidence” and “reinforce gender stereotypes”. Further, these unconscious attitudes are so deeply ingrained they impact teachers’ selection of children’s books, causing further potential harm. Her solution? Read her instructional woke pamphlet (“Gender Equity in Early Childhood Picture Books”, Australian Educational Researcher) and follow! It even has references to the United Nations so it must be right.

What the terribly serious Adam and her ilk fail to recognise is that while unconscious attitudes undoubtedly exist, and may cause harm, like anything else, her iconoclastic position is a conscious, and very loud, assault on individual identity itself. Identity politics reduces individuals to mere mouthpieces of the collective that defines them, and so dialogues between individuals are reduced to power struggles between groups they belong to. You don’t engage with your opponents because there is no “you”—only your group exercising power in the interest of the group’s identity. By this logic it follows that the woodsmen in “Little Red Riding Hood” cannot be read as individual men, and certainly not heroic ones, but must be read as “sexist” and “species-ist” products of a human-centric patriarchal society that must be overthrown. The result? Silence instead of discussion: the bones of cancel culture.

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Feds Still Fighting Release of J6 Tapes Despite Mounting Legal Pressure A consortium of major media companies is suing the Justice Department and the FBI for ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the still-secret recordings of January 6. By Julie Kelly

By on April 21st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/20/feds-still-fighting-release-of-j6-tapes-despite-mounting-legal-pressure/

Matthew Graves just received a court summons.

As the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Graves is rarely on the receiving end of a legal inquiry. In fact, Graves’ hand must be tired from signing thousands of criminal indictments, sentencing memos, and plea offers related to his ongoing investigation into the events of January 6, 2021. Just this week, the FBI arrested two more individuals on minor offenses, giving Graves’ overstaffed office more fresh meat for the Justice Department’s vengeful retaliation against Americans who protested the certification of Joe Biden’s election that day.

No investigative technique is too invasive for Graves’ henchmen to use in court proceedings. Big Tech, banking institutions, airlines, hotels, and other private interests work hand-in-glove with the Justice Department to hunt down Trump supporters and track their every movement before and on January 6. Much of the evidence consists of video footage captured by Capitol police’s closed-circuit television system during the breach of the building. Investigators routinely include still shots of the surveillance video in criminal complaints.

But now Graves is under pressure from all sides to make the video footage public. A consortium of major media companies is suing Graves and the FBI for ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the still-secret recordings. As I’ve reported since May 2021, the entire trove was designated “highly sensitive” government material shortly after the investigation began. Clips entered as evidence in January 6 cases are under strict protective orders.

Over the past two years, a group called the Press Coalition filed motions seeking to unseal video clips in numerous cases, however, it never requested access to the full archive of footage. That changed after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy allowed Fox News host Tucker Carlson to view the videos and air selected clips in February.

Lawyers representing the group—which includes CNN, the New York Times, and Politico among other outlets—wrote congressional leaders to demand “all closed-circuit camera footage recorded on January 6, 2021, inside the United States Capitol and on its surrounding outside grounds.” 

In what might be a first, news organizations commended McCarthy. “The Speaker also explicitly recognized the overriding public interest in disclosure: ‘I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment,’” the letter quoted McCarthy.

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