RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-melancholy-centennial-/
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss in which we live now.

“The summer was more wonderful than ever and promised to become even more so, and we all looked out on the world without any cares,” Stefan Zweig wrote long after it was all over. “That last day in Baden I remember walking over the vine-clad hills with a friend and an old vine-grower saying to us: ‘We haven’t had a summer like this for a long time. If this weather continues this year’s wine is going to be beyond compare. People will always remember the summer of 1914.’”

We will always remember that summer indeed, and not for the exquisite Spätburgunder. The final verses of Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV summed it up:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

On the centennial of the Armistice, it is not uncommon to hear, from poorly educated members of the postpodern commentariat, the assertion that the Guns of August were the result of unintended blunders in various courts, foreign offices, and chancelleries. In what passes for the academe these days, one notable example is Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwakers, an audaciously revisionist whitewash of the Central Powers published in 2014. Clark rehashes the old claim that the decision-makers were swept into a maelstrom by malevolent forces beyond their control. The European balance was supposedly so volatile that two shots fired by a young Serb in Sarajevo could fatally disrupt it, with a revanchist France and an ever-malevolent Russia goading the hapless Kaiser and his officials into a trap.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-danger-of-rushing-into-peace-1541968382

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns were stilled in what was then the bloodiest war in history. A century later it’s worth remembering that while the armistice ended a world war, it also set the table for the next, thanks to the misguided idealism of its author, President Woodrow Wilson.

The Allies had no military reason to stop the fighting. The German army had been badly beaten in a series of battles and was streaming homeward in confusion. The British and French were at the point of exhaustion after four years of constant slaughter, but Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, wanted to turn the German retreat into a rout. His forces had taken a bloody nose in the Argonne Forest, but they were still fresh—and growing in numbers. By the start of 1919 Pershing expected to have more than a million men in the field. Completing Germany’s defeat, even advancing to Berlin, would put the U.S. in a position to dictate final peace terms. Germany’s unconditional surrender would allow America to shape Europe in ways that would guarantee Americans soldiers need never die there again.

But Wilson demurred. The president had entered the war pledging “peace without victory.” His objective was to create a new world order. When the new German government sent a note to Wilson on Oct. 4 asking for an armistice, he saw an opportunity to achieve his aims without further bloodshed.

He was flattered that the Germans asked for peace terms based on his own Fourteen Points, which he’d announced in late 1917 as America’s war aims. They included “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” a reduction in world armaments, and the establishment of a League of Nations. Convinced that Germany was willing to act in the spirit of democracy and peaceful coexistence, Wilson proposed an armistice. On Oct. 20 Germany formally accepted Wilson’s terms, with the proviso that Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicate his throne.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/08/the-11th-hour-of-

The First World War ended 100 years ago this month on November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. Nearly 20 million people had perished since the war began on July 28, 1914.

In early 1918, it looked as if the Central Powers—Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire—would win.

Czarist Russia gave up in December 1917. Tens of thousands of German and Austrian soldiers were freed to redeploy to the Western Front and finish off the exhausted French and British armies.

The late-entering United States did not declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary until April 1917. Six months later, America had still not begun to deploy troops in any great number.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. By summer 1918, hordes of American soldiers began arriving in France in unimaginable numbers of up to 10,000 doughboys a day. Anglo-American convoys began devastating German submarines. The German high command’s tactical blunders stalled the German offensives of spring 1918—the last chance before growing Allied numbers overran German lines.

Nonetheless, World War I strangely ended with an armistice—with German troops still well inside France and Belgium. Revolution was brewing in German cities back home.

The three major Allied victors squabbled over peace terms. America’s idealist president, Woodrow Wilson, opposed an Allied invasion of German and Austria to occupy both countries and enforce their surrenders.

By the time the formal Versailles Peace Conference began in January 1919, millions of soldiers had gone home. German politicians and veterans were already blaming their capitulation on “stab-in-the-back” traitors and spreading the lie that their armies lost only because they ran out of supplies while on the verge of victory in enemy territory.

The Allied victors were in disarray. Wilson was idolized when he arrived in France for peace talks in December 1918—and was hated for being self-righteous when he left six months later.

The Treaty of Versailles proved a disaster, at once too harsh and too soft. Its terms were far less punitive than those the victorious Allies would later dictate to Germany after World War II. Earlier, Germany itself had demanded tougher concessions from a defeated France in 1871 and Russia in 1918.

In the end, the Allies proved unforgiving to a defeated Germany in the abstract but not tough enough in the concrete.

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/lubbers-crackers-obsquatulators-americas-poor-white-trash/

Since Trump’s election the centre of gravity in the Republican Party has moved in the direction of the lower-middle and working classes. As ballots in the November 6 midterms are cast and tallied, a guide to the lineage of the lubbers, hicks, crackers and absquatulators who may well decide it.

On a Hudson Valley day in 1993, during a course I was running, I alluded to class in America and was politely contradicted by a student: “Ours is a classless society”—this was at Vassar, one of the Seven Sisters, Jacqueline Kennedy’s college. I mentioned the Winthrops, Adamses, Cabots, Lodges, Quincys and Thayers, New England names so far up the class ladder that they wouldn’t be caught dead in the social pages, but she was a scholarship girl from out west and hadn’t heard of them. Some of the others were related to them.

The American underclass goes back further than any of those names, to the late 1500s. Nancy Isenberg has written what claims to be the first book exclusively devoted to it. There are countless histories of the American working class and of poverty in America, but this book is about “white trash”. The category is folded in with, if not entirely co-extensive with, the poorest white urban and rural populations in the South (the term is not generally applied in the North or the West). It requires a set of descriptors all to be present, and Isenberg never delineates these clearly: bottom-class Anglo-Saxons, poorly or averagely educated, with few resources, in a stable mode of being (they are not becoming anything), fixed or transient, rural and urban-peripheral, careless in demeanour and manners.

The early British colonial settlements in America, particularly in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas but also in New England, were largely developed by the use of unfree white labour—indentured servants (classed as chattels, movable goods and property, their contracts saleable and inheritable) and transported convicts (vast numbers; for an upbeat novelistic account read Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders: Moll, a criminal, and her criminal mother, were at separate times dumped in Virginia). This was an underclass seen as expendable human waste. It grew rapidly with inbound accretions through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was early viewed as a permanent breed: “waste people” was a common term for them, unwanted and unsalvage­able. In each era the American mainstream distanced itself from its white trash, to whom were attached memorable labels: “lubbers”, “clay-eaters”, “crackers”, “rubbish”, “rednecks”.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-revolutionary-conservatism-of-the-jews/

Nothing is more conservative as a practical matter than Jewish observance. Scripture, and commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries are preserved in a living colloquy among the generations. Communities that adopt specific customs are obligated to preserve them. The reading of the Pentateuch in an annual cycle recreates its revelation at Mt. Sinai: It must be heard and not merely read to evoke the experience of hearing it for the first time. Yet all of this arch-conservative practice with its punctilious attention to the slightest details of the past is there to bring to life a revolutionary event, the irruption of the Creator God into human history. Nothing is more revolutionary than Judaism. The revolutionary-conservative character of the United States of America cannot be understood except by reference to this phenomenon in Judaism.

What passes for Jewish conservativsm has been an abject failure. A group of conservative Jewish funders styling themselves “The Jewish Leadership Conference”today are holding a conference in New York City to promote “Jewish conservatism,” including a few of my friends. I won’t attend; the effort remains immired in the neo-conservative swamp against which I have inveighed these past twenty years. Its lead speaker is the former Russian refusenik and Israeli political leader Nathan Sharansky, whom I admire unreservedly a human being, but question as a political thinker. Ten years ago I excoriated Sharansky’s claim that democracy provided a universal antitode to the world’s ills, in a book review entitled, “Nathan Sharansky’s Mistaken Identity.” The other poster-boy for this conference is the late Charles Krauthammer, whose watchword was “democratic realism.”

Sharansky and Krauthammer, both men of high intelligence and good will, helped persuade President George W. Bush to undertake his crusade for world democracy, and thus bring the United States close to financial and strategic ruin. Their influence has been baleful despite their best intentions, and it is a measure of the political immaturity of American Jews that the best we can to by way of conservatism is to advertise the errors that nearly ruined us in our generation. Forcing majority rule on Iraq put a sectarian Shia government in power, allied to its co-sectarians in Iran, vastly expanding Iran’s power in the region, and putting Israel at risk. Of all the stupid and self-destructive things that Jews have done with the best of intentions, the Bush Freedom Agenda promoted by Krauthammer and Sharansky produced the clearest and most urgent threat to Jewish survival. With Sharansky and Krauthammer on the marquee, the “Jewish Conservatism” conference also features Hillary Clinton supporter Bill Kristol. Clearly we have a congnitive dissonance here.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181017-the-bosnians-who-speak-medieval-spanish

On our way to Sarajevo’s Ashkenazi Synagogue for the Friday evening Shabbat (Sabbath) service, my friend Paula Goldman and I walked down cobblestone streets through the Baščaršija, the old Ottoman area of the city, passing mosques, shops and a madrasa (Islamic school). It was the year 2000, and the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina still bore the scars of the Balkans War. A Nato tank rolled by as we crossed the Miljacka river.

As we entered the second floor of the salmon-coloured stone building with its four onion-shaped domes, light flooded through doors set with stained glass images of the Star of David and into the synagogue. We took our seats among the congregation as cantor David Kamhi took his place in front of the ark that held the Torah (a scroll containing the Five Books of Moses). Soon, the synagogue filled with the harmonies of prayer. Paula and I looked at each other strangely when we heard ‘Adonaj es mi pastor. No mankare de nada’ (The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want) from Psalm 23 recited in what we thought was Spanish. After the service, I asked Blanka Kamhi, the cantor’s wife, why the congregation was praying in Spanish.

“That wasn’t Spanish,” she responded. “We were praying in Ladino.”

Like many Bosnian Jews, Kamhi and his wife are descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by the Edict of Expulsion in 1492. During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews who did not voluntarily convert to Catholicism were expelled from the country, killed or forcibly converted. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire invited the displaced Sephardic Jews to settle in the Balkans, where they were permitted to maintain their religion and customs. Many chose to move to the Ottoman Empire, while others moved to North Africa, the Netherlands and the Americas.