RUTHFULLY YOURS

The world was anti-Semitic in 1944, when Ben Hecht wrote A Guide for the Bedevilled. The majority of educated, civilized, and rational people believed that the Jews in some fashion had brought their own problems upon themselves. Hecht began fighting anti-Semitism after an unsettling exchange with a New York hostess, who explained to him that Jews had to acknowledge their own responsibility in the matter of their persecution. This polite Gentile lady explained:

The Jews complain. They suffer dreadfully, and they accuse. But they never stop to explain or to reason or to figure the thing out and tell the world what they, and only they, know…They are–how shall I put it–collaborative victims, a thing they refuse to see…The Germans are not a race of killers, fiends, of a special and different sort of sub-humans.

Not that she approved of Nazi genocide, to be sure; she may not have known the extent of the butchery, but she knew that dreadful things were happening to Europe’s Jews. But she thought that the Germans must have had some kind of provocation to hate the Jews so deeply. Why else would the Germans hate Jews so much?

When did the old anti-Semitism return? For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. What Hecht’s interlocutor believed in 1944, most liberals believe today, not to mention the vast majority of Europeans. Yes, the Arabs hate Jews, and express this hatred in a barbaric way, they will allow, but that is because Israel has provoked the hatred.

Tripwires that once seemed taboo are being crossed every day. One was triggered in the new action film “Triple 9,” which portrays a gang of ruthless Russian mafia killers operating under the cover of a kosher meat business. There are some violent Jewish criminals, but I have not been able to find a single example of an observant Jew among them. The filmmakers have invented a stereotype that has no instantiation in the real world.

As Jews the world over prepare to celebrate Shavuot, the anniversary of the giving of the Law, few biblical scenes are more appropriate to contemplate than the spectacle of Moses bringing the tablets of the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And, incongruous though this may seem to many Jews, no more appropriate image of the scene exists than Rembrandt van Rijn’s depiction of the prophet holding aloft the two tablets bearing their Hebrew inscriptions (1659). Not only strikingly beautiful, the painting also happens to be one of the most authentically Jewish works of art ever created. http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/06/rembrandts-great-jewish-painting/

How so?

For one thing, the great Dutch master corrected the exegetical and sculptural error committed by Michelangelo in the most famous depiction of Moses in the history of art. The book of Exodus describes how, descending from Sinai, Moses was unaware ki karan or panav. Through a mistaken analogy to the word keren, “horn,” Christian Bible commentators took the word karan to mean “horned,” leading to the “horns of light” seen on the head not only of Michelangelo’s Moses at the tomb of Pope Julius II but of other artistic renderings of the prophet throughout the centuries. Not, however, Rembrandt—who clearly understood that the most accurate translation of the biblical phrase has Moses unaware that his face “shone,” just as it shines in this painting. As the historian Simon Schama has written, the very darkness of the painting’s surrounding scene “only makes such light as there is shine with greater intensity.”

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Schama also notes a further corrective of the common misunderstanding, namely, Rembrandt’s transformation of the horns, a widespread feature in contemporary European prints of the scene, into “tufts of hair in the center of [Moses’] pate.” Rembrandt’s Moses is not an especially handsome individual, but neither is he in any way ugly. He is a normal human being, whose face, unbeknownst to him, has become bathed in a divine luminance.

And that makes those winsome tufts of hair, nothing but a few small dabs of paint, significant in another way as well: as an example of Dutch art’s “normalization” of the Jews. In Rembrandt’s Jews, Steven Nadler reminds us that in much medieval and Renaissance art, “the Jew is not merely morally degenerate, but of a sinisterly different nature altogether.” With “bulging, heavy-lidded eyes, hooked nose, dark skin, large open mouth, and thick, fleshy lips,” Jews are made to look “more like cartoon characters than natural human beings.” And then suddenly, Nadler writes,

we come to 17th-century Dutch art, where we find . . . nothing; utter plainness. . . . . Ugliness and deformity are there, but they represent the common sins and foibles of all of humankind. . . . More than a century after their political emancipation in the Netherlands, the Jews experienced there an unprecedented aesthetic liberation.

Moses’ face and foreheadexhaust Rembrandt’s deep sympathy with Jews and Jewish tradition as exhibited in this artwork. Let’s take a closer look at the tablets themselves. True, they are rounded, whereas rabbinic tradition insists they had squared edges. But many synagogues nevertheless depicted the tablets as round, among them the Bevis Marks synagogue, opened in 1701 and the oldest in Britain.

In any case, the real Jewishness of Rembrandt’s tablets lies not in their shape but in their lettering. For an artist who did not read Hebrew, Rembrandt’s calligraphy is both exquisite and exquisitely faithful, and the spelling almost perfect. Even among his Dutch contemporaries, this was unusual; often in their work, Hebrew script is rendered in caricature. But here, too, Nadler writes, Rembrandt “was different”: indeed, “no other non-Jewish painter in history . . . equaled his ability to make the Hebrew—real Hebrew—an integral element of the work.” Most noteworthy in this painting is the letter bet in the eighth commandment, lo tignov (“Thou shalt not steal”); in order to keep the line even with those above it, the horizontal ends of the letter are elongated exactly as a sofer, a Torah scribe, would do.

Harry Truman is now rated as a great president by both parties.

In the book Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959 reveals how much classified material the President revealed to his beloved wife.

From Berlin, at the Potsdam Conference on July31, 1945:

He opines ……after adding “Kiss my baby. Lots and lots of love,” he ends with “I’ve got to lunch with the Limey king when I get to Plymouth”

When President Harry Truman picked up his “Washington Post” early on December 6, 1950, to read a review of his daughter Margaret Truman’s singing performance, he was livid. Though conceding that Miss Truman was “extremely attractive,” Paul Hume, the “Post’s” music critic, stated bluntly that “Miss Truman cannot sing very well” and “has not improved” over the years. The president wrote the following letter to the 34-year old Hume, whom he compared to the columnist Westbrook Pegler (“a rat,” in Truman’s view).

Harry S. Truman to Music Critic Paul Hume

Mr Hume:

I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

Harry S. Truman

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.”

Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.

The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).

Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”

So, who’s right?

They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves.

The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”

Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.

But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Your humble servant recently came across a report showing that Israel scores highly in surveys of human happiness. The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel 11th in the world out of 158 countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Life Satisfaction Index rates Israel fifth out of 36 countries — ahead of many other advanced democracies.

At first blush, these data may seem unexpected, since Israel lives under the constant threat of terrorist violence. By definition, such violence does not discriminate between military and civilian targets, and strikes its victims at random. Yet it is partially because of this danger (not in spite of it) that citizens of the Jewish state exhibit remarkable degrees of personal fulfillment. The stresses of war and terror often breed social unity. Little wonder that 83 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity.

Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.” Since its inception, Israel has faced aggressive neighbors bent on its destruction — a near-constant reminder of its precarious status in the order of nations. Israelis have responded to existential danger by banding together as if they belonged to a vast kibbutz settlement. They have, in other words, taken quite literally the ancient Israelite claim to be people of the tribe.

The phenomenon of tribal solidarity isn’t confined to Jews. It is the subject of Sebastian Junger’s enthralling new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Junger offers a richly researched work of history, psychology, and anthropology to explore the deep appeal of the tribal culture throughout history. The result is a tour de force that should be read by anyone interested in the human condition.

Junger previously served as a war correspondent for Vanity Fair, embedding for long stretches at remote American outposts in Afghanistan’s frightful Korengal valley. This experience may help explain his interest in the intimate bonds that define tribal societies as well as the despair that can come from being wrenched out of a situation that makes those bonds necessary.

Tribe aptly opens with Benjamin Franklin’s observation, decades before the American Revolution, that more than a few English settlers were “escaping into the woods” to join Indian society. Doctor Franklin noticed that emigration seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, but rarely the other way around. White captives of the American Indians, for instance, often did not wish to be repatriated to colonial society. At this distance, it is simply astonishing that so many frontiersmen would have cast off the relative comforts of civilization in favor an “empire wilderness” rife with Stone Age tribes that, as Junger notes, “had barely changed in 15,000 years.”

The small but significant flow of white men — they were mostly men — into the tree-line sat uncomfortably with those who stayed behind. Without indulging the modern temptation to romanticize what was a blood-soaked way of life, Junger hazards an explanation for the appeal of tribal culture. Western society was a diverse and dynamic but deeply alienating place. (Plus ça change…) This stood in stark contrast to native life, which was essentially classless and egalitarian. The “intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe” provided a high degree of autonomy — as long as it didn’t threaten the defense of the tribe, which was punishable by death — as well as a sense of belonging.

The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary Unveiling the false equivalence. Bruce Thornton

“The November election is not a choice between two equally bad candidates. It’s the moment when we reject the candidate who we know, based on her long public record of corruption, lying, and grasping for power and wealth, will take us further down the road to political perdition.”

A lot of Republicans still upset over Donald Trump winning the nomination resort to a false equivalence between Trump and Clinton in order to justify sitting the election out or even voting for Hillary.

Take a recent example by the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. First he lists Hillary’s manifold sins that Trump is innocent of: lying to the parents of the Benghazi victims, promising to nominate hard-left jurists to the Supreme Court, and supporting Obamas’ high-tax economics and unconstitutional amnesty of illegal aliens.

Then Ponnuru offers a catalogue of Trump’s sins Hillary hasn’t committed: mocking a reporter’s disability, indulging a preposterous conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald, threatening a trade war with China, or threatening war crimes against the families of terrorists. Trump’s list presumably balances Hillary’s flaws, in order to make the point that both Trump and Hillary are equally distasteful, thus making the election a Hobson’s choice for principled conservatives.

But this comparison is false and misleading, for Trump and Clinton have had very different careers with different obligations and responsibilities.

Culture is inherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar — the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change. There are rare exceptions, that is, cultures that foster innovation, or cultures that during brief time spans favour innovation.

Oswald Spengler called the great epoch of 19th-century innovation “Faustian,” in the literal sense of Goethe’s masterpiece: Faust will lose his pact with the devil if he is shown a single moment that satisfies him. His dying words, “Only he deserves freedom as well as life who must conquer them every day!” could have served as the century’s motto.

That was Europe once. When Goethe published his drama in 1807, he had God tell the Devil that human beings wanted unconditional rest, and that Faust was the only exception. By the end of the 19th century everyone wanted to be Faust. Faust bet the Devil that he could resist the temptation to hold on to the present moment (in Coleridge’s rendering):

FAUSTUS
Could you, by
Flattery or spells, seduce me to the feeling
Of one short throb of pleasure; let the hour
That brings it be my last. Take you my offer?

MEPHISTOPHELES
I do accept it.

FAUST
Be the bargain ratified!
And if at any moment I exclaim:
“Linger, still linger, beautiful illusions,”
Then throw me into fetters; then I’ll sink,
And willingly, to ruin. Ring my death-knell;
Thy service then is o’er; the clock may pause,
And the hand fall, and time be mine no longer.

What Oswald Spengler called the Faustian spirit of the 19th century gave us all the great inventions that inform our daily lives: electricity, the automobile, the aeroplane, and so forth. The latter part of the 19th century was the most fecund period of human history, and Continental Europe contributed disproportionately.

That is true no longer. Consider the 24 employees of France Telecom who committed suicide in 2009 and 2010 after reassignment to new jobs. One employee in Marseilles left a suicide note stating, “Overwork, stress, absence of training and total disorganisation in the company. I’m a wreck, it’s better to end it all.” He was healthy, ran marathons, had enough money, and had no family problems, but was evidently terrified of change. For some, sameness and security are so precious that life is too frightening to bear without them.

France remains a very wealthy country — it ranks third on Credit Suisse’s table of net average wealth per adult — but the main wealth-acquiring activity practised by the French today is waiting for one’s parents to die. The French once were a paradigm of ambition; Napoleon said that every private soldier carried a field-marshal’s baton in his rucksack. Today, French entrepreneurs move to the US, the UK, Canada or Israel. A 2014 New York Times feature entitled “Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs,” quoted a French transplant to London who heads a Google enterprise saying that in the UK, “it’s not considered bad if you have failed.” He went on: “You learn from failure in order to maximise success. Things are different in France. There is a fear of failure. If you fail, it’s like the ultimate shame. In London, there’s this can-do attitude, and a sense that anything’s possible. If you make an error, you can get up again.”

One might add that at 45 per cent, France’s top rate of taxation on capital gains is the highest in the OECD.

Is Saudi Arabia still providing “Alms for Jihad”?http://spectator.org/suing-the-saudis/

On May 17, the Senate passed legislation that would enable private citizens to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and other Saudis possibly connected to al-Qaeda for damages incurred in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that took nearly three thousand lives.

Predictably, the Saudis took an apocalyptic view of the bill. Before it passed the Senate, the Saudi foreign minister reportedly threatened to pull hundreds of billions of dollars of investments from the United States. One Saudi newspaper headlined it as a “satanic bill” that would “open the gates of hell.” In truth, the bill would open a window on the Saudis’ involvement in the 9/11 attacks that they, and our government, have made extraordinary efforts to conceal.

President Obama has threatened to veto the measure.

Famous by now are the twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report that reportedly describe the connections between the Saudi government (including the Saudi royals and other Saudi citizens) and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The Obama administration says it’s considering releasing the pages, but it’s a good bet it won’t because of Obama’s obsequious relationship with the Saudis.

What else do we know that could justify lawsuits against the Saudi government, and Saudi individuals, banks, and charities?

A December 30, 2009 State Department cable labeled “Secret/No Forn” (meaning no disclosure to foreign governments) published by WikiLeaks, says that, “…Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources…”

If a nation that pretends to be our ally is still funding al-Qaeda eight years after 9/11, we have to ask are they still?

Equally valuable information, and a ton of it, is contained in Alms for Jihad by J. Millard Burr and Robert Collins. It details the enormous and complex web of Islamic charities and banks, many funded by prominent Saudis, that are directly involved in funding terrorism.

Recently my wife and I drove past the house in New Hampshire where I grew up. It looked lonely, in need of repair and, to anthropomorphize the place, hesitant about the future – a metaphor for our nation, with its flagging leadership, crumbling infrastructures and doubt that the future can be as good as the past – a past, admittedly, more idyllic in memory than in reality.

When my newly-married parents came to the house in 1938 the country was mired in an eight-year-old depression, Europe was on the verge of falling to the Nazis, and Japan had occupied large swaths of China. With a future so uncertain, it would not have been surprising if my parents had decided that prospects were too bleak to bring another person into the world. Instead, the first of nine children was born eleven months later – about as positive a bet on the future that a couple can make! Educated people (and my father had a Harvard education) don’t bring children into a world for which they have no hope.

Yet, today, amidst living standards our ancestors could not have imagined, we seem to have lost confidence that the future can be better than the past. Why? And why have we, as a nation, reached a nadir in terms of national confidence, while our leaders are at an apex in terms of supercilious arrogance? Is there a connection between the descent of the former and the ascent of the latter?

As a nation, we should be more confident. We should be able to look back over the past hundred years, with pride and relief in equal measures. The great domestic issues of segregation, civil and women’s rights were addressed and largely resolved in the last seventy-five years. Geography, abundant natural resources, a literate electorate, a penchant for innovation and hard work, and a democratic political system have made our nation the most powerful (and most decent) the world has ever known. What, for example, would have happened had Communism spread to the United States, as looked possible in the two decades following the Russian Revolution? What if Hitler had prevailed in Europe in the 1940s? What if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War in the 1980s? What would have happened to liberty and individual human rights? Would standards of living be as high? Would declines in global poverty have been as rapid as they were? Would there be a United Nations, or a World Bank? What would have happened to the world’s great centers of learning – to the Oxford’s, Cambridge’s, Harvard’s and Yale’s? Would the environment be as clean? Would science have advanced for the benefit of mankind, or would it have been used to sustain dictatorial governments? Those rhetorical questions and their answers should give confidence to Americans that their country is exceptional. America is not perfect and hubris is a sin, but confidence, which stems from self-reliance, a belief in one’s capabilities and faith that the nation’s laws will protect personal and property rights, is critical for a bright and sustained future.

For a century progressives have argued that History and a more scientific understanding of human behavior have required a new, “living” Constitution interpreted “according to the Darwinian principle,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. The technocrats, whom Wilson called “the hundreds who are wise,” were gradually empowered by an expanded federal government to guide the millions he dubbed “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” This concentration of power in the federal Leviathan has subjected both individuals and the states to its ever-expanding, intrusive reach.

In other words, we now have a kind of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. To quote George Orwell, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Robert Curry’s Common Sense Nation, however, is much more that an intelligent restatement of the Constitution’s protections. A member of the board of directors of the Claremont Institute, and a contributor to the American Thinker and the Federalist websites, Curry corrects various misconceptions and recovers influences on the founders that are too often forgotten.

He pays special attention to the influence of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment on men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Curry clearly and briskly sets out the key insights of philosophers Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, as well as of Protestant clergyman John Witherspoon, who immigrated to America, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served as president of what would become Princeton University, where his students included three future Supreme Court Justices and 28 senators.

The distinctively Scottish belief in innate human faculties of “moral sense” and “common sense,” Curry argues, left their mark on the American Enlightenment that produced the Declaration and the Constitution. The moral sense, as Hutcheson explained, is the instinctive faculty for recognizing right and wrong. It is as much a part of human nature as is hearing or seeing, providing access to elementary morals through feelings of pleasure and pain innate to a social animal; and a political community is impossible without it. Reid expanded this notion to include common sense, which Curry defines as “an endowment of human nature that makes possible both moral knowledge and human knowledge in general.” Common sense unifies the reports of the other senses, both physical and moral, into a full picture of the real world. With it we are able to make rational judgments on everything from technical knowledge to moral questions, in order to determine what is both useful and morally right. Rather than being John Locke’s tabula rasa, a “blank slate” upon which experience writes ideas and concepts, people are born with both common sense and the moral sense upon which popular sovereignty must be founded.