RUTHFULLY YOURS

Have you noticed that men in frocks and women with whiskers are making the news all over the place? Well one thing you probably won’t read in all the adulatory coverage of Caitlyn Jenner’s “bravery” is that the US hospital which pioneered sex-change surgery now refuses to perform it
Among the issues guaranteed to draw a volcanic eruption from the politically correct is the free and open discussion than transgenderism. Indeed, to talk these days about transgenderism other than lavish and unqualified praise for those who abandon the gender of their births is to invite the label of mean-minded bigot.

Caitlyn Jenner’s apotheosis from suffering patriarch of the Kardashian clan to the newly inaugurated Queen of the trans movement marks a fresh high-water mark for trans-mania. At the start of April this year, Caitlyn was a father, former Olympian and sordid reality TV star. Now, just over eight months later, Caitlyn has been crowned ‘Woman of the Year.’ Should you want to offer anything other than gushing adulation for Caitlyn’s putative heroism, expect to be exiled from polite society.

This is why it was so amusing when last week Germaine Greer, normally a stalwart of the left, bluntly confront the First Commandment of transgenderism: Thous shalt not deny that gender is ‘fluid.’

Here’s what she said:

Just because you lop off your d— it doesn’t make you a woman… a man who get his d*** chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat, but that won’t turn me into a f***ing cocker spaniel.

“In the end, one can say this: Snyder’s obfuscating and half-baked “discoveries” about the Holocaust do further harm to a field of study already disfigured by the work of emissaries of one school or another, not to mention outright deniers. His book will not be the last such venture in misguided interpretation—the varieties are unlimited—but it will lengthen the time needed to repair the damage.”

No author of books on Eastern Europe during the period of World War II and the Holocaust has been more widely reviewed and discussed in recent years than Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. In Bloodlands (2010), Snyder presented what might be termed a Polish-Ukrainian version of the Holocaust, highlighting the brutality of Nazi rule over the countries of Eastern Europe—the “bloodlands” between Germany and Soviet Russia—and the horrific toll in lives, especially Polish lives, taken by the two battling powers.

Now, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder deals mostly with the mass murder of Jews, ascribing greater responsibility than have other historians to the early work of the Nazi SS killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) operating in occupied Eastern Europe, but also memorializing those who helped to save Jewish lives in Poland after the 1939 invasion and partition of that country by the twin forces of Nazi Germany and the USSR. Indeed, the book, which is based to a considerable extent on the stories of individual survivors, centers like the previous one mainly on Poland, and to a lesser extent on the three Baltic states. There is little here on the fate of Jewish communities in other European countries, most of whom were transported to their deaths in Poland. Nor, despite its subtitle—“The Holocaust as History and Warning”—is Black Earth properly seen as another history of the Holocaust. It is instead a new interpretation, and one with some startling arguments to advance.

“Mr. Obama will do none of this. Instead he will send out Messrs. Kerry and Blinken to assert that U.S. retreat is really success, that Russian advances are really defeat, and that five years of war will soon yield to peace because Mr. Obama believes against all Syrian evidence that the arc of history bends his way.”

So the U.S. government that was surprised by Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Crimea, surprised by his invasion of eastern Ukraine, surprised by his plan to sell S-300 missiles to Iran, and surprised by his intervention in Syria now thinks the Russian strongman will sue for peace in Syria on U.S. terms and oust Bashar Assad.

“Russia’s intervention is a powerful example of the law of unintended consequences,” said Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a security conference in Bahrain this weekend. “It will have two primary effects. First, it will increase Russia’s leverage over Assad. But second, it will increase the conflict’s leverage over Russia. And that in turn creates a compelling incentive for Russia to work for, not against, a political transition.”

Secretary of State John Kerry’s right-hand man even used a Vietnam War-era word to describe Mr. Putin’s supposed predicament: “The quagmire will spread and deepen, drawing Russia further in.”