RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/how_secret_soviet_killings_led_to_covid_tyranny.html

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears.  Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved.  She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris.  She’d told doctors she suspected she’d been poisoned.  Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her.

For Soviet émigrés of the time, the empty stage, the melancholic music, and the spotlight sans performer were poignant symbols of the hundreds of thousands of “liternoye” killings — secret, disguised liquidations staged as natural deaths or suicides — ordered by Joseph Stalin.  His targets were not just rivals in the USSR, but also dissident writers, intellectuals, artists, and performers living abroad.  In fact, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, while Stalin was carrying out purges in the USSR, the émigré community witnessed several mysterious deaths and disappearances.

Stalin worked by the dictum “communism must eliminate what it cannot control.”  “Liternoye” killings were different from the genocides and massacres he oversaw: the liquidation of kulaks, the Holodomor — deaths caused by famine-related decisions in Ukraine — and the purge of nationalities.  Unlike those, “liternoye” killings resulted in deaths from seemingly natural causes.  They would be followed by hasty disposal of bodies and either advantageous glorification (as for  Lenin, a presumed victim of Stalin) or damnatio memoriae (complete erasure from the records and history).  Quite often, hard-to-detect poisons and bioweapons were used for these murders.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-708406

They met on January 20, 1942, at a luxury villa on park-like grounds overlooking Lake Wannsee, a recreation site a half-hour’s drive from Berlin. Built by a wealthy industrialist, the villa was now held by an SS foundation. They were 15 top Nazi officials – among them nine lawyers and eight with doctorates. In that idyllic setting, in a meeting that lasted 90 minutes, they decided the “Jewish question” – how to deport 11 million people to labor camps and kill any who survived. If they differed, it was on the details. Never on the intent – mass murder.

Holocaust expert Peter Longerich’s illuminating book Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution begins by describing the meeting on that wintry day. The description brings out Nazi cynicism and cold-bloodedness: convening at a pleasure spot to plan genocide. Longerich draws on the only remaining record of the meeting: the “minutes” prepared and distributed by Adolf Eichmann with instructions for destruction after review. 

One minister disobeyed, and his copy was discovered by the US Army in 1945. The document summarizes the main lines of discussion and the decisions reached; it estimates Jewish populations in 30 countries, sets out specific territories where fit Jews should be made to work in labor gangs subjected to “natural wastage”; and it says survivors would be disposed of in an unspecified manner.

The participants at the Wannsee Conference, called by Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, broadly represented all facets of the Reich. They did not actually initiate the Holocaust; it had already been haphazardly set in motion by disparate factions of the Nazi machinery. What they achieved was consensus. Those horrified by plans for exterminating Jews were pressured into compliance as evidence of their commitment to the Nazi goal of purifying the German volk.

Reichstag president Hermann Göring had made Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), directly responsible for the “Final Solution.” But even before the Wannsee Conference, deportations had begun, at Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s behest, in October 1941. The first death camps had already been built. Agencies of the Reich were carrying out uncoordinated campaigns of mass murder and competing to propose radical solutions. The conference defined “Jewishness” for the Nazis’ base purposes, decided on what to do with half-Jews, and created an RSHA-led master plan for eliminating Jews. It channeled intention into a systematic extermination program.

Right from the time they came to power in 1933, the Nazis instituted discriminatory policies to remove Jews from public life, boycott their businesses, impose curfews on them, force them into labor, and harass, humiliate, intimidate and exploit them. Enacted in 1935 and imposed the next year, the Nuremberg Laws included statutes that forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and decreed that only those of pure German blood were eligible to be citizens of the Reich.

According to Longerich’s book, the conference should be seen in the context of two significant factors: the outbreak of the Second World War and the rivalry between Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, another architect of the Holocaust.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/31/confronting-conformity-and-collectivism-with-david-mamet/

EXCERPTS

Leftist film and theater critics (are there really any other kind?) have had a hard time accepting Mamet’s political views, yet they’re caught in their own “Catch-22,” an existential condition that plagues every leftist. They can’t help but admire Mamet’s work and see the significance of it, yet they issue disclaimers upon disclaimers about how it’s “unfortunate” and “sad” that Mamet has lost his political way. It’s a hallmark of a leftist pseudo-intellectual to “gift” the conservative with a heap of pity and condescension in an effort to induce an apology and contrition from the said conservative.

Today, American culture is even more dismantled. With Barack Obama, America started to put all of these academic theories into practice, and now, political correctness has reached another level of absurdity. In his typical style (a blend of cultural analysis, memoir, and drama), Mamet explores the current social and political predicament in Recessional: the Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. He touches upon many subjects: media, Judaism, wokeness, Donald Trump, literature, and inevitably, COVID. The political game has changed and Mamet is fully aware of this. The book is not so much an argument against leftism (since categories of “Left” and “Right” have changed or in some cases, been erased) as it is a way to bring down conformity, collectivism, and mediocrity. These three components are what drive Mamet’s thoughts, implicitly and explicitly.

The problem of culture is not simply political, claims Mamet, but also religious. He’s not saying that everyone needs to find God, hitting us over our heads with a two-by-four, but the Jewish tradition from which he bases his beliefs clearly guides his thoughts and analysis. He’s rightfully aware that what is causing much of the chaos in our world is man’s refusal to see perennial aspects of human nature. We are fallen beings, and in many ways (as Qohelet/Ecclesiastes tells us) “What has been will be again/what has been done will be done again;/there is nothing new under the sun.” Some people have no humility and seek false idols so they can worship them and feel better about their own mediocrity and inadequacies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/13/western-civ-has-got-to-stay/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from Mr. Murray’s new book The War on the West.

Our hemispheric tradition should contemplate itself before continuing the suicide

It is now over 30 years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protesters at Stanford University with the chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University’s introductory humanities program “Western Culture.” They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it was what happened next that was so striking. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of Western culture with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilization has met with sustained hostility, ridicule, and even violence. Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime minister John Howard, has had great trouble finding any universities to partner with. And that tells us something about the speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilization was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_thrill_and_terror_of_the_world_on_the_brink_of_world_war_ii.html

The mood in the U.S. during the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany could have been personified in Charles Lindbergh, America’s aviation hero of those times. An antisemite, he admired German efficiency and felt that America shouldn’t waste its resources helping Britain battle the Nazis.  Ordinary Americans, too, were focused not on Hitler, but on the domestic economy.  The shadow of the Great Depression was looming.   Why sacrifice blood and treasure to save Europe?  A negotiated peace with Hitler was acceptable.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took first took office in 1933 and held four terms until his death in 1945, knew that the U.S. must actively engage in international affairs.  But he was restricted by the isolationist sentiment saturating the nation.  And since he needed congressional support for his domestic New Deal policies, FDR was wary of going against the grain.  In the mid-1930s, however, tensions increased as German invasions began.  With war clouds gathering over Europe, the need for U.S. involvement became apparent.

In Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler, David McKean presents a gripping, well documented history of America’s turnaround — from watching from the sidelines to fighting the Nazi evil.  FDR’s decisions were influenced by his ambassadors in five capitals: Breckinridge Long in Rome; William Bullitt in Moscow, and later Paris; Joseph P. Kennedy in London; and William Dodd in Berlin.  As was customary, FDR rewarded friends and campaign contributors with such appointments.  But he was aware of their strengths and foibles and tempered their reports with his astute judgment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-generation-grows-up-is-one-smart-book/

There is a sense abroad that generational change has placed the essentials of our constitutional system and its supporting culture at risk. Many Millennials — the generation now in their 20s and 30s — have soured, not only on fundamentals like freedom of speech, but on the American story as such. Various writers have tried to make sense of this disturbing cultural shift. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt highlight a certain style of parenting. Mary Eberstadt explores the implications of family decline. Now, Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, adds some crucial missing pieces to the puzzle. His focus — social media and education — may seem well-worn, but you’ve never seen them approached like this.

I’ll get to substance, but first I want to address the striking tone of the book. Although the work is well-documented and thoughtfully argued, the overall feel is singular and unconventional. There is something “prophetic” about this book. I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of “predicting the future,” although Bauerlein’s 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, to which this is a follow-up, did in fact foresee, against the then-reigning idealization of the Millennials, many of the problems they’re experiencing today.

No, I mean that Bauerlein’s willingness to openly and uncompromisingly confront, and in a sense denounce face to face, America’s young — as well as the Boomer mentors who failed them — has the ring of the biblical prophets about it. After publishing The Dumbest Generation, Bauerlein was invited by many colleges and universities to address their students (and professors) in person. After taking his audiences to task for devoting more attention to selfies and “likes” than to serious history and art, Bauerlein would often find himself booed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/an_awakening_conservatives_vs_progressives.html

George C. Leef has written a wonderful, definitive book that lays out the difference between self-identified progressives and conservatives.  The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time is a fictionalized narrative about a Washington Post journalist — a progressive leftist, of course — who is chosen to write an official biography of the first female president, Patricia Farnsworth.  The facts of this woman’s eight years in office are essentially the Obama/Biden two terms in all but name.  Their destructive policies, briefly interrupted by the successful presidency of Donald Trump, are all in play again.  The Supreme Court has been packed.  Offending statues have been duly destroyed.  Riots and protests are endemic, often staged for political purposes.  Opponents of the left have been virtually silenced.  The book feels as though it was written in just the past few weeks, so accurate are the devastating consequences of progressive policies Americans are enduring under Biden.

Van Arsdale is at first thrilled at the opportunity to write about the woman she has long considered heroic.  She has written numerous columns celebrating Farnsworth’s policies, implemented to transform America without regard for the Constitution.  Both women pride themselves on their successful gambits that have destroyed opponents and won elections.  Farnsworth even brags about having ballots ready to submit if needed.  Arsdale is selected because she is particularly skilled at constructing progressive narratives to go with any event, policy, or disaster without letting facts get in her way.  She has fully embraced the dictates of gender and identity politics.  She knows how to slant any story, how to obscure inconvenient facts in order to make any column suitably progressive.  As a lover of classical music, she attends concerts in disguise because, among her friends and colleagues, classical music is “problematic” since most composers were white.  She would have heartily supported the We See You White American Theater manifesto.  Shakespeare is also “problematic.”