RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/columns/natan-sharansky-and-the-meaning-of-freedom/

Life lessons from the dissident, politician, and activist.

Natan Sharansky has been a computer scientist, a chess player, a refusenik, a dissident, a political prisoner, a party leader, a government minister, a nonprofit executive, and a bestselling author. He never expected to be a school counselor.

But the coronavirus dashes expectations. In early March, when the virus began to appear in Jewish communities outside New York City, Sharansky found himself online, in an unaccustomed position. He began to share with students and parents whose schools were closed how he had coped during years in confinement.“At first, it seemed absurd, even obscene,” Sharansky writes in his latest book, Never Alone, coauthored with the historian Gil Troy. “How could my experience of playing chess in my head in my punishment cell compare to being cooped up in gadget-filled homes wired to the internet — with computer chess — especially because this isolation is imposed to protect people, not break them?”

What Sharansky realized is that the costs of lockdowns do not depend on the reasons behind them. The sudden and seemingly arbitrary interruption of individual plans, movements, and relationships causes psychological harm. Sharansky recorded a brief YouTube video for the Jewish Agency — you can watch it here — offering his five tips for quarantine. Recognize the importance of your choices and behavior, Sharansky advised. Understand that some things are beyond your control. Keep laughing. Enjoy your hobbies. Consider yourself part of a larger cause.

“Surprisingly,” Sharansky writes, “this short clip went viral, reaching so many people all over the world within a few days that it made me wonder why even bother writing this book.” His reaction was another example of his droll and often self-deprecating wit. The video, however helpful it may be, does not match the power and wisdom of Never Alone. Part autobiography, part meditation on Jewish community, the book ties together the themes of Sharansky’s earlier work, from his prison memoir, Fear No Evil (1988), to his defense of cultural particularity, Defending Identity (2008). It is a moving story of emancipation and connection, of freedom and meaning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/unmasking-antifa-mark-tapson/

The other day on Facebook a friend posted something critical of the domestic terror group known as Antifa, and someone came to its defense by echoing Clueless Joe Biden’s recent, bizarre declaration that Antifa is not an organization but “an idea.”

It is true that Antifa is not an organization in the strict sense, but Biden’s vague description is either stunningly uninformed or a weak attempt to deflect criticism from its masked militant members. I’m betting on the latter, because Democrat leaders have been curiously reluctant to condemn Antifa’s strategy of violence and intimidation toward the purportedly “fascist” supporters of President Trump.

To educate the Facebook commenter and Biden supporter who believes Antifa actually opposes fascism, I recommended the new book Unmasking Antifa: Five Perspectives on a Growing Threat, edited by the Center for Security Policy and featuring FrontPage Mag contributor Matthew Vadum, because there is no better dissection of the origins, nature, tactics, and aims of this anarchic “idea” and its dangerous adherents than this compact exposé.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/obamas-reason-hate-lloyd-billingsley/

In his new book A Promised Land, former president Obama claims he sought “a broader struggle for a fair, just and generous society.” That quest brought criticisms including: “how whites avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes. How this left Black people with a psychic burden, expected to constantly swallow legitimate anger and frustration in the name of some far-off ideal.” This recalls a theme from the author’s first book.

“Black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”

Thus spake the poet “Frank” in Dreams from My Father. Frank is giving advice to young Barry, about to leave Hawaii for Occidental College in Los Angeles. As Frank warns, “They’ll train you so good you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

After Dreams from My Father was published in 1995, the author acknowledged that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, still identified as a black journalist and poet. Davis was also a longtime Communist Party activist on the FBI’s security index. When the Dreams author became a rising star in politics, Davis disappeared from the audio version of the book and made no appearance in The Audacity of Hope.

That book mentioned David Axelrod, who in 2007 had been proclaimed “Obama’s narrator” by the New York Times. The next year, the Dreams author became president and set about transforming the United States. As Paul Kengor documented in The Communist, the domestic agenda of the Dreams author bore striking similarities to the views of Frank Marshall Davis. In 2015, Davis did not appear in David Axelrod’s massive Believer, which still proved enlightening on racial themes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/covid-19s-catastrophic-pandemic-fear-andrew-harrod/

“We’ve had severe viral pandemics over the years, but this was the first pandemic of panic” with COVID-19, write the authors of the new book, The Price of Panic:  How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.  This insightful, lucid work carefully exposes how global elites in academia, media, and politics responded to the latest coronavirus outbreak with botched societal cures truly worse than the disease.  

“The global response to COVID-19 vastly exceeded that to any other pandemic in history,” note the trio of Biola University biology professor Douglas Axe, statistician William M. Briggs, and Catholic University professor Jay W. Richards.  They detail the devastation of unprecedented lockdowns worldwide; for example, United Nations World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley has warned that disrupted food supply chains could cause 300,000 deaths daily.  “Never before had scores of countries around the world chosen to perform such economic harakiri in unison,” resulting in epidemic ravaging of wealth and health, like increased suicides.

The initial impetus for these socioeconomic plagues came from academic epidemiological models that “were so wrong they were like shots in the dark,” the authors note.  They focus in particular on studies from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation (IHME) and the “single, untested, apocalyptic model from Imperial College London” (ICL).  The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) then promoted the Imperial College projections of 40 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide.  

“We’re shocked that anybody believed these astounding numbers,” the authors respond.  The ICL model entailed the “shocking but bogus claim that 3.4 percent of coronavirus infections were fatal,” while the “2018–19 flu had a case mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.”  Accordingly, the Imperial College model predicted that COVID-19 would effectively equal the notorious 1918 Spanish flu, which killed between 18 and 58 million.

In reality, the author’s statistical source, Worldometer, counted 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths on November 12, hardly a historically unprecedented loss given other little-noticed viral outbreaks.  WHO estimates that perhaps 650,000 die annually from flu-linked illness in a bad flu season.  The 1968–1969 Hong Kong flu also killed between 1-2 million people.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/politics-and-pulitzers-bruce-bawer/

Three decades ago, I spent about a year on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. A year was enough. The NBCC’s principal activity was awarding annual prizes, and each member of the board belonged to a committee devoted to choosing that year’s winning book in one category or another. I was on the criticism committee. The job involved reading dozens of books, whole boxfuls of them – although in most cases glancing at a few pages was enough to justify tossing a volume aside and moving on to the next – and, in consultation with the other committee members, picking five finalists for the entire board to vote on.

That year, two books stood out for me as prizeworthy. One was Camille Paglia’s magnum opus Sexual Personae, which impressed me with its quirky brilliance. Almost every page contained a provocative assertion worth pausing over and pondering. When it came to the point in the process at which the entire board crowded around a large table to pronounce on the books selected by the various committees, it was these assertions, these bold statements, that got Paglia in trouble: one member after another, when it came to be his or her turn to comment on Paglia’s book, had already selected a specific sentence, which he or she would read out aloud, outraged at its utter lack of political correctness, and then say something to the effect: “We can’t give a prize to a book that includes that!”

My other favorite that year in the same category was Shelby Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character, which brought common sense to the dialogue about race in America. That book drew some flak too, because it challenged decades of received wisdom, but after intense debate, Steele won, and I was honored to present him with his prize at the awards ceremony. Although not everybody on the board was thrilled with Steele’s message, they did welcome the opportunity to give an award to a black person. Being able to do so was considered extremely important. Indeed, when we got around to debating poetry books – a category on which roughly half of the board members simply excused themselves (“pass!”), explaining that they didn’t feel comfortable pronouncing on contemporary poetry – there was one potential finalist with a simple English surname, which meant he was probably either a WASP or black. This was pre-Internet, of course, so it wasn’t easy to find out such things, but it was quickly agreed that we had to determine the author’s race before voting on the nomination.

That experience with the NBCC taught me a few lessons. The main one was that political correctness, even then, made a big, big deal.