RUTHFULLY YOURS

What’s the highest pleasure known to man? Christian theologians talk about the visio beatifica, the “beatific vision” of God.https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/22/rage-trump-builds/

Alas, that communion is granted to very few in this life. For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest pleasure is moral infatuation.
Like a heartbeat, moral infatuation has a systolic and diastolic phase. In the systolic phase, there is an abrupt contraction of sputtering indignation: fury, outrage, high horses everywhere. Delicious.

Then there is the gratifying period of recovery: the warm bath of self-satisfaction, set like a jelly in a communal ecstasy of unanchored virtue signaling.

The communal element is key. For while individuals may experience and enjoy moral infatuation, the overall effect is greatly magnified when shared.
One case in point was afforded by the mass ecstasy that accompanied Maximilien Robespierre’s effort to establish a Republic of Virtue in 1793.

The response to Donald Trump’s comments about the murderous violence that erupted in Charlottesville last week provides another vivid example.

Trump’s chief tort was to have suggested that there was “blame on both sides” as well as “good people” on both sides at the Charlottesville protest. I am not sure there were an abundance of “good people” on either side of the divide that day, although Trump’s main point was to distinguish between lawful protest and hate-fueled violence. But forget about distinctions. The paroxysms of rage that greeted Trump were a marvel to behold, as infectious as they were unbounded. One prominent commentator spoke for the multitude when he described Trump’s response as a “moral disgrace.”

I didn’t think so, but then I thought that Trump was correct when he suggested that the alt-Left is just as much a problem as the alt-Right. Indeed, if we needed to compare the degree of iniquity of the neo-nazis, “white supremacists,” and Ku Kluxers, on the one hand, and Antifa and its fellow travelers, on the other, I am not at all sure which would come out the worse. Real Nazis—the kind that popped up like mushrooms in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s—are scary. But American “neo-nazis”? They are tiny bunch of pathetic losers. The Ku Klux Klan was a murderous Democratic terrorist group in its earlier incarnations. Now it too is a tiny bunch (the Anti-Defamation League says it has 5,000-8,000 members) of impotent malcontents.

Antifa has brought its racialist brand of violent protest to campuses and demonstrations around the country: smashing heads as well as property. I suspect that paid-up, full-time members of the group are few, but the ideology of identity politics that they feed upon is a gruesome specialité de la maison of the higher education establishment today.

I also thought that Trump was right to ask where the erasure of history would end. This week it was a statue of Robert E. Lee. But why stop there? Why not pronounce a damnatio memoriae on the entire history of the Confederacy? There are apparently some 1,500 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States. Some of them were erected during the Jim Crow era, something else that was brought to you courtesy of the Democratic Party.

“Many reputations are now tied to a false version of what Donald Trump said, and a version of events in Charlottesville that may or may not survive careful documentation. Do not expect moral courage or any apologies. Mobs are mobs. Nazis whose every thought is reprehensible will still quail in the face of a lawless crowd. CEOs of publicly traded companies are not in the business of being brave. And yet the natural order is holding. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists may be a continuing American embarrassment and eyesore, but they are not today’s most pressing threat to our civil liberties.”
Well, that was a bit embarrassing. Antifascist liberals mounted thousand-strong counter-rallies all weekend against a Nazi threat that proved nonexistent or thin on the ground. Leftists imagined themselves to be modern-day versions of the Czech resistance or the Warsaw uprising, but it turns out they were the majoritarian mob shouting down a handful of losers who’ve been an execrable but small part of the American pageant for as long as most of us can remember.

We don’t know what speakers at Saturday’s “free speech” rally in Boston might have said. It was organized, according to the local papers, by libertarians protesting campus speech codes, though they opened their platform to anybody, left and right. The meeting ended early; the speakers were all drowned out. Nazis and white supremacists, if any were present, were shown to be vastly outnumbered by Americans who reject such doctrines.

To state another obvious point, our civil liberties are meaningless if they don’t protect unpopular views. It’s not the mob but the mob’s targets that need protection.
For the record, of the 20th century’s malign ideologies, Nazi ideas of who should be murdered and why strike me as slightly more odious and frightful than Maoist or Stalinist ideas of who should be murdered and why. The applicability to current U.S. events is slender, though.

More relevant is the principle that large mobs are more dangerous than small mobs, and likely to harbor more psychopaths. Apparently running out of Nazis to resist, Boston protesters threw rocks and urine-filled bottles at police. Any shortage of white supremacists can always be corrected by expanding the definition. Opponents of a $15 minimum wage are racist. Skeptics about a pending climate crisis are racist. Anyone questioning the utility of pulling down old statues is racist.

The slippery slope of civil-rights erosion is manifest every time certain members of the vituperative left open their mouths.

Hard to escape is a lesson about incentives: Majoritarian violence is the predominant risk even when its targets are people otherwise impossible to sympathize with.

Which brings us back to Charlottesville. Serious professionals in every field know first reports are unreliable. We aren’t counting certain modern-day news sites, of course. Their job is manipulating passing, news-related symbols in ways that pleasure their target audiences. Bandwagons are their profession.

For the record, however, Donald Trump’s press conference, in its entirety, is available online and takes 23 minutes to watch. He did not fail to denounce Nazis and racists.

An account of events in Charlottesville is also taking shape. Mr. Trump feels he has been treated unfairly. Guess what? That’s politics. Your opponents aren’t required to give you a break. Outsmart them. President Obama would have spoken carefully, starting with: Though we don’t have all the facts, one thing Americans can agree about is that Nazi ideology and racial hatred are offensive to American ideals. CONTINUE AT SITE

As readers may know from my various articles over the years on the Holocaust, Nazis and neo-Nazis, there is no group that I believe are more repellent than right-wing fascists. President Trump was wrong not immediately to condemn in an unambiguous way the 200 or so ultra right-wing white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville 10 days ago.

But I have also long campaigned against the hateful human rights abuses in left-wing regimes from North Korea to Venezuela, and in addition have pointed out the anti-Semitism of leftists in many countries, including some in America. On this dispatch list I have also highlighted far-left rallies in Europe in recent years where placards showing Stars of David turned into swastikas have been on display.

Below, I attach three articles in left-leaning publications (The Forward, Haaretz, and The Atlantic) from recent days, noting the dangers of left-wing anti-Semitism.

Indeed many of the threats against American Jewish institutions made earlier this year, wrongly attributed to Trump supporters, were carried out by a left-wing journalist (Juan Thompson), and a deranged self-hating Jew.

SHARING THE SAME METHODS AND ATTITUDES

From Haaretz:

The far left’s presumption to be the only true opponent of the far right hides the fact it share the same methods and attitudes to the media and democracy

They hate the police and the government. Put no trust in the mainstream media or the financial system. They’re in favor of limiting freedom of speech, outlawing what’s “dangerous” or “offensive.” They condone political violence (though they call it “protecting the community” or “direct action”).

On foreign policy, they are fans of Vladimir Putin, Assad’s regime and Iran. Generally, they’re fine with most dictators. They oppose free trade agreements, abhor NATO and if they’re European, the European Union as well. If they’re American, they didn’t vote for “corrupt” and “warmongering” Hillary Clinton.

Oh, and they don’t like most Jews (for whom they usually use labels like “Zionists,” “globalists,” “Soros financiers” and “Rothschild bankers” instead), and will accuse them of overusing the Holocaust for their own interests…

The far left’s presumption to be the only true opponents of the far right covers up the fact that it shares the same methods and attitudes to the media and democracy, believes in the same conspiracy theories.

IF ONE LINE captured the essence of Saturday’s Boston Common rally and counter-protest, it was a quote halfway through Mark Arsenault’s Page 1 story in the Boston Globe:

“‘Excuse me,’ one man in the counter-protest innocently asked a Globe reporter. ‘Where are the white supremacists?'”

As a police officer escorted a participant in the Boston Free Speech Rally away from the scene, a water bottle was flung at the man’s head.

That was the day in a nutshell. Participants in the “Boston Free Speech Rally” had been demonized as a troupe of neo-Nazis prepared to reprise the horror that had erupted in Charlottesville. They turned out to be a couple dozen courteous people linked by little more than a commitment to — surprise! — free speech.

The small group on the Parkman Bandstand threatened no one. One of the rally’s organizers, a 23-year-old libertarian named John Medlar, had insisted vigorously that its purpose was not to endorse white supremacy. “The rally I’m helping to organize is about promoting Free Speech as a COUNTER to political violence,” he had posted on Facebook. “There are NO WHITE SUPREMACISTS speaking at this rally.”

Indeed, nothing about the tiny rally, whose organizers had a permit, seemed in any way connected with bigotry or hatred. One of the speakers was Shiva Ayyadurai, an immigrant from India who is seeking the Republican nomination in next year’s US Senate race. As Ayyadurai spoke, his supporters held signs proclaiming “Black Lives Do Matter.”

But he and the others who gathered at the Parkman Bandstand had never stood a chance of competing with the rumor that neo-Nazis were coming to Boston. That toxic claim was irresponsibly fueled by Mayor Marty Walsh, who denounced the planned rally — “Boston does not want you here” — even though organizers were at pains to stress that they had no connection to Charlottesville’s racial agenda and intended to focus on the importance of free speech.

What happened on Saturday was both impressive and distressing.

A massive counter-protest, 40,000 strong, showed up to denounce a nonexistent cohort of racists. Boston deployed hundreds of police officers, who did an admirable job of maintaining order. Some of the counter-protesters screamed, cursed, or acted like thugs — at one point the Boston Police Department warned protesters “to refrain from throwing urine, bottles, and other harmful projectiles” — but most behaved appropriately. Though a few dozen punks were arrested, nobody was seriously hurt.

But free speech took a beating.

The speakers on the Common bandstand were kept from being heard. They were blocked off with a 225-foot buffer zone, and segregated beyond earshot. Police barred anyone from approaching to hear what the rally speakers had to say. Reporters were excluded, too.

Result: The free-speech rally took place in a virtual cone of silence. Its participants “spoke essentially to themselves for about 50 minutes,” the Globe reported. “If any of them said anything provocative, the massive crowd did not hear it.”

Even some of the rally’s own would-be attendees were kept from the bandstand. But when Police Commissioner Bill Evans was asked at a press conference Saturday afternoon whether it was right to treat them that way, he was unapologetic.

Joshua Witt just wanted lunch. But his haircut — which, if you see a crowd of young people, is perhaps the most common one you’ll find these days — has somehow become an identifier of white nationalism to the Left.

To the point that it was evidence enough for an Antifa thug to to attack the 26-year-old man:

Witt says he’d just pulled in to the parking lot of the Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colo., and was opening his car door.

“All I hear is, ‘Are you one of them neo-Nazis?’ as this dude is swinging a knife up over my car door at me,” he said.

“I threw my hands up and once the knife kind of hit, I dived back into my car and shut the door and watched him run off west, behind my car.

“The dude was actually aiming for my head,” he added.

Witt got three stitches to his wounded hand — and a profound desire to change hairstyles, which I can’t blame him for. Witt’s haircut:

President Trump inherited a mess in Afghanistan, so give him credit for heeding his generals and committing to more troops and a new strategy. His decision has risks, like all uses of military force, but it will prevent a rout of our allies in Kabul and allow more aggressive operations against jihadists who would be delighted to plan global attacks with impunity.

Also give him credit for explaining a matter of war and peace to the American people Monday in a serious, thoughtful speech. Barack Obama unveiled his Afghan strategy in a major speech in 2009 and then tried to forget about the place. Mr. Trump should continue making the case for his strategy in more than Twitter bursts.

The heart of the new strategy is a commitment linked not to any timeline but to “conditions” on the ground and the larger war on terror. “We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists,” he said, in a line that will resonate with his political base even if building the Afghan defense forces is part of the goal.

Mr. Obama’s great antiterror mistake was imposing political limits that made it harder to succeed. He did this in Afghanistan at the start of his surge when he put a timeline on withdrawal. And he did it at the end of his term when he refused to let U.S. forces target Taliban soldiers even when they were killing our Afghan allies.

Mr. Trump said he is also lifting “restrictions” from Washington on the rules of military engagement. This means going after jihadists of all stripes, and it gives the generals flexibility to inflict enough pain on the Taliban that they begin to doubt they can win. Mr. Trump didn’t commit to a specific number of troops, though some sources have suggested 4,000 in addition to the 8,400 currently there.

Those troops won’t turn the tide by themselves, but we hope Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has the flexibility to deploy what he needs. If the strategy includes more close-air support, medical evacuation capability, Apache attack helicopters and officers embedded at the battalion level with Afghan military units, the U.S. troops will boost the morale of Afghan forces who ultimately have to win the war.

Mr. Trump’s most significant shift—if he can follow through—is the challenge to Pakistan. “We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting,” he said. “But that will have to change, and that will change immediately.”

History shows that a key to defeating an insurgency is denying the kind of safe haven that Pakistan provides the Taliban and the closely allied Haqqani network. Mr. Trump’s implication is that Pakistan must help in Afghanistan or face a cutoff in U.S. aid and perhaps cross-border strikes against terrorists inside Pakistan. Pakistani military leaders have never taken such a U.S. threat seriously, and if they play the same double game Mr. Trump will have to show he means it.

The Taliban now control as much as 40% of Afghan territory. But if the U.S. and Afghan army can stabilize more of the country, while training more Afghans to be as effective as its special forces have become, a diminished Taliban threat is achievable. The Afghan government will also have to do its part by providing better governance. Taliban leaders will have to be killed, but its foot soldiers might decide over time they can live with the government in Kabul.

And what is the alternative? Senator Rand Paul and the isolationist right want a U.S. withdrawal. But as Mr. Trump explained, that could return Afghanistan to a jihadist playground. Mr. Trump would own the foreign-policy and political consequences as Mr. Obama did the rise of Islamic State after his retreat from Iraq. Opposition from Democrats now is also disingenuous given their silence as Mr. Obama pursued his losing strategy.

Erik Prince of Blackwater has proposed turning the Afghan duty over to mercenaries with experience in the country. But does anyone think the U.S. public would long support paying modern-day Hessians to fight, as the press corps highlights every mistaken use of force or alleged misuse of taxpayer funds? Democrats turned Blackwater into a dirty political word—unfairly, for the most part—even when it was working side by side with U.S. troops in Iraq.
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As Mr. Trump acknowledged, the U.S. public is wary of spending money on war without results. But Americans have also shown they will support commitments abroad for decades as long as casualties are low and they serve U.S. security interests. That’s true in South Korea, Europe and the Persian Gulf. The long war against jihadists will require similar commitments abroad.

Mr. Trump campaigned against overseas entanglements, but America’s foreign commitments can’t be abandoned without damaging consequences. Mr. Trump has now made his own political commitment to Afghanistan, and his job will be maintaining public support and congressional funding. These obligations go with the title of Commander-in-Chief.

Let’s say you’re a prosecutor in Washington. You are investigating a husband and wife, naturalized Americans, who you believe have scammed a federal credit union out of nearly $300,000. You catch them in several false statements about their qualifications for a credit line and their intended use of the money. The strongest part of your case, though, involves the schemers’ transferring the loot to their native Pakistan.

So . . . what’s the best evidence you could possibly have, the slam-dunk proof that their goal was to steal the money and never look back? That’s easy: One after the other, the wife and husband pulled up stakes and tried to high-tail it to Pakistan after they’d wired the funds there — the wife successfully fleeing, the husband nabbed as he was about to board his flight.

Well, here’s a peculiar thing about the Justice Department’s indictment of Imran Awan and Hina Alvi, the alleged fraudster couple who doubled as IT wizzes for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and many other congressional Democrats: There’s not a word in it about flight to Pakistan. The indictment undertakes to describe in detail four counts of bank-fraud conspiracy, false statements on credit applications, and unlawful monetary transactions, yet leaves out the most damning evidence of guilt.

In fact, the indictment appears to go out of its way not to mention it.

I’ll get back to that in a second. First, let’s recap. As I explained about three weeks ago, there is a very intriguing investigation of the Awan family. There are about six of them — brothers, spouses, and attached others — who were retained by various Democrats as computer-systems managers at compensation levels dwarfing that of the average congressional staffer. The Awans fell under suspicion in late 2016 and were canned at the beginning of February, on suspicion of mishandling the sensitive information to which they’d had access: scanning members’ e-mail, transferring files to remote servers under the Awans’ control, stealing computer equipment and hard drives (some of which they attempted to destroy when they were found out), along with a sideline in procurement fraud.

We should say that almost all of them were canned. Hina Alvi and her husband, Imran Awan, stayed on, even though they were no longer authorized to have access to the House computer system (i.e., to do the work they were hired to do). Alvi continued to be retained by Congressman Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, for another four weeks. During that time, we now know, she was tying up loose financial ends, packing her house up, and pulling three young daughters out of school — just before skedaddling to Pakistan.

Awan was kept on the payroll for about six more months by Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman, and Clinton insider. She finally fired him only after he was arrested at the airport right before a scheduled flight to Qatar, from whence he planned to join Alvi in Pakistan.

There are grounds to suspect blackmail, given (a) the staggering sums of money paid to the Awans over the years, (b) the sensitive congressional communications to which they had access, (c) the alleged involvement of Imran Awan and one of his brothers in a blackmail-extortion scheme against their stepmother, and (d) Wasserman Schultz’s months of protecting Awan and potentially impeding the investigation. There are also, of course, questions about stolen information. And there is, in addition, the question I raised a month ago: Why did the FBI and the Capitol Police allow Hina Alvi to leave the country on March 5 when there were grounds to arrest her at Dulles Airport? Why did they wait to charge her until last week — by which time she was safely in Pakistan, from which it will likely be impossible to extradite her for prosecution?

What, moreover, about Awan’s brothers and other apparent accomplices? What has become of them since they were fired by the House almost seven months ago?

Back to the Future

Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive — only to be despised the moment they dropped.

After unhinged emperors were finally killed off, the sycophantic Senate often proclaimed a damnatio memoriae (a “damnation of memory”). Prior commemoration was wiped away, thereby robbing the posthumous ogre of any legacy and hence any existence for eternity.

In more practical matters, there followed a concurrent abolitio memoriae (an “erasing of memory”). Specifically, moralists either destroyed or rounded up and put away all statuary and inscriptions concerning the bad, dead emperor. In the case of particularly striking or expensive artistic pieces, they erased the emperor’s name (abolitio nominis) or his face and some physical characteristics from the artwork.

Impressive marble torsos were sometimes recut to accommodate a more acceptable (or powerful) successor. (Think of something like the heads only of the generals on Stone Mountain blasted off and replaced by new carved profiles of John Brown and Nat Turner).

A Scary History

Without Leon Trotsky’s organizational and tactical genius, Vladimir Lenin might never have consolidated power among squabbling anti-czarist factions. Yet after the triumph of Stalin, “de-Trotskyization” demanded that every word, every photo, and every memory of an ostracized Trotsky was to be obliterated. That nightmarish process fueled allegorical themes in George Orwell’s fictional Animal Farm and 1984.

How many times has St. Petersburg changed its name, reflecting each generation’s love or hate or indifference to czarist Russia or neighboring Germany? Is the city always to remain St. Petersburg, or will it once again be anti-German Petrograd as it was after the horrific First World War? Or perhaps it will again be Communist Leningrad during the giddy age of the new man — as dictated by the morality and the politics of each new generation resenting its past? Is a society that damns its past every 50 years one to be emulated?

Abolition of memory is easy when the revisionists enjoy the high moral ground and the damned are evil incarnate. But more often, killing the dead is not an easy a matter of dragon slaying, as with Hitler or Stalin. Confederate General Joe Johnston was not General Stonewall Jackson and after the war General John Mosby was not General Wade Hampton, just as Ludwig Beck was not Joachim Peiper.

Stone Throwers and Their Targets

What about the morally ambiguous persecution of sinners such as the current effort in California to damn the memory of Father Junipero Serra and erase his eponymous boulevards, to punish his supposedly illiberal treatment of Native Americans in the early missions some 250 years ago?

California Bay Area zealots are careful to target Serra but not Leland Stanford, who left a more detailed record of his own 19th-century anti-non-white prejudices, but whose university brand no progressive student of Stanford would dare to erase, because doing so would endanger his own studied trajectory to the good life. We forget that there are other catalysts than moral outrage that calibrate the targets of abolitio memoriae.

Again, in the case of the current abolition of Confederate icons — reenergized by the Black Lives Matter movement and the general repulsion over the vile murders by cowardly racist Dylan Roof — are all Confederate statues equally deserving of damnation?

Does the statue of Confederate General James Longstreet deserve defacing? He was a conflicted officer of the Confederacy, a critic of Robert E. Lee’s, later a Unionist friend of Ulysses S. Grant, an enemy of the Lost Causers, and a leader of African-American militias in enforcing reconstruction edicts against white nationalists. Is Longstreet the moral equivalent of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (“get there firstest with the mostest”), who was the psychopathic villain of Fort Pillow, a near illiterate ante-bellum slave-trading millionaire, and the first head of the original Ku Klux Klan?

Were the 60–70 percent of the Confederate population in most secessionist states who did not own slaves complicit in the economics of slavery? Did they have good options to leave their ancestral homes when the war started to escape the stain of perpetuating slavery? Do such questions even matter to the new arbiters of ethics, who recently defiled the so-called peace monument in an Atlanta park — a depiction of a fallen Confederate everyman, his trigger hand stilled by an angel? How did those obsessed with the past know so little of history?

Key to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating strategy of marching through Georgia and the Carolinas was his decision to deliberately target the plantations and the homes of the wealthy, along with Confederate public buildings. Apparently Sherman believed that the plantation owners of the South were far more culpable than the poor non-slave-holding majority in most secessionist states. Sherman generally spared the property of non-slave owners, though they collectively suffered nonetheless through the general impoverishment left in Sherman’s wake.

In our race to rectify the past in the present, could Ken Burns in 2017 still make his stellar Civil War documentary, with a folksy and drawly Shelby Foote animating the tragedies of the Confederacy’s gifted soldiers sacrificing their all for a bad cause? Should progressives ask Burns to reissue an updated Civil War version in which Foote and southern “contextualizers” are left on the cutting room floor?