RUTHFULLY YOURS

Had you happened by a cave outside a certain kibbutz in British Palestine in late 1941, you would have been startled to find a small group of Nazi soldiers singing German songs by firelight under swastika flags. This wasn’t an advance unit of a Wehrmacht invasion force, though at the time the Afrika Korps wasn’t far away. It was the “German Section,” an outfit run by the British Special Operations Executive and the Palmach, the Jewish militia, and its members were German Jews who could pass for “Aryans.” Their job would be sabotage and subterfuge after the arrival of the German army in Palestine, which seemed imminent.

General Rommel and his Afrika Korps never got to Palestine, of course, so the German Section was never activated. But the image of those Jewish soldiers in Nazi uniform—young men forced from Germany because they weren’t Germans who then became useful because they were Germans—came back to me as I read Bruce Henderson’s Sons and Soldiers. Henderson tells the parallel story of a group of young Jews who barely escaped the Third Reich, reached a new homeland in America, and ended up putting their former identities and languages at the service of the U.S. Army as combat interrogators in Europe.

Before deploying as Americans to fight their former countrymen, Henderson writes, the soldiers passed through a U.S. Army intelligence installation in rural Maryland that included a mock German village and a theater for propaganda training, including staged Nazi rallies. Drawing their name from the strange base, Camp Ritchie, the soldiers became known—to the extent that they’re known (I’d never heard of them before reading this book)—as the Ritchie Boys.

Henderson introduces us to interrogators such as Werner Angress, who fled Germany as a scared teenager and returned from the sky with the 82nd Airborne. We meet Victor Brombert, whose family fled Germany for France after the rise of the Nazis and then had to keep running. He ended up returning to the Paris neighborhood of his youth in 1944 as a soldier in Patton’s army. When Brombert went looking for a girl he’d loved, he was told her fate in one word: Déportée.

With its population of soldiers of different nationalities preparing for the different battlefields of the world war, Camp Ritchie was a haven for Americans with strange backgrounds and accents, “a cacophony of foreign languages.” But military life wasn’t all friendly: Angress, for example, while still in a regular U.S. infantry regiment, spent time in something called an “alien detachment” because of his German identity, along with other foreigners denied weapons and relegated to cleaning latrines. “At night,” Henderson writes, “drunken soldiers coming back from town would curse loudly at them, calling them ‘Nazi pigs’ and worse.”

Reviews of Ron Chernow’s Grant omit the fact that this lengthy biography includes only one paragraph about the former President’s trip to the Holy Land in 1878 and that it is a misleading one. It implies that the only Jews there were in Jerusalem and that they were little more than beggars.

The reviewer follows suit. (Of course, Grant’s primary mission was not to visit and study the various Jewish communities there.) But, for some reason, Chernow omits an event of probable interest to many readers.

Finding that most of what is now the central area of Israel was almost entirely unpopulated, bleak, and consisting mainly of sand, Grant and his traveling companion, journalist John Russel Young, investigated what they were traveling over and determined that beneath the sand was fertile soil.

They both agreed that the area would be flourishing farmland if Americans had come there. This great development, of course, came very shortly afterwards with the arrival of Zionist Jews. Young’s contemporaneous accounts were printed in the American press as the trip proceeded.

His detailed, two-volume description of Grant’s worldwide tour was published soon after the two adventurers returned to the U.S. It is still in print and remarkably relevant to today’s headlines, e.g., China’s claims to Japanese islands.

Admiration for Princeton professor Glen Warren Bowersock’s distinguished career and great learning inspired a reverent anticipation as I took up his latest book, ‘The Crucible of Islam’, which professes to examine the origins of that creed. Alas, that reverence was grossly misplaced.

The Crucible of Islam
by Glen Warren Bowersock
Harvard, 2017, 220 pages, US$25
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Glen Warren Bowersock, now eighty-one years of age, is by any measure one of the West’s most distinguished scholars of classical civilisation. His chosen field, from the start, was the history of the ancient Mediterranean world: Greece, Rome and the Near East. He is a prize-winning graduate of Harvard (1957) and Oxford (1959, as a Rhodes Scholar). His doctorate, at Oxford (1962) was on Augustus and the Greek world. He has served as lecturer in Ancient History at Balliol, Magdalen and New colleges, Oxford (1960–62), Professor of Classics and History at Harvard (1962–80) and was Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University from 1980 until his retirement in 2006. He is the author of over a dozen books and has published over 400 articles on Greek, Roman and Near Eastern history and culture as well as the classical tradition.

The list of his honours is long and impressive and the titles of his books and the number of his scholarly articles are alike the stuff of open-mouthed awe on the part of any aspiring student of classical civilisation. They include a book based on his doctoral dissertation, Augustus and the Greek World (1965), Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (1969), Julian the Apostate (1978), Roman Arabia (1983), Gibbon’s Historical Imagination (1988), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999), Interpreting Late Antiquity (2001), Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (2006), Lorenzo Valla: On the Donation of Constantine (edition and translation, 2007), From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition (2009) and The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (2013).

This is a wonderful body of work and an indication of what our best universities in the West have been able to produce, even if all too many of our students in the twenty-first century read very little of it. Having read several of Professor Bowersock’s earlier works, not least his recent and fascinating study of pre-Islamic Arabia and Christian Ethiopia, The Throne of Adulis, I was prompted to buy and read at once his latest offering, The Crucible of Islam. I was dismayed, therefore, to discover that something strange has happened to the great scholar, leading to some startling, basic errors of history and an approach to his subject that would have astonished Edward Gibbon, whose “historical imagination” had exercised Bowersock in his prime. I had expected mature insights and fresh perspectives from this book, concise though it is, at only 220 pages. Instead, I found myself astonished by its errors and omissions and recoiling from its deference to Islam.

We might anchor a reflection on Bowersock’s writing about the origins of Islam in the famous remarks by Gibbon himself, in the fiftieth and fifty-first chapters of his celebrated history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He makes the sardonic remark that:

The birth of Mohammed was fortunately placed in the most degenerate and disorderly period of the Persians, the Romans and the barbarians of Europe: the empires of Trajan, or even of Constantine or Charlemagne, would have repelled the assault of the naked Saracens, and the torrent of fanaticism might have been obscurely lost in the sands of Arabia.

James O’Keefe is one of the most controversial and consequential figures in American media. Using hidden cameras and microphones, he has engineered a series of undercover investigations that have toppled powerful figures, sparked legal reforms – and generated a torrent of criticism: Tough appraisals in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere have portrayed the 33-year-old as an unethical right-wing activist who seeks to legitimize his work by claiming it is journalism.

Now O’Keefe is getting his say in a new book, “American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.” In it he presents himself as a modern-day Mike Wallace and his organization, Project Veritas, as a “60 Minutes” for the digital age. In the following excerpt, he argues that the failings of the mainstream media have made his brand of citizen journalism necessary. And he offers brief sketches of some of Project Veritas’s top exposés, before its most recent: Twitter employees describing the hiding of users’ tweets, based on content, without notifying them.

All Points Books/St. Martin’s Press

Why the Veritas Journalist Exists

The mission of Project Veritas is “to investigate and expose institutional waste, fraud, abuse, and other misconduct in order to create a more ethical and transparent society.” This is not inherently a political mission. If our objective were to advance a political agenda, as journalists on both sides have admitted doing, we would have to reinforce that agenda time after time with editorial content. We don’t. We move on. We do not put words in our subjects’ mouths. We cannot create a reality where there is none. If we have any motivation at all, it is to hold the media and administrative state accountable. Not inherently “right wing” or “left wing,” we work the opportunities the major media choose to ignore.

No ordinary American advocates for general waste, fraud, and abuse. No politician does either. That does not stop the political class from practicing—indeed perfecting—all of the above. So mired are so many lawmakers and administrators in everyday abuses that the Trumpian word “swamp” seems altogether appropriate to describe the contemporary deep state. For many of the swamp dwellers, the Constitution is not a guide but an obstacle. Without the journalist’s external light—and lots of light day after day, night after night—the swamp will not be drained.

During 1940, three of the most significant Zionist leaders in the world – Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben Gurion , all visited the United States , hoping to gain a measure of American Jewish support or US government support for the creation of a Jewish army to help fight the Nazis. Rick Richman’s new book, Racing Against History, provides an interesting and very carefully researched history of these visits, the leaders’ goals, what they accomplished, and what prevented greater success. Richman’s book is a fascinating look at a moment in time, different seemingly from our own, but with some of the same issues.

Many fewer people are aware today of Jabotinsky than of Weizmann or Ben Gurion. Richman provides an illuminating portrait of this exceptional Jewish leader and his work, which will serve as an introduction for many. Nearly 40 years after Jabotinsky’s death, Menachem Begin became the first Israeli Prime Minister whose politics were rooted in his vision.

In World War 1, the British had allowed the creation of a Jewish legion, 15,000 strong, that had fought on their side in various places, with Jabotinsky having a leadership military role. Weizmann, a highly respected British chemist with many British government contacts, parlayed the Jewish help for Britain in the war to gain support for creation of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine, laid out in the Balfour Declaration, and eventually leading to the British mandate for Palestine between the wars.

Editor’s Note: The following piece originally appeared in the December 31, 2017, issue of National Review.

One day in December 2010, a policewoman in a small and rather humdrum town in Tunisia slapped the face of Mohamed Bouazizi. The dispute was over his permit to be selling fruit and vegetables off a barrow. The injustice that he encountered, and the humiliation, drove the poor man to take his life. Just as a butterfly fluttering its wings is supposed to cause a cascade of faraway atmospheric effects, this suicide set off a movement of protest and solidarity in one Arab country after another. The monarchies and republics in which Arabs live are, in reality, dictatorships, and the time had apparently arrived for them to reform and take their place in what was supposed to be an emerging worldwide democratic order.

What became known as the Arab Spring did not live up to these expectations; far from it. Since 2010, Arab countries have suffered civil war, coups, terrorism, invasion by foreign powers, genocide, the sale of women in slave markets, the ruin of historic cities and monuments, the death of civilians by the hundreds of thousands, and the flight of refugees in their millions. The rise of the Islamic State, self-described as a caliphate, redesigned the boundaries of Syria and Iraq, countries that may not be reconstituted for a very long time, if ever. Islamist volunteers in this misappropriated territory murdered, beheaded, crucified, or tortured to death, often in public, whomever they pleased. Libya, Yemen, and Lebanon are also states in varying stages of collapse. A whole civilization seems to be coming apart.

The proper human response to such calamity is that something ought to be done about it. Elliott Abrams takes it for granted in Realism and Democracy: Foreign Policy after the Arab Spring that the United States can and should come to the rescue. His career has given him authority to comment on matters of power politics. In the Reagan administration, he was assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs (1981–85) and assistant secretary for inter-American affairs (1985–89); he later served as President George W. Bush’s adviser for global democracy strategy (2005–09). His sympathies are very wide, his quotations from the academic literature are numerous and apt, and his prose is almost miraculously jargon-free.

In 1929, Benito Mussolini boasted, “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.”

This is the first in a series of essays on the life and thought of Friedrich A. Hayek.

Of course, Mussolini was wrong about his historical priority, just as he was wrong about most other things. The palm for first promulgating that principle in all its modern awfulness must go to V. I. Lenin, who back in 1917 boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.”

What Lenin didn’t know about “restricting the freedom of the individual” wasn’t worth knowing.

Granted, things didn’t work out quite as Lenin hoped—or said that he hoped—since as the Soviet Union lumbered on there was less and less work and mostly worthless pay. (“They pretend to pay us,” one wag said, “and we pretend to work.”) Really, the only equality Lenin and his heirs achieved was an equality of misery and impoverishment for all but a shifting fraction of the nomenklatura. Trotsky got right to the practical nub of the matter, observing that when the state is the sole employer the old adage “he who does not work does not eat” is replaced by “he who does not obey does not eat.”

Nevertheless, a long line of Western intellectuals came, saw, and were conquered: how many bien-pensants writers, journalists, artists, and commentators swooned as did Lincoln Steffens: “I have been over into the future,” he said of his visit to the Soviet Union in 1921, “and it works.” Jeremy Corbyn updated the sentiment when, in 2013, he said that Hugo Chavez “showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice and it’s something Venezuela has made a big step towards.”

Yes, Jeremy, it has. And how do you like it? Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is remarkable what a large accumulation of egg-shells we have piled up over the last century. (And then there is always Orwell’s embarrassing question: “Where’s the omelet?”)