RUTHFULLY YOURS

Posted: November 6, 2018https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/lust-for-destruction/

Journalist Victor Sebestyen’s Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror is a fast-paced, absorbing new biography of one of history’s greatest revolutionaries—or, if you share my perspective, political mass murderers. Scrupulously researched and vividly written, it is the first major new biography of Vladimir Lenin in 20 years and makes extensive use of the archival materials that have become available in that time. It will be an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the founder of the Soviet Union.

Much of the interest in the book has been over its revelations about Lenin’s personal life, hitherto largely unknown. Although his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, has often been portrayed as a dour helpmate in a loveless marriage who cooked and cleaned for the Iron Man, Sebestyen reveals real depth of feeling and complexity in their private lives. At the same time, Lenin carried on a passionate love affair for a decade with a beautiful French émigré, Inessa Armand, “by far the most glamorous of all the Russian émigrés in the radical circles of Paris.” His “ménage à trois” with Inessa and Nadya (who condoned the affair) was “central to Lenin’s emotional life.” According to Sebestyen, the Soviet leader was “not a monster” but, in personal relationships, “invariably kind.” He could even laugh at himself, “occasionally.” What’s more, he didn’t revel in “the details of his victims’ deaths” as did Hitler or Mao, because, for Lenin, “the deaths were theoretical, mere numbers.” I’m afraid Sebestyen may have succumbed to the temptation every biographer faces of getting too attached to his subject.

After he led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 against the crumbling Czarist autocracy, Lenin’s socialist state quickly became a totalitarian hell of mass executions, forced collectivization, and slave labor. Newly revealed details about his personal life furnish no further insight into this vast project of institutionalized terrorism. Countless men display traits of loyalty in marriage as well as lapses from that loyalty; very few emerge as political murderers on such a grand scale. The most that these details can establish is the sickening contrast between someone capable of tenderness and affection in private life and capable at the same time of mobilizing the deaths of millions.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? Nothing new there really. Just catnip.

The daughters of the American rich who invaded London in quest of titled mates tended to be spirited and good company, not milksops like the general run of British debutantes. Whatever their other attractions, the ‘buccaneer belles’ have inspired a social history par excellence.

There I was, in an airport bookshop, seeking some entertainment for another long-haul flight, clutching a paperback that had looked promising on the shelf, and so it proved to be. The cover picture was enticing, a coloured-up photograph of an 1890s belle, displaying in pastels the porcelain skin, long straight nose, fine clear eyes and the pile of preferably auburn hair that was all the go at the time, the whole a cultural ensemble for feminine pulchritude, topped off with a bunch of pink peony roses dramatising her blue straw hat. Her neck swathed in a high fichu of fine white lace, the hint of an elegantly generous leg-of-mutton sleeve on her gown and her discreet stud-pearl earrings all said “lady”, but her vaguely eager expression suggested she might be fun nevertheless.

https://www.momentmag.com/book-review

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
by Adina Hoffman

The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Israeli leader Menachem Begin, speaking at Hecht’s packed funeral in Manhattan in 1964, said Hecht not only “wrote stories…he made history.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics, including Scarface, Twentieth Century, The Front Page, Gunga Din and Notorious.

Hecht was also a pivotal figure in American Jewish history—in bringing the Holocaust to the attention of the American public in real time during the height of World War II, and in aiding one of the most extreme of Zionist underground groups in its violent campaign against British forces in Palestine, thus helping create the conditions for the birth of Israel.

Adina Hoffman’s richly informative new biography is part of the Yale University Press’s acclaimed Jewish Lives series of short interpretative biographies covering a wide range of Jewish figures, from authors to philosophers to politicians to entertainers. Her book is a fine introduction to a seminal figure in American Jewish culture and Hollywood’s first century. But like a large and powerful man crammed into a suit three sizes too small, Ben Hecht’s life is simply too robust and complicated to be shoehorned into 220 pages of text. It’s not Hoffman’s fault: She was commissioned to write, in effect, a one-act play about a life that merits a four-hour opera and a six-part HBO series.

Hecht grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, where his parents, who had arrived from Belarus as teenagers, moved from the sweatshops of New York. After graduating from high school and lasting just three days at the University of Wisconsin, he escaped to Chicago, where he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Daily News, wrote short stories and novels and hobnobbed with literary figures such as Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. He acquired the sandpaper lingo, flexible ethics and hard-liquor habits of the city newsrooms, learned how to write fast and facile prose, spent six months reporting on the toxic chaos of post-World War I Berlin and dumped his young, well-off, non-Jewish first wife for Rose Caylor, a novelist who stuck with him for the rest of his life despite his self-confessed tendency to sleep with every attractive woman he met.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/05/bureaucracy-wars-americans-control-government/
Expansion of federal agencies’ power over the last century has culminated in the rise of the Deep State, which is seeking to undermine presidential power.

Of all the domestic challenges America faces in government, the administrative state stands preeminent, not only in its size and scope, but in the threat it poses to liberty as such a formidable, fundamentally tyrannical institution. James Madison might as well have been describing the administrative state in Federalist 47, when he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

A new book, “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century,” by professors John Marini and Ken Masugi, explores the sprawling federal bureaucracy’s philosophical origins, chronicles its evolution, and provides a compelling argument that the Trump administration is attempting to curtail it. (Disclosure: The authors consulted with me for this book project and I received payment for my work.)

Marini and Masugi have played an outsized but underappreciated role in American political thought, focusing on the theory and practice of the mammoth, ever-ballooning, arguably unconstitutional––and certainly anti-constitutional––bureaucratic morass of which “Unmasking the Administrative State” serves an essential part.

https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/

In 1955, when a flushing toilet was still considered too offensive for the eyes of the movie-going public, it’s no surprise that a blackly comic novel about sex with children would cause a stir. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the effusively written story of a 37-year-old literature professor who marries a widow in order to gain access to Lolita, her 12-year-old daughter. The star of Lolita is not Lolita herself, but Humbert Humbert, who hides his obsession with adolescent girls under a mask of tweedy old-world erudition. Humbert uses his position as narrator to lecture the reader on the many noble aspects of adult-on-child romance, and to extol his love for his adopted daughter/concubine. To many, Nabokov remains “the guy who wrote that book about pedophilia.”

Following its publication, Lolita was ignored, and then banned. Britain led the way, confiscating all copies of the novel entering the country, and France followed suit. Only months after its release did Lolita receive its first positive review from a respectable paper, the Sunday Times.

Responding to the Sunday Times, John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, spoke for Lolita’s moral critics: “Without doubt it is the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… Anyone who published it or sold it here would certainly go to prison. I am sure the Sunday Times would approve, even though it abhors censorship as much as I do.”

The first edition of Lolita was printed by Olympia Press, a publishing house where the pornographic bumped elbows with the merely provocative. Nabokov was not the first serious writer to take refuge with the seedy publisher: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Robert Kaufman’s exposé Inside Scientology all had their first editions at Olympia. The Olympia imprint, however, did little to improve Lolita’s credibility.

In the 2010s, as hand-wringing over the moral effects of art has grown fashionable once more, Lolita has been subjected to fresh scrutiny. In Russia, an ascendant religious Right has sought to discredit Nabokov as an un-Russian cosmopolitan and purveyor of deviance. The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg has suffered particular abuse, ranging from graffiti accusing Nabokov of pedophilia to having vodka bottles containing Bible verses thrown through its windows.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/25/rediscovering-the-virtues-of-andrew-jackson/

Few Americans in the country’s history have received the polarized interpretations that President Andrew Jackson has. Once revered as the quintessential frontier hero, a statesman who saved rugged individualism from the corrupt forces of corporatists and government centralizers, Jackson has more recently been maligned as a brutal white supremacist who epitomized white, capitalist, and Southern bigotry in the 19th century.

On this point, there is an unlikely alliance between some conservatives and Marxists. Dinesh D’Souza attacks Jackson as an early “progressive Democrat” who ushered in the Democratic Party’s legacy of genocide. The neo-Marxist Howard Zinn, similarly, scorns him as a “slave owner,” a “killer of Indians,” and “the architect of the Trail of Tears.” Adding to the confusion, Jackson has been appropriated by rather unlikely allies, such as the government centralizers of the New Deal era, who argued that Jackson anticipated the New Deal’s concentration of power in the hands of the presidency for the purpose of fulfilling the will of the majority.

Against the facile misinterpretations and half-truths touted both by friends and foes of President Jackson, Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson offers a thoughtful, refreshing, and timely analysis of our hopelessly misunderstood seventh president. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, paints a vivid portrait of Jackson as both a man and as a statesman.

He should be perceived, Birzer demonstrates, not as the ancestor of majoritarian New Deal democracy but as a principled defender of traditional American republicanism. Eloquently written and amply supported by historical evidence, In Defense of Andrew Jackson serves as a sorely needed reminder of the republican principles that inspired so many Americans in the 19th century—principles that Americans need desperately.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/churchill-walking-with-destiny-book-review/

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Viking, 1,152 pp., $40)

We might ask ourselves which is worse — disdain for Winston Churchill or simple ignorance of this colossal figure and his place in history. Ignorance may be unsurprising in a period when, as a recent poll shows, many young people think Churchill a character from fiction. But the disdain can come only from minds corrupted by propaganda and laced with ingratitude for Western civilization and, just as much, for those who have sacrificed for its defense in those darker days before our own brilliantly flabby, righteous age arrived. The fact that astronaut Scott Kelly can be slapped down for tweeting a quote by Churchill (“In victory, magnanimity”) on grounds that the great man was so clearly a “racist” is regrettable enough. That the ill-schooled Kelly so quickly apologized to trolls tells us much about the desperately low tone of our culture these days.

So perhaps yet another biography of Churchill, one of the most written-up men of the last century — this is the 1,010th biography, Roberts notes — doesn’t need to justify itself after all. This is true most especially when the British historian Andrew Roberts writes it. Churchill’s world and its environs have been so richly and perspicaciously documented by Roberts for decades that the real oddity would be his reaching the end of a fruitful career as a historian of vast events and great men with no such tome to his credit.

And a tome any proper biography of Churchill must be. Little else can do justice to a man whose stupendous political journey lasted over 60 years and who died just past his 90th birthday. With nearly a thousand pages of chiseled prose, Roberts allows himself the room to lay out all the highlights and not a few sidelights of his subject’s long and varied life, following him from a benighted childhood and on to Harrow and Sandhurst, through military and journalistic triumphs and misadventures from Cuba to Sudan, India, and South Africa, and then by the age of 25 to Parliament, from which point the rest would be history. The result is a tour de force of scrupulous selection and astute appraisal, perhaps the best full-scale biography to date in a field where the competition has been crowded and stiff.