RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/bullets-and-baseball-fourth-july-16005.html

On Tuesday, July 4, 1950, a New York Giants baseball fan named Bernard “Barney” Doyle was sitting in the grandstands at the Polo Grounds in uptown Manhattan, waiting for a Giants–Dodgers doubleheader to begin. Doyle, a 53-year-old ship’s carpenter and freight worker from New Jersey, had attended early mass that morning to give himself plenty of time for the drive into the city. The showdown between crosstown rivals was sure to be a sellout.

Seated next to Doyle, who had earned a niche in sports history managing the early career of heavyweight boxing champ James J. “Cinderella Man” Braddock, was 13-year-old Otto Flaig, a neighbor’s son. At 30 minutes past noon, as the Dodgers took the field for batting practice, Doyle leaned forward in Seat 3 of Row C in Section 42 and started to say something to young Otto. But before he could speak, he lurched backward in his seat, stone dead.

At first, the ballpark cops suspected a heart attack. Then they noticed the hole in Doyle’s left temple. The game went on as Doyle was carried out of the stadium, though several members of the overflow crowd were said to have scuffled over his empty seat. An autopsy showed that the Giants fan from Jersey had been struck by a .45 caliber bullet. Otto Flaig, who had missed death by inches and whom the cops said complained about missing the doubleheader, did not hear any shots. Neither did anyone else in Section 42. The bullet, detectives quickly realized, must have been fired from Coogan’s Bluff, the rocky escarpment that rose above the western end of the Polo Grounds.

Sometimes called “Tightwad Hill” because thrifty Giants fans atop the precipice preferred a partial view of the ballfield to the price of a ticket, Coogan’s Bluff was home to several apartment buildings on Edgecombe Avenue, which runs along the ridgeline. For two days, detectives scoured the neighborhood and the apartments before a tip led them to a 14-year-old boy named Robert Peebles. They found various weapons in the apartment where Peebles lived, and he confessed to firing the fatal shot. Six months earlier, he told the police, he had found the .45 in Central Park, with one bullet remaining in the magazine. He had been waiting to celebrate the Fourth with a bang. After climbing to the roof of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, he looked down on 49,000 fans jam-packed into the Polo Grounds, aimed the pistol into the air, and pulled the trigger. A few seconds later, 1,200 feet away, Barney Doyle fell dead. Peebles said that when he heard what happened, he threw the gun away. It was never found.

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/32233-david-irving-s-great-adventure

A recent report stated that David Irving, who lost a defamation suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin publishers who accused him of Holocaust denial, had planned to lead a tour of Holocaust sites in Poland. According to Irving’s website, his 2019 tour begins on September 1 from Warsaw and ends there on September 9. The group will visit the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s primary headquarters on the Easter Front, not far from the town of Rastenburg in East Prussia. They will also tour Hochwald; the nearby bunker of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS; and Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec and Majdanek.

For those who know little about David Irving and Ernest Zündel, who before his death in August 2017 was the leading Holocaust denier in North America, this article will help provide some insight.

In “Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?” Michael Shermer and I wrote, “There is no more paradoxical character in the Holocaust denial movement” than David Irving. He seeks the respect and recognition of the academic historical community, while at times derides them for their failure to recognize the value of his works,” which include “Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden,” “Hitler’s War,” “The Trail of the Fox: The Search for the True Field Marshall,” “Goring: A Biography,” and “Churchill’s War: The German Atomic Bomb.”

He ridicules academic historians for being haughty and verbose, yet this is the manner he projects at times. Of all the Holocaust deniers, he is the most historically sophisticated, even though he has no professional training in history. In a widely quoted interview with Michael Shermer, Irving said “Without Hitler Israel probably would not exist today. To that extent he was probably the Jews’ greatest friend.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/american-history-beginning-of-a-nation/

The aftermath of the revolutionary story, even in brief, is rich and exciting.

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the July 23, 1976, issue of National Review.

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O! Ye unborn Inhabitants of America! Should this Page escape its destin’d Conflagration at the Year’s End, and these Alphabetical Letters remain legible — when your Eyes behold the Sun after he has rolled the Seasons round for two or three Centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dream’d of your times. 

So the Boston philomath Nathaniel Ames wrote in his almanac almost two decades before Congress declared the 13 colonies independence from Britain. It had been a century and a half since Captain Newport established at Jamestown the first permanent English foothold; almost as long since Ames’s New England forebears established their “city upon a hill” along Massachusetts Bay. Now, in the mid-eighteenth century, England’s American colonists began to share a sense of special destiny that would later be woven into the fabric of a new American nationalism.

Without this awakening consciousness of the uniqueness of the American experience, the colonists could never have transcended their traditional loyalty to the “English nation.” Their commitment crossed colonial boundaries to embrace the American continent. It is this cultural phenomenon — the emergence after 1750 of a new American self-consciousness — that underlay the American Revolution begun in 1763 and consummated in 1789.

We are commemorating on July 4 of this year the Bicentennial of one event in that tremendous transformation. Independence, however, did not then and there create the American nation. Independence alone, without the existence of a continental political structure, could not have fulfilled the vision Ames articulated 18 years before. It was one thing for a South Carolinian, for example, to feel a sense of common destiny with a citizen of New York. It was quite another for the Carolinian and the New Yorker to come together under a single national government. Separation from Great Britain was one step in the morphology of the Revolution. But the “real revolution,” to use John Adams’ term, consisted in the creation of the United States of America out of 13 highly individualistic English colonies.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/from-islams-shahada-to-communisms-credo-shared-totalitarian-religious-visions/

A century ago, in April, 1918, the Burlington Vermont Daily News, captured, unintentionally, the quintessential, shared ideological roots of Neo-Marxist Bernie Sanders’ Red [Communism]- Green [Islam] Alliance, foreshadowing the ugly consequences of this nexus:

 “[M]any of the Protestant churches in Germany are no more than empty shells. This lack of horizon, spiritually speaking, has led to the growth of socialism to a marked degree in Germany. Karl Marx was its founder and its slogan is ‘There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.’”

Even earlier, five years before the October, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would begin to impose Communist totalitarianism on Russia, Henry C. Vedder, observed in his 1912 study of Socialism, that the Marxist Social Labor Federation of Britain had adopted Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” [Capital] as their infallible authority, “an article of faith from which they will permit no dissent, on pain of excommunication.”  Vedder, a Professor of Church History at the Upland, Pennsylvania Crozer Theological Seminary, added that this British Marxist organization rejected the orthodoxy of its own votaries unless they too professed as their credo, “There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.”— mirroring the Islamic declaration of faith (p.730), or “shahada”—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Late doyen of Islamic studies, Bernard Lewis, had erroneously attributed the origins of this Communist profession of faith to an unnamed mid-20th century “humorist” in his 1954 essay, “Communism and Islam”. Despite that rather egregious error—attributing the established, obligatory creed of humorless Marxists, some four decades after the fact, to a witty quip by some anonymous comic—Lewis did keenly point out how this statement highlighted “real affinity” between Islamic and Communist totalitarianism, a theme his essay developed quite well, and at some length.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-century-of-disorder/

A hundred years ago, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the illustrious Hall of Mirrors, the same spot where the German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871. It was the most ambitious gathering of its kind in history. Leaders and diplomats of 27 nations convened to establish a new order and make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson had summarized America’s war aims in his message to Congress two years earlier.

Far from reestablishing a solid new order after over four years of carnage and destruction, the Treaty was deeply flawed from the outset. It produced an unstable system which lacked legitimacyin the eyes of the vanquished states, especially Germany. This hindered their prospects of eventual integration into the new order, or even their willingness to try doing so in good faith. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise:

The war had been of such magnitude – affecting so many lives directly, creating both domestic and international divisions, and engendering insatiable expectations of the peace – that the peacemakers were all but impotent to deal sensibly with its consequences. This was not a settlement in which the peacemakers carelessly let the opportunity for consensus–building slip through their fingers: the basic problem of Versailles was that no such consensus could possibly be found.

“Versailles” contained the seeds of another, even more destructive war a generation later. On the centennial of the convening of the conference I wrote an article for the print edition of Chronicles(“A Century of Disorder,” January 2019) dealing with the Treaty’s shortcomings and their consequences. Today’s anniversary calls for a rewrite and more detailed treatment of some key themes. The subject is relevant in our own time: since the end of the Cold War, the bipartisan “foreign policy community” in Washington has been trying to create and uphold an international system based on America’s self-proclaimed authority to impose the universal regime of “benevolent global hegemony.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/business/reimann

Their billionaire descendants, who control Krispy Kreme, Stumptown and other brands, are grappling with the exposure of an unspeakable secret. Emilie Landecker, circa 1961. Her Jewish father, Alfred, was killed by the Nazis. When her children asked about the family’s roots, she would admonish them to stop talking about “that old stuff.”

1. Such appalling events

Emilie Landecker was 19 when she went to work for Benckiser, a German company that made industrial cleaning products and also took pride in cleansing its staff of non-Aryan elements.

It was 1941. Ms. Landecker was half Jewish and terrified of deportation. Her new boss, Albert Reimann Jr., was an early disciple of Adolf Hitler and described himself as an “unconditional follower” of Nazi race theory.

Somehow, inexplicably, they fell in love.

The story of Ms. Landecker, whose Jewish father was murdered by the Nazis, and Mr. Reimann, whose fervent Nazism and abuse of forced laborers did not stop his family from attaining colossal wealth after the war, is a tale of death and devotion and human contradictions. It is also a tale of modern-day corporate atonement.

Decades after World War II, Benckiser evolved into one of the largest consumer goods conglomerates on the planet. Known today as JAB Holding Company and still controlled by the Reimann family, it is worth more than $20 billion and owns Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Peet’s Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Pret A Manger, Keurig and other breakfast brands.

The relationship between Mr. Reimann and Ms. Landecker was for many years a secret. He was married, but had no children with his wife. He and Ms. Landecker had three, and he adopted them in the 1960s; today, two of them own a combined stake in JAB of about 45 percent. For decades, they say, they did not know about their father’s Nazism and the abuses that took place at the company they inherited: The female forced laborers who had to stand at attention outside their barracks naked. A prisoner of war who was kicked out of a bomb shelter and died.